Chapter 7 #3
He moves slowly. So slowly that I want, for one half-second, to laugh at the patience of him — and then a second half-second later I do not want to laugh anymore because the slowness is doing something I had not been prepared for.
It is — and I am only learning this — the slowness is letting me feel each thing as it happens.
The slowness is making me arrive at each touch awake.
The slowness is treating my body like a sentence to be read carefully, not skimmed.
His hand finds the bottom of my dress where my knee is. He lifts the hem. He does not pull it up. He folds it. The way you would fold a page corner you intend to come back to. He folds it from my knee to my mid-thigh. He looks at me.
I nod.
He folds it higher.
His hand goes to the eyelet at my shoulder. He unties the small ribbon there. He works the dress slowly down off my shoulders. His mouth follows his hand, the kiss landing in each new place that the cotton has just left, the small clean shock of his lips after the slide of the cloth.
He is — and I want to write this down somewhere because I do not want to forget it — he is asking with every touch.
Every move he makes is a question. Here?
Yes? Is this all right? Is this what you want?
And I answer him with my hands on his shoulders, with my breath catching at his ear, with the small low sound I make in the back of my throat when he kisses the inside of my wrist where the gold chain is.
I undress him with shaking hands. The buckle of his belt is harder than it looks.
He helps me without taking over. He takes his boots off himself, one at a time, setting each one carefully on the stones so they do not knock against the bench leg.
He is naked under the henley and the jeans except for boxer briefs in dark heather gray, and I have never in my life seen a man this completely, and I have to take one long second to look at him.
He lets me look.
He does not flinch. He does not look away. He does not do the small embarrassed shifting men do when they are being looked at. He just kneels above me at the end of the bench with his hands at his sides and his eyes on me and he lets me look at him for as long as I want.
When I lift my arms toward him, he comes down.
He braces his weight on his forearms, on either side of me.
The warmth of him over me — the long warm steady weight of him, his ribs against mine, his hips at my hips, his face a half-inch from my face — is the most enclosed I have ever felt by another person, and the enclosure is not — and this is the part I had not been able to predict — the enclosure is not narrowing me.
It is the opposite. It is opening me. It is making me larger inside my own skin.
It is making me feel, for the first time in my whole quiet life, the full size I have always been and have never been allowed to take up.
He kisses me again.
The kiss goes longer this time.
His hand goes down between us. Slow. Asking.
The palm of his hand on the inside of my thigh, broad and warm, the calluses catching faintly against the skin, his thumb tracing the soft place where my leg meets my hip.
I am gasping a little against his mouth before he has even — and he stops.
He freezes the second I gasp. He lifts his head.
I open my eyes.
I say, "No. Don't. Keep going."
He says, "Are you sure."
I say, "Yes. Yes. I want you to."
He goes back to kissing me. His hand goes back to where it had been, and then further.
The asking continues, his mouth at the corner of my jaw, my mouth open and slightly parted at his shoulder, his palm slow and patient and warm and impossibly careful.
He learns me with his fingers the way he has learned the cedar he built the bench out of — testing for the grain, for the give, for the place where the pressure is right.
He finds the place where I make a sound.
He stays there. He stays there with the kind of attention I have never been the receiver of, his forehead against my temple, his breath warm against my ear, his hand patient and unhurried and slow, and the small lavender petals continue to drift down on us from the trellis, landing on his shoulder, on my hair, on the cotton of my discarded dress where it is bunched at my hip.
I do not have the practice for this. I am making sounds I have not made before.
Small ones. Soft ones. They sound in the garden and the garden absorbs them — the wisteria absorbs them, the roses absorb them, the cosmos absorb them.
My hand has found the back of his neck. My fingers are in the short hair at the nape, gripping, ungripping.
My other hand is on the cedar slat above my head and I am holding the wood as if it is the only thing keeping me on the bench.
The fairy lights overhead have gone soft and blurred at the edges of my vision.
The wisteria is a low purple cloud above us.
His hand is — his hand is finding everything I did not know I had.
He says against my temple, in a voice I have never heard him use, "Look at me. Nora. Look at me."
I open my eyes.
He is looking at me. He is looking at me with the river-ice eyes gone warm. He is looking at me with a tenderness so naked I almost cannot meet it.
He says, "I have got you."
I say, "I know."
He moves above me. He moves with the same patient careful slowness everything else of him has had tonight, and there is a small fine catch of breath — a small clean adjustment my body has to make — and he stops the second he feels it.
He stays still. He kisses my forehead. He kisses the bridge of my nose.
He kisses the corner of my mouth. He waits.
He waits as long as I need him to wait, and while he is waiting he is touching my face with the back of his fingers, tracing the line of my hairline at the temple, the curve of my cheek, the corner of my jaw, slow soft strokes I will think about later as the same slow soft strokes I have watched him do to the spine of a book he is about to open.
When I move, finally — when I lift my hips and tell him with my body that I am ready, that I have arrived — he begins to move with me.
The first movement is so slow I almost do not register it as movement.
It is the slowest pressure I have ever felt.
It is the press of the tide, not a wave.
It is something that is happening to me at the speed at which a flower opens, which is to say the speed at which a thing happens that you only notice has happened by looking away and coming back.
He moves into me and stays. He moves into me and stays.
He moves into me and stays, his weight braced on his forearm beside my head, his other hand cupping the back of my neck so that my face is held up to his face, and his eyes do not leave my eyes, and the small slow building inside my body is the kind of building I had not believed was possible at this slow a tempo.
I had thought, before tonight, that this was a thing that had to be fast.
I had thought that the fast was the whole point.
He is teaching me that it is not.
He moves above me slow and slow and slow and the slow is its own kind of pressure, a low patient gathering inside my hips and inside my spine and inside the long warm line down the back of my thighs where his hand has gone to lift me to him, and I find — to my own astonishment, lying here with the wisteria above me and his face above me and the fairy lights above us both — that I am moving with him.
I am moving the way the bench is moving under us, faintly, with him, the cedar creaking small and warm in the dark.
I am making a low sound in the back of my throat I did not know I could make.
I have my hand on the side of his face and I am holding his face in place against my face the way you hold the page of a book open with the flat of your palm.
His hand under my lower back tightens. He lifts me a fraction.
The change in the angle of him is — there is no graceful way to describe what the change does inside me — it is as if a door I did not know existed has been opened by a hand that knew where the door was.
I gasp into his mouth. He stops. I shake my head — no, no, don't stop — and he understands without my saying it, and he goes back, slow, and finds the door again.
He keeps finding it.