27. Margot #2
She touches me, without rush. Her hand on my breast, cupping the weight of it, the thumb circling my nipple with a slowness that is maddening and deliberate.
She begins to move lower. Her mouth tracing down my sternum, farther down to my stomach, the intention clear, and I—
“Stay here,” I say. My voice is soft. “Stay close.”
She looks up. She reads me.
“I need your face,” I say. I cannot say precisely what I mean. “I need to see you. I need you— here. Close. I can’t—” I stop. I breathe. “If you’re down there and I’m up here I will lose the— I will go somewhere in my head and I don’t want to go there. I want to stay here. With you.”
The admission costs me something I can feel, a heat in my face that is not arousal but the flush of having said the unsayable thing, the thing the system was designed to prevent me from ever needing to say.
I will go somewhere in my head. The sealed room.
The architecture. The place I go when the vulnerability exceeds what the system can manage.
It is the opposite of being here, and being here is the only thing I want tonight.
“Okay,” she says. Simply. No performance of understanding.
No reassurance that might tip into pity.
Just okay, the word that accepts the limit without examining it, without asking why, without making the limit a problem to be solved.
She moves back up my body. She settles beside me, propped on one elbow, close, her face near mine, her breath on my mouth.
“What do you want?” she asks. The asking is warm.
The asking is not clinical. The asking is a woman lying beside me in my bed with her hand on my stomach and her eyes on mine, asking me what I want in the same voice she uses to ask me what I think about a passage, with genuine curiosity, with the expectation that my answer will be interesting.
“Your hand,” I say. “Just your hand. Just—” the words are harder than they should be. Twelve years of not asking makes the asking almost impossible. “On me. Not inside me. Just— I don’t—”
“I know,” she says.
The way she says it. I know. No pause, no recalibration, no flicker of disappointment.
The ease of those two words, as though what I am asking for is not a lesser version of something else, as though the limit is not a limit but simply what tonight is.
The ask becomes ordinary in the space of a breath, and the ordinariness is the kindness, the only way it could survive the asking.
“Hey,” she says. Her hand comes to my face. Her thumb on my cheekbone. “We’re just here. Just you and me and whatever this is.”
“This is terrifying,” I say.
She laughs. It lands on my mouth because her mouth is six inches from mine. “I know. You’re doing it anyway. You’re lying in this bed scared out of your mind, and you’re still here and you haven’t run to the kitchen to make tea and that is— Margot, that is everything. The tea can wait.”
I almost laugh. The almost laugh that has been getting closer to the real thing for five months. “The tea can always wait.”
“I’m going to remind you that you said that.”
“I will deny it.”
“I have witnesses.”
“There are no witnesses. We are alone in my bedroom.”
“I’m a witness. My hand is about to be a witness.”
The laugh arrives. The real one. In my bedroom, in my bed, with a woman’s hand on my stomach and my heart hammering and the wall not down—the wall is not down—but the window is open and her hand is reaching through it, and I am letting her reach.
The letting is enough. The letting is tonight.
Tonight does not have to be the whole story. Tonight is the first sentence.
She kisses me. Slower now, the urgency from the stairs settling into something more deliberate.
She kisses my throat. The hollow at the base.
She moves lower, and her mouth finds my breast and the sound I make surprises me, the willingness of it, the sound leaving my body without being vetted.
Her mouth is warm and unhurried and she stays until my fingers are in her hair and my breathing has changed and I am not thinking about the wall or the window or any of it.
Her hand traces down my stomach. Slowly.
The flat of her palm, the warmth of it on my skin.
She traces the curve of my hip. The inside of my thigh, her fingers light, drawing a line that makes my legs open without my deciding to open them.
She moves back up. Down again. She is learning the territory by feel, by attention, by patience I did not know a body could have.
“I’m so happy to be here,” she says. Against my skin. Simply, without architecture, without strategy. Just the thing, said into the warmth between us.
“I’m ready,” I say.
Her hand slides lower.
Her fingers find me. The first touch, light, exploring, her fingers learning the shape of me. Then she brings her hand to her mouth and wets her fingers and comes back, and the second touch is slicker, warmer, and my hips lift off the bed.
She strokes me. Slow, deliberate, her fingers learning the topography of me through attention and response.
She finds the rhythm I need before I know I need it.
She is reading my body like a text: closely, attending to what it is saying and what it is not saying.
Her fingers are in the spaces between and the spaces are opening and I am losing language.
I am a professor of Comparative Literature and I am losing language because a woman’s hand is between my legs and the hand knows what it is doing.
I make a sound. A sound from the place where the roar came from. She is looking at my face while the touching happens. Watching. Attending. Seeing.
My breathing has come apart. I am panting with my head back and my hips rocking against her hand in a rhythm she is matching and that is accelerating and that I could not stop if I wanted to.
I want more. I want her pressure harder.
The word: more. Not elegant. Not precise.
A single syllable expelled from a body that has stopped consulting the mind.
She gives me more. Her fingers press and circle and the circling tightens and the pressure builds and my back arches off the bed and my hand is in her hair and my thighs are shaking.
She maintains exactly the rhythm and pressure that produced the tremor, because she understands that when the experiment is producing results you do not change the variables.
And then, softly, against my temple, her lips brushing my skin: “God, Margot.” And I’m undone again. God, Margot. Still soft, with tenderness and wonder, but the ache is gone. And the two words are the gasoline on the fire that was already raging.
The orgasm arrives, not as an explosion but as a wave, slow at first, building from the place where her fingers are moving, spreading outward through my hips and into my stomach and up through my chest and into my face.
My breathing stops—one held second, the body suspended at the crest—and then the wave breaks and my breath comes out as a sound I have never made, a sound that has been stored in the same place as the roar and the crying, and the sound fills the room.
I look at her. I look at her while the wave moves through me and my hips press against her hand and my thighs tremble and my chest heaves and the orgasm takes everything the system was holding and releases it in one long, shuddering exhalation.
She looks back. Her eyes on mine while my body comes apart in her hands.
This looking is more intimate than the touching, more intimate than the sound, more intimate than the months of wanting now resolving into the simple fact of being here, with her, seen.
The wave recedes. I am breathing. She is breathing. Her hand is still on me, gentle now.
And I cannot stay here.
Here is the most exposed I have been in twelve years, laid bare, seen, held open, and the tenderness of it is almost unbearable.
I need to move. I need my hands on something.
I need to do something, because the doing is where I live, the doing is where my precision has a direction, and without direction I am just a woman lying in a bed with her composure in pieces.
I move. I rise over her. The shift surprises her. I can see it in the slight widening of her eyes as I change the dynamic. But she reads me. She always reads me.
“Hi,” she says softly, just meeting me where I am.
She is on her back and her hair is spread across my pillow and I am looking at her—her face, her throat, her chest, the dark red bra that matches the blouse that is somewhere on my bedroom floor, and I need this. I need the looking to be mine.
“Tell me what you want,” I say.
“Your mouth,” she says. No hesitation. “On my throat. Then lower.” She reaches up and takes my hand from where it’s braced beside her head and brings it to her breast. “Here first.” She holds my hand there for a moment, my palm against the warmth of her through the fabric, her heartbeat underneath.
Then she slides my hand down. Over her ribs.
Her stomach. Lower, until my fingers are at the waistband of her pants and her hips shift under my touch. “Then here.”
She is looking up at me, and she is not shy about any of this and— I want her. The want arrives without a system, without a framework, without the careful architecture I bring to everything. I just want her.