Move With Me #2
My nervous system was not particularly receptive.
She pressed closer when the engine turned over, making a small involuntary sound I felt more than heard, and I gripped the handlebars and stared at the road ahead and thought: I am a decorated veteran and a trained crisis responder and I am going to drive this motorcycle in a safe and controlled manner if it kills me.
I rode like someone's grandmother. Every turn calculated and restrained.
Every acceleration contemplated three times.
Because she was holding onto me like I was the only fixed point in a world that had suddenly started moving very fast, and I wanted to be that.
For the first time in a long time, I wanted to be the thing someone held on to.
Ten minutes. The ride took ten minutes, which should have been nothing, and was, in fact, everything.
When I killed the engine in the parking lot, her arms stayed locked around me. Her helmet rested between my shoulder blades. Her whole body was trembling.
"Vera? Talk to me."
A long pause.
"I need a moment," she said, muffled.
"Take your time."
Another pause. "That was the most terrifying thing I have ever done."
"Okay."
"I want to do it again immediately."
I laughed. She climbed off, and I followed, and when I unclipped her helmet and lifted it free, her hair was wild, her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes were bright with something that hadn't entirely come from the wind.
"You good?"
"I'm extraordinary." She grabbed my jacket lapels—her signature move, apparently—and looked up at me. "How do people do that every day?"
"Most people don't find it quite so—"
"If you say terrifying, I'm going to be offended on behalf of your motorcycle."
"I was going to say affecting."
"Oh." She released my lapels, smoothing them. "Yes. Affecting. That's the word."
"Vera."
"Petra."
"We're in the parking lot."
"We are," she agreed. "And I've been thinking about my apartment since noon, and I would very much like to not be in the parking lot anymore, and if you could please take me upstairs before I do something entirely undignified in front of our building—"
I took her upstairs.
We made it through her front door.
Barely.
I kicked it shut with my boot and had her against it before the latch caught, her sharp intake of breath swallowed immediately by my mouth on hers.
Her hands went into my hair, gripping hard enough to make me hiss against her lips.
Mine went to her hips, fingers finding the warm curve of her body through the silky fabric, and when she made that small, desperate sound I was already becoming helplessly, embarrassingly addicted to.
I pulled back. Just enough to see her face.
Her lips were already swollen. Her eyes were already dark, pupils swallowing all that blue. She was breathing like she'd been waiting all afternoon to do exactly this, which, as it turned out, was accurate.
"Before we go any further," I said.
"Petra—"
"Listen, baby girl." I tilted her chin up with two fingers. "If I'm going to be in charge tonight, you need a way to stop me. Any time. For any reason." I held her gaze, making sure she was with me. "A word you'd never say in the middle of this."
She stilled. That focused librarian attention, the one that missed absolutely nothing, came to bear directly on me. Then something delicate moved across her face. "You're setting a safeword."
"I'm setting a safeword."
She considered for exactly one second. "Parachute."
"Parachute?"
"You use it when you're falling and need to be saved." She said it simply, the way she said all the things she believed in. "It only works if you actually pull it."
Something happened in my chest that I didn't have a name for. Not yet. "Parachute," I repeated. "You say that word and everything stops. Immediately. No hesitation, no discussion, no wounded feelings. Yes?"
"Yes." Her eyes hadn't left mine. "You can use it, too."
"I'll use it if I need it." I let my thumb trace her jaw, feeling her pulse skip beneath it. "But tonight is about you."
The corner of her mouth curved up, slow and warm. "Is it?"
"It is." I kept my voice even, which was a significant personal achievement, because she was looking at me like I was something she'd been waiting a long time to find on a shelf. "So tell me right now if you want this. Clearly."
"I want this." No hesitation anywhere. "I have wanted this since you kissed me against the Le Guin section, and I would like you to please stop asking and start—"
I kissed her.
She made a sound of pure satisfaction against my mouth, and her hands went immediately back into my hair, pulling in a way that was more instruction than reflex. I pressed her harder into the door, hands finding her thighs, and lifted her without thinking about it.
She made a completely different sound. "Oh—"
"Thinking about the parking lot still?" I asked against her jaw.
"I've forgotten," she informed me breathlessly, legs wrapping around my waist, "that parking lots exist as a concept."
