Chapter 20 #2
Six weeks since I had gone to the jeweler that Marcus had told me about, the one run by a woman named Patricia who had been making rings in Philadelphia for thirty years and who had sat across from me for an hour asking questions I hadn’t expected.
Not what kind of ring, but what kind of woman.
How did she hold things? What did her hands do when she was paying attention to something?
What was she like when she was completely herself?
I had told Patricia about the records, the way Nova eased vinyl out of a sleeve to check the condition before she let herself want it, about how the tingle made her light up from the inside out.
I had told her about the way she stood in the center of a room with her head tilted right when the sound was doing something she hadn’t expected.
Patricia had listened to all of it and then she had drawn something on a piece of paper and shown it to me, and I had said yes immediately, because it was better than anything I had imagined. The design was simple yet specific and made for hands that handled things carefully.
Now, Nova’s hand was on my chest. Her breathing was slow and even, her body entirely trusting when she was asleep.
I had been watching her sleep for months and it still felt like something I didn’t deserve, the quiet privilege of being the person she let stay.
Nova shifted and her face found the hollow of my shoulder.
her hand settling over my heart like it belonged there.
She woke when I turned toward her, not surprised, her body already oriented toward mine before her eyes opened. She looked at me in the dark. “Hi,” she said, low.
“Hi,” I said.
I kissed her slowly, like I had time, like there was nothing after this that required anything of me.
She made a sound low in her throat, and I felt her wake up fully, appearing with the gradual gathering of her attention.
Her mouth opened against mine. She pulled me closer and I went, because I had been going wherever she pulled me for months now and had no intention of stopping.
I moved my mouth to one of her nipples and she tilted her head back. She ran her hands up my back, her touch deliberate and thorough, and I felt it everywhere she went.
“Deion?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, into her collarbone.
“I’m up now,” she said. “Don’t waste the moment.”
I looked at her. Even in the dark I could see the expression, the one that meant she was fully present and about to stand on business.
I had learned to read this expression quickly and act on it without hesitation, information she had conveyed not in words but in the way her hands moved when I got it right versus when I didn’t.
I was determined to get it right. Her body in the low dark of the room, familiar now in the way things became that way when you had been paying close attention for long enough, not ordinary, never ordinary, but known.
Mine to know. I took my time because I could…
because she was not going anywhere… because this was weeknight in what was now our home together and we had nowhere to be until morning.
I put my mouth on the tip of her other breast, where the nipple pebbled tighter against my tongue and she made a sound that wasn’t a word while her hand tightened around the length of me.
“I want you,” she whispered into the air.
“I know,” I said.
“Are you going to do something about it?”
“Maybe,” I teased, and when she gripped me tighter, I added, “I’ll think about it.”
She laughed and I felt it against my chest. Then her hand slid slowly, up and down, causing me to stop thinking about anything clever to say.
I shifted over her and she brought her knee up along my side, opening and pulling me into her, her hands at my back with a pressure that meant now rather than eventually.
I found her spot almost immediately and she exhaled my name, long and deliberate, like she was saying it for the first time and wanted to get it right.
That’s when I worked to give her more of what she was asking for.
She moved with me the way she moved with music, her whole body in it, nothing held back, her head tipping back against the pillow and her back arching up and her hands gripping wherever they could reach.
I watched her face in the dark, the openness of it, the total absence of anything that didn’t need to take up space with us at the moment, just Nova at full capacity, and I stayed in it with her and gave her everything I had.
She called out my name close to a dozen times in what was its own beautiful call and response to every moment where I guided her, talking her through ever peak, especially when I felt her hold on to each release that built up inside her, before ultimately letting go.
I felt her break open beneath me with her face pressed into me, both hands at my back pulling me closer rather than pushing me away, her whole body giving its release to me, and I followed her into it because there was nowhere else I had ever wanted to be.
Afterward she lay against my chest, her breathing slowing, her hand flat over my heart.
“Your heartbeat,” she said, when she could say things again.
“Still there,” I replied.
“I know,” she said. “Just keeping track.”
I held her, the room still again around us.
“Deion?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad you moved in.”
I looked at the ceiling. “Me too.”