38. Tasha
TASHA
Frankie's guest room had unfamiliar curtains, thin blue cotton that didn't quite block the streetlight, and I stood in the middle of it with Grisha's coat still damp from the drive and my own pulse doing something I couldn't get to settle.
Down the hall, I heard Frankie's door click shut with the particular loudness of someone trying very hard to seem like she wasn't listening, and then the apartment went quiet in the specific way apartments go quiet when everyone in them has agreed to pretend to be asleep.
"You're staring at me," Grisha said, low, standing just inside the door like he hadn't quite decided he was allowed the rest of the room.
"I'm making sure you're actually here." I reached out and pressed my palm flat to his chest, over the steady, uneven rhythm of his heart, needing the proof of it more than I needed anything else in that moment.
"I keep expecting to wake up back in that guest room and find out I dreamed the whole doorway. "
"I'm here." He covered my hand with his, holding it there against him. "I'm not going anywhere you don't want me."
"That's the thing." My voice cracked on it, and I let it, because we were past the point of pretending steadiness mattered more than truth.
"I want you everywhere. That's what scared me the most this whole time.
Not that I didn't want this. That I wanted it so much I stopped being able to tell if I still knew how to want anything else. "
"You don't have to choose between wanting me and wanting your own life.
" He reached up and brushed a piece of hair back from my face, slow, like he had all the time in the world now that he'd finally stopped racing his own fear to get here.
"I meant what I said in the hallway. Whatever this life ends up looking like, I want to be standing next to you while you build it, not deciding the shape of it for you from three rooms away. "
"I'm holding you to that." I tipped my face up, close enough now to feel his breath, close enough that the space between us had stopped being a question.
"Tonight, though, I don't want to talk about the gala or Kessler or any version of the plan.
I just want you to kiss me like you meant every single word of that hallway. "
He didn't need telling twice. His hand slid to the back of my neck, careful even now, and when he kissed me it wasn't the desperate, half-apologetic kiss I'd braced for.
It was slow, deliberate, the kind of kiss that took its time because it had finally stopped being afraid of running out of it.
His tongue traced my bottom lip, patient, until I opened for him, and the low sound he made against my mouth when I did told me exactly how long he'd been rationing himself to careful, safer kisses out of fear that letting himself want more would frighten me off.
I felt eight years of his caution and three days of my own fear both dissolve into something simpler, something that didn't need managing or measuring, just this, just him, just the specific relief of a person choosing you back with his whole body instead of half of it.
"I missed you in a way that scared me," I said against his mouth, my hands already working the buttons of his shirt, patient despite how badly I wanted to hurry, each one giving way to reveal another inch of warm skin I hadn't let myself think about in three days.
"Not the abstract kind of missing. The kind where I couldn't finish a sentence in my own head without it circling back to you. "
"I know that kind." His voice had gone rough, and I felt his hands settle at my waist, not pulling, just resting there like he was memorizing the shape of me before he let himself have more.
"I spent three days walking around a house that used to feel too crowded and started feeling like the loneliest place I'd ever lived in.
I don't want to know that particular kind of quiet again. "
I pushed his shirt off his shoulders, and he let me, going motionless under my hands in a way he never allowed himself for anything else in his life, and that patience undid me faster than urgency would have.
I traced the old scar along his ribs, the newer one pink and still healing beside it, both of them a map of every time he'd chosen distance over asking for help, and felt him hold his breath under my fingers like he expected me to flinch away from the evidence of it.
"I'm not scared of your scars," I said, pressing my mouth to the healing one instead, deliberate, and felt him go still in an entirely different way, a shudder he didn't try to hide.
"I'm scared of the version of you that gets them alone and doesn't tell anyone until it's almost too late. That's different."
"I know the difference now." He pulled me back up to him, and this time when he kissed me there was less patience in it, his hands finding the hem of my borrowed sweatshirt and drawing it up and over my head in one long, deliberate motion, like he wanted to watch himself do it and remember every second.
His gaze moved over me after, unhurried and open in a way I'd never seen him allow himself anywhere else, no calculation left in it at all, and the sheer want on his face heated my skin faster than his hands had.
"I'm done being the only one who knows how close it got. "
His mouth dropped to my throat first, unhurried, tracing the same path his eyes had just taken, and when he reached the curve where my neck met my shoulder he stopped there and stayed a moment, teeth grazing gently enough that I felt it everywhere at once, a wordless, deliberate promise of exactly how thorough he intended to be about all of this.
His hands found my waist next, wide and warm and careful, then slid higher, taking their time, until his thumb brushed over the curve of my breast and my breath caught loud enough to fill the quiet room.
He watched my face the whole time, reading it the way he read everything, and when he finally lowered his head and followed his hands with his mouth, taking one hardened peak between his lips while his thumb kept working the other, I lost the thread of whatever I'd meant to say next entirely.
He looked at me for a moment after, quiet, the two of us half undressed in the streetlight, and something in his face went soft in a way I'd only seen once or twice before, usually right before he said something he'd spent years too afraid to say.
"You're the only thing I've ever wanted that didn't feel like a job," he said. "I don't know how to hold something like that without turning it into one. I'm asking you to be patient with me while I figure that out."
"I'm not going anywhere while you figure it out." I reached for his belt, done waiting for either of us to finish being careful with words when there were better ways to say the same thing. "Show me the rest instead. We can talk architecture tomorrow."
My fingers weren't as steady as I wanted them to be working the buckle, and he covered my hand with his once, briefly, not to stop me, just to feel it shaking, before he let me finish.
When the last of what either of us was wearing finally hit the floor between us, he didn't reach for me right away.
He just looked, slow and unashamed, the proof of exactly how much he wanted me plain between us for the first time all night, like a man memorizing something he intended to remember for the rest of his life, and the wait of it was its own kind of touch, heavier than anything his hands had done yet.
We moved toward the bed without either of us steering it there on purpose, and when he laid me back against Frankie's unfamiliar sheets and followed me down, bracing his weight above me, I felt none of the hesitation that had lived between us even at our closest before.
This wasn't discovery anymore. We already knew the map of each other.
What was left was choice, made slower and more deliberately than either of the times before it, both of us fully aware now of exactly what loving each other actually cost and reaching for it anyway.
His mouth started at my collarbone and didn't hurry from there, tracing a patient, deliberate line down my body, over my breastbone and the soft skin below my ribs, pausing at my navel long enough that I felt the anticipation of it as sharply as the touch itself.
He had all night and intended to use every minute of it, learning the places that made my hips lift without my permission and cataloging each one with a kind of quiet, thorough attention that left me unraveling faster than urgency ever had.
By the time he reached the crease of my hip, kissing along it toward the inside of my thigh, I was already saying his name, not as a question, just as the only word I had left.
He looked up at me once before his mouth moved lower still, checking, always checking, and whatever he saw in my face was answer enough.
When he finally put his mouth on me, patient and easy at first and then not, I forgot how to do anything but grip the sheets and say his name again, softer this time, one hand finding its way into his hair without my permission, unraveling under the same thorough attention he gave every single inch of me like it was something rare he'd been afraid he'd never get to have.
I was shaking again by the time he finally lifted his head, my whole body loose and wanting, every last careful instinct gone.
"Tasha." He said my name like it surprised him to be allowed to, moving back up over me, his mouth finding the line of my throat, taking his time, learning all over again the places that made my breath catch as though he needed to relearn them after three days apart.
"Tell me if this is too fast. Tell me if you need slower. "