22. Tasha #2
"For never. I've decided terrible tea from you beats good tea from anyone else. I wanted to tell you before I talked myself out of it."
We made it to the bed sideways, laughing, my knee catching the edge of the nightstand hard enough to rattle the candle and send a curl of wax sliding down the glass before either of us thought to steady it.
"You're going to burn the cottage down," he said, one hand already working the last button of my shirt loose while the other reached out and set the candle upright with the kind of automatic precision that made me wonder if he filed everything away on instinct, even mid-crisis.
"I would like it on record that this is entirely your fault. You're the one who kissed me into a piece of furniture."
"I redirected you around it. There's a difference." He pulled my shirt free and let it fall somewhere I didn't bother tracking, his mouth finding my collarbone with a patience that undercut every ounce of urgency in his hands. "If I wanted you on the floor, you'd be on the floor."
"That's either extremely hot or extremely concerning, and I've decided not to examine which."
He laughed against my skin, low and unguarded, a sound rare enough that I kept a private count of it the way he counted exits. "Both," he said. "It's usually both, with us."
I got his shirt open with less finesse than he'd managed with mine, one button popping loose entirely and skittering off somewhere under the bed, which neither of us stopped to mourn.
His chest under my hands was warm, familiar now in a way that still surprised me every time, old scars I'd learned the stories behind and one I still hadn't asked about, and I traced the long one along his ribs with my mouth while his breath went unsteady above me.
"You're doing that thing," he said, voice rougher now, "where you catalogue me."
"Occupational hazard."
"I'm not a painting."
"No," I agreed, working my way back up to his jaw, to the scar there, pressing my lips against it the way I'd started doing without meaning to, an old habit becoming a new one. "You're better preserved."
He made a sound that was half laugh and half something else entirely, and after that there wasn't much room left for talking.
His hands found the rest of what I was wearing with the same unrushed thoroughness he brought to everything, until there was nothing between us but candlelight and the particular stillness two people make once they've stopped performing for anyone, even each other.
He laid me back against the pillows and followed me down, and when he finally settled his weight over me I felt the last of his tension from earlier fully let go, replaced by something looser and warmer that had nothing to do with tomorrow at all.
"Say something funny," I told him, breathless, half joking. "I don't want to think tonight."
"I don't know any jokes."
"You know at least one. The one about the tea."
"That wasn't a joke. That was a confession." He kissed the corner of my mouth, unhurried, then lower, tracing a slow line down my throat that made whatever clever thing I'd been building dissolve entirely. "I've used my whole week's supply of jokes on you already. This is what's left. Just me."
"That's plenty," I said, and meant it more than the words let on, and then his hand found the exact place that made my back arch off the sheets, and I stopped being able to make words at all for a while.
He was slower this time than the first, unhurried in a way that felt less like restraint and more like neither of us wanted to rush past a single second of it, his mouth finding every place that made my breath catch and lingering there like he meant to memorize it.
When he finally moved into me I heard myself laugh, helpless and startled by my own reaction, and felt him go still above me.
"What?" he said, half amused, half something rawer underneath it.
"Nothing. Good. I don't know why I'm laughing." I pulled him down closer, my mouth against his ear. "You just make me happy. Apparently that's what happens now. I laugh."
"I can live with that," he said, low, and started to move, and I buried the sound I made against the pillow, muffled and unguarded, laughing and something else entirely all at once, both of us finding a rhythm with room in it for both.
It built slow and easy at first, the way the whole night had been, his forehead dropping to mine between breaths, my legs locking around him like I could keep him exactly there if I only held on tight enough.
When it finally broke over both of us it broke together, his name and something wordless both tangled in my mouth against his shoulder, his own breath ragged and warm against my throat, and after, we lay tangled in the sheets with our laughter still not entirely spent, breathless in a way that had as much to do with joy as anything else.
The candle had burned down low by the time either of us moved again, wax pooled thick along one side of the jar and cooling into a ridge that caught the last of the flame's light.
I lay with my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow from something urgent into something steady, his hand moving in slow absent circles against my back like he wasn't fully aware he was doing it.
"You're quiet," I said.
"I'm always quiet."
"You're differently quiet. There's a kind you do when you're thinking about tomorrow, and a kind you do when you're thinking about nothing at all.
This is the second one." I propped my chin on my hand and looked at him, the low light catching the line of his jaw, the scar gone soft and unremarkable in the dark the way it always did once he'd stopped bracing against something. "I like this kind better."
"So do I."
We lay like that a while, the candle guttering lower, the cottage gone so quiet I could hear the wind finding the edge of the roofline outside.
Something rose up in my chest, unbidden and certain in a way that surprised me with how little permission it asked, a whole sentence sitting right behind my teeth, three words I had never once said to anyone I actually meant them for, and I opened my mouth before I'd fully decided whether I meant to.
"I love..." I started, and felt the whole shape of it arrive at once, too big and too sudden for a night that had started with me arguing with a candle, and some old instinct, faster than the rest of me, threw a hand up in front of it before it could land.
"I love that you make terrible tea," I said instead, too quick, too light, and heard exactly how it sounded the second it left me.
He didn't say anything right away. I felt him go still beneath my cheek, not tense, just present in a different way than a second before, and when I finally risked looking up at him his eyes were already on me, steady, unreadable in the low light in the specific way that meant he'd caught it and decided not to make me answer for it tonight.
"Good thing I keep making it, then," he said finally, and the words came out easy, but something in his voice had gone careful around the edges, deliberate, the sound of a man setting something down gently instead of dropping it.
His thumb found my jaw and traced it once, slow, and he didn't ask, and I didn't offer, and the quiet that settled over both of us after that was the loudest thing in the room.
I pressed my face into his chest so he wouldn't see whatever my own face was doing, and felt him press a kiss to the top of my head, unhurried, the kind of gesture that never needed translating.
Neither of us said anything else. The candle burned itself out sometime after that, and I didn't notice until morning that I had never once thought about the guest list again.