"Good." I got my mouth to her throat, found her pulse with my lips, and felt it hammering. "Let's see what else we can make you forget."
She gave directions to the bedroom in fragments between increasingly unreliable breaths. We managed the closed door together, which I chose to interpret as a good sign. I dropped her on the bed and followed her down, bracketing her small, lithe body with my tall, towering one.
She looked up at me—hair already spread across the pillow, lips swollen, chest rising and falling fast, eyes enormous and dark—and said, very softly, "Hi."
"Hi yourself." I braced above her, watching her face. "I need you to know something."
"What?"
"I'm going to tell you exactly what to do tonight," I said in the low register I didn't use in daylight. "And you're going to do it. And if it's ever too much—"
"Parachute." Immediate, clear.
"Parachute." I pressed my mouth to the corner of hers. "Good girl."
Her whole body shivered. Her hips pushed up against mine, almost involuntary, and I felt it everywhere.
I noted that response and saved the memory somewhere permanent.
She reached for my jacket. I let her work it off, helped with the second sleeve, and let her pull my shirt over my head. She went still.
Her gaze tracked slowly across my chest, my shoulders, the tattoos across my chest, climbing my arms and collarbone and throat, and she looked the way she'd looked in the library in the amber light—like she was doing primary research on something she intended to know completely.
"Vera," I said.
"Librarian organizing," she said faintly. "Give me a moment."
"Five seconds," I said. "Then I'm taking over."
She used all five, both palms pressing flat against my chest. Then I caught her wrists gently and guided them up, pressing them against the headboard.
"Keep them here," I said. "Unless I say otherwise."
She looked at me and tested it for exactly one breath.
Then her fingers curled against the headboard and stayed.
"Good." I pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist, right on her pulse point, and felt it racing. "That's exactly right."
She exhaled like something in her had been released.
I sat back on my heels and just looked at her for a second—arms above her head, dress pooled around her hips, lips parted, watching me with those narrowed, lustful darkening eyes—and the sight of her arranged exactly where I'd put her made me clench in my belly, low and urgent.
"You're beautiful," I said. Not a line. Just true.
She flushed. "Petra—"
"That's not an invitation to argue." I reached for the zipper at the back of her dress. "May I?"
"Please."
The zipper came down. The dress came off. She reached back and unhooked her bra herself with one-handed, matter-of-fact efficiency, and the casual confidence of the gesture was somehow more disarming than anything self-conscious would have been. I pulled back to look at her.
Pale skin and soft curves and a constellation of freckles across her shoulders. The last of the afternoon light laying itself across her in gold bars through the curtains. A scrap of pink lace at her hips, irrelevant, but only for another thirty seconds.
"Hands," I said.
She put them back above her head without being asked twice.
I got my mouth to her throat, her jaw, the spot just below her ear that I was already learning was the beginning of an undoing for her. She made a small, desperate sound, and her hips moved, and I pressed them back down with one hand, flat and firm.
"Hold still."
"I'm trying—"
"Try harder." I kissed the hollow below her collarbone. Felt her whole body tighten with the effort of not chasing it. "You can do it."
"You're doing this on purpose," she accused, breathless.
"Yes." I kissed lower. "How am I doing?"
She laughed, cracked and helpless, and then my mouth found her taut, pink nipple and the laugh dissolved into a moan that went straight down my spine. I sucked hard, and she cried out, her hands flying off the headboard toward my hair—
"Hands," I said against her breast, without looking up.
A pause filled the space between us. Then, slowly, her arms went back up.
"Good girl."
The whimper she made at that was obscene in the best possible way. I gave her other breast the same attention, teeth grazing the sensitive peak, feeling her shake with the effort of keeping still, and I was incredibly impressed by how hard she was trying.
I said so.
"You're doing so well," I told her, working my way down her stomach, and she made a sound that was half moan and half something embarrassingly close to a sob. "You feel that? That's what being good gets you."
"I will do literally anything you tell me," she said, in a voice that had lost all its usual composure. "For the record."
"I know." I kissed her hip. "I'm counting on it."
I pulled the lace underwear down and off and settled between her thighs, and she was already wet enough that I could see it in the light.
"Christ, Vera."
"Don't be smug about it," she said weakly.