12 #2
I took my time with her, deliberately, the way I'd promised myself I would the moment I first let myself imagine this — learning what made her breath catch, what made her laugh low and surprised, what made her fingers tighten against my shoulders in a way that told me considerably more than words would have.
She was vocal in a way that undid every careful inch of my own composure, calling my name like it was the only word she had left, and when I finally settled over her, both of us bare and unguarded in the moonlight, I paused, deliberately, holding myself still.
"Last chance to send me to the couch," I said, only half joking.
"Rurik." Her hands found my face, steady, certain, no hesitation anywhere in her. "Stop asking and start—"
I did, slowly, watching her the entire time, reading every shift in her expression like it was the only text I'd ever needed to learn to read fluently.
She met me with the same fierce, unguarded want she'd shown me all evening, her nails finding my back, her voice breaking my name into pieces against my throat, and I understood, somewhere in the unhurried, devastating slowness of it, that I had never once in my life felt this present in my own body, this thoroughly unconcerned with anything beyond the woman currently undoing the very last of my carefully maintained control.
We moved together slowly at first, then less so, the careful architecture of the entire evening finally giving way to something neither of us tried any further to manage — her name in my mouth, mine breaking apart in hers, the specific, overwhelming relief of two people who had spent weeks circling toward exactly this and had finally, deliberately, let themselves arrive.
When she came apart beneath me, my name on her lips and her whole body gone taut and trembling against mine, I held her through it, watching, memorizing, understanding with absolute clarity that I would spend considerable effort, for the rest of my life, trying to be the kind of man who deserved to keep witnessing exactly that.
Afterward, she lay against my chest, her fingers tracing idle patterns across my sternum, entirely unhurried, herself.
"For the record," she said, into the quiet, "that decor critique stands. The bookshelf needs better lighting. You're reading some genuinely excellent history in genuinely terrible conditions."
I laughed, surprised by it, the sound coming up from somewhere I rarely let it come from. "Is this the part where you tell me everything that's wrong with my house, immediately after."
"This is exactly that part, yes. I find clarity right after tends to be unusually honest." She propped herself up on one elbow, studying me with the same sharp, assessing look she gave a delivery that hadn't arrived correctly, utterly undiminished by anything that had just happened between us.
"Also, your coffee maker is from another decade and I have genuine concerns about your relationship with caffeine generally.
We're fixing that before I let you cook for me again. "
"You're remarkably unromantic immediately following what I thought was a fairly significant evening."
"I'm extremely romantic. I'm also still myself, which I'd think you'd prefer to the alternative.
" Something flickered behind her eyes, more serious now, underneath the teasing.
"I'd a fiancé who liked me considerably softer right after.
Quieter. Like the whole point was for me to stop being quite so much myself for a while, so he could feel like he'd accomplished something.
I'm telling you this so you understand it's not an accident, the way I'm being right now.
It's a test, a little bit. I'd like you to keep passing it. "
"Tell me more about what failing would have looked like. With him."
"Disappointment, mostly. The specific kind a man performs when he's decided you've ruined a mood he was enjoying by continuing to have opinions.
" She traced a slow line down my sternum, thoughtful now rather than teasing.
"It took me months to even notice I was doing it — going quiet right after, agreeable, smaller somehow, like intimacy was a transaction that required me to hand over a piece of my personality as payment.
I didn't notice until a friend pointed out I'd stopped arguing with him about anything, ever, the way I used to argue with everyone about everything.
I'd just folded, gradually, one bedroom at a time, until there wasn't much left of the version of me he'd actually fallen for in the first place. "
"This sounds considerably worse than the federal informant detail, if I'm being honest, and I want you to know that's not a low bar I'm setting."
"It was, in a way. The informant thing was a betrayal that happened to me.
That was a betrayal I did to myself, slowly, with his help.
" She met my eyes, steady, unflinching. "I'm not interested in doing it again.
Not for you, not for anyone. If that ever starts happening — if I ever go quiet in a way that isn't actually about being content — I need you to notice before I do, and say something. "
"I'll." I meant it with the same absolute certainty I'd meant everything else that night.
"And if I ever once make you feel like silence was the price of admission, I expect you to tell me directly, the same way you told me about your terms in the back room.
I've no interest in being a man who only earns your honesty when it's convenient for him. "
"Good." She settled back against my chest, apparently satisfied, the seriousness ebbing back into something lighter.
"Then we're agreed. I remain fully myself, you remain unreasonably good at asking the right questions at one in the morning, and your bookshelf still needs better lighting.
I'm not letting that one go, for the record, regardless of how good tonight was otherwise. "
"Noted, on all three counts, and filed permanently."
She fell asleep eventually, her breathing gone slow and even against my chest, and I lay awake longer than I should have, turning over the particular, unfamiliar shape of the night — not just the intimacy itself, though that alone would have kept me awake on its own merits, but the specific, steady fact of her staying exactly herself through all of it, sharp and unhushed and entirely unwilling to soften into anything I hadn't actually earned from her.
I had spent fifteen years surrounded by people who adjusted themselves around my power.
I understood, lying there with her weight warm against my side, watching the moonlight shift slowly across the ceiling, that I had finally found the one person who had no intention of adjusting at all, and that I wanted, more than I'd wanted almost anything in my adult life, to spend considerably more nights learning exactly how much further that refusal extended, however long it took either of us to find the edge of it.