17. Harper #2
He pressed into me slow and certain, and the sound he made against my hair was wrecked and reverent and mine.
For a moment neither of us moved. He held there, filling me, looking at me like the looking was its own act, and I felt impossibly, terrifyingly seen, broken open and held together in the same breath.
Then he began to move, deep and deliberate and relentless, setting a rhythm with that low steady control that left me both undone and utterly held, and I rose to meet him, learning the shape of us together, the give and the take of it, until I could not tell where his control ended and my abandon began.
He set a punishing, gorgeous pace and then gentled it just to watch me chase what he took away, learning that too, that I would lift off the bed reaching for the rhythm the second he slowed it.
He caught my wrist and pinned it to the pillow and laced our fingers and used the leverage to press deeper, and every stroke dragged a sound out of me I would have been mortified by on any other night and was not, now, because he gathered each one like proof, like evidence that I was here and real and his.
"More," I said, and for me that was not a small word. It was the whole confession. "Please. I want all of it. I want you."
"I know." There was no flinch in him to answer mine, only a gathering tenderness run right up to the edge of fierce. "I have you. I am not going anywhere. Tell me again, and watch what I do with it."
And I did. I said the unsayable things, the ones twenty-two years of training swore would empty a room and slam the door, and he answered every one with his body, harder now, deeper, his hand sliding under the small of my back to tilt me up into him and find the angle that turned my voice into something I did not recognize.
He stayed. He looked at the full size of my wanting and he did not run from it.
He came closer. He moved in me with a steady building force that was still, somehow, entirely about me, his eyes never once leaving my face, gathering every unguarded thing I had spent my life hiding and giving it back doubled.
It rose and rose until it was past anything I could hold.
He felt it cresting, slowed, then pressed deep and held there, working exact and merciless against the place that finished me, and I came apart around him with his name tearing out of me and my nails dragging down the muscle of his back.
Somewhere in the white center of it there was no abandonment wound, no preemptive lie I tell to make people leave before they can choose to.
There was only being held while being completely known, which I had honestly filed under things that happen to other, luckier women.
He followed me a handful of strokes later, a rough low sound breaking out of him against my throat, his whole body drawing taut and then folding down over mine like a man who had finally run out of reasons to hold himself apart.
Afterward we lay in a tangle of limbs and ruined breathing, his arm a heavy bar across me, my face tucked into the warm hollow under his jaw, both of us spent and slick and refusing to let go.
My heart was still going like I had sprinted somewhere.
The sheer size of it settled on my chest, sweet and a little terrifying at once, and naturally, because I am who I am, the terror came out of me sideways.
"Okay, so," I said into his throat, "I have to confess something, and I need you to promise it will not go straight to your head."
His chest tensed under me, bracing for something heavy. "Tell me."
"All those nights I crushed you at chess online?
" I propped my chin on his sternum so I could watch his face take the hit.
"I was profoundly distracted the entire time wondering what your forearms looked like in real life.
So by rights you should have won most of those.
I would like it entered into the official record. "
For a beat he only stared at me. Then he laughed, a real one, startled up out of somewhere deep, his whole chest shaking under my chin, the sound so unguarded it loosened the old knot in me another notch all on its own.
"You lost chess games," he said, delighted and scandalized at once, "thinking about my forearms."
"I lost nothing. I was nobly handicapped by raw lust. Completely different thing.
" I grinned up at him, and he grinned back, helpless with it, and the weight of the last hour turned over into something light enough to live inside.
"Relax. The forearms held up to inspection.
Five stars. Would be handicapped by them again. "
"You are the strangest woman I have ever met," he said, except it landed the way other people say the most beautiful, and he pulled me up the length of him to kiss my forehead, the bridge of my nose, my mouth, soft now, a man fully at rest in his own skin.
We talked in the dark after that, in the loose untended half-language of two people with nothing left to guard from each other.
About nothing in particular. About everything that had ever mattered.
His hand traced idle lines up and down my spine until the words wore thin and we drifted, knotted together, the room going gray and then pale and then gold along the edges of the curtain.
At dawn, tangled together, I traced the tattoo over his heart while he murmured, out loud, against my skin, the exact line "Luke" always typed at midnight. I finally, completely believed they were the same man.