Move With Me #5
I worked her through every second. Slower, gentler, following her down as carefully as I'd taken her up, until the shaking subsided and her hips stilled and her hands went soft on my arm.
Then I lifted my hand from her throat and brought it to her face instead, and her eyes finally closed, and she turned her cheek into my palm like something seeking warmth.
We stayed like that for a long moment.
"Vera," I said, very quietly. "Talk to me."
"I'm here." A long exhale. "I'm very, very here."
"Good."
She turned her face toward me, eyes still closed, mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile yet. "I've been thinking about that for six years," she said. "Since I figured out what I wanted."
I stayed quiet.
"It was better," she said, "than I imagined."
I pressed a kiss to her forehead. She made a small sound, content and drowsy and thoroughly undone, and curled against me with the settled certainty of someone who had exactly nowhere else they intended to be.
The moon had come up while we weren't paying attention, cool and silver through the curtains. The room had gone quiet.
"Stay," she murmured. "The whole night."
I had reasons not to. A full list of them, sensible and self-protective, well-organized in the part of my brain that was still functioning.
I listened to her breathe. Felt her go warm and heavy against my side.
"Okay," I said.
Her smile pressed into my collarbone.
I woke to sunlight and the smell of coffee and the acute awareness of being watched.
Vera was sitting cross-legged on her side of the bed, already in her robe, cat-eye glasses on, mug held in both hands, studying me.
"How long have you been awake?" I asked.
"Long enough." She took a sip. "You make a very interesting face when you sleep."
"I make a—" I pressed a hand over my eyes. "What kind of face?"
"Like you're solving a problem, but it's going well." She tilted her head. "It's extremely cute."
"I don't do cute."
"You absolutely do cute. You do it without knowing, which makes it significantly worse. Cuter." She handed me her mug. It looked how I took my coffee. Black. Some possible sugars.
I accepted it and took a sip. It tasted exactly right.
"Are you taking your coffee the way I take mine?"
She nodded. "I wanted to be able to share, in case you woke up.
I noticed that's how you took your coffee and…
well. You know." She settled back against the headboard, shoulder to shoulder with me.
"I also noted that you hold doors for people even when they're far away, you check exits when you enter a room, and you were counting fire suppression heads in the diner ceiling on our first date. "
I stared at her.
"Library science," she said. "We observe."
"You're terrifying."
"Thank you." She leaned her head against my shoulder. "How did you sleep?"
"Better than I have in years," I said, which surprised me by being true.
"Me too." Her bright eyes sought mine and held my gaze. "I was worried you'd be gone."
"I thought about it," I admitted. "Old habit."
"But you stayed."
"Couldn't bring myself to leave."
She tipped her face up, and I kissed her, slowly, tasting coffee and sleep and that indefinable Vera-ness I was apparently going to spend a significant amount of time thinking about from now on.
"I could get used to this," she murmured.
"The coffee or the staying?"
"Yes."
I laughed, and she smiled against my jaw at the sound of it.
"Scrambled eggs?" she asked.
"Are they as good as the coffee?"
She lifted her head, affronted. "The eggs are famous."
"Famous where, specifically?"
"In my kitchen."
"That's a limited sample size."
"Then you should eat them and expand the data set." She climbed out of bed, belting her robe, and held out her hand. "Come on."
I took her hand, pulled on my shirt, and followed her into a sunlit kitchen where she moved with natural authority, cracking eggs, chopping herbs, stealing commentary over her shoulder while I sat on the counter and watched her and thought: this.
This was what I hadn't known I was looking for. Not the action or the adrenaline or the grand gesture. Just a Saturday morning kitchen and someone moving through it who wanted me there.
"You're staring again," she said without turning.
"I'm observing," I said. "Library science."
She pointed the spatula at me over her shoulder. "That's my thing."
"I'm borrowing it."
She turned back to the eggs. I could see, from behind, that she was smiling. The eggs were excellent, which she received as her absolute due.
When I finally had to leave for my noon shift, she walked me to the door in her robe, coffee mug in hand, hair loose.
"Tonight?" she asked.
"Miss me already?"
"I've missed you for twenty-nine years," she said. "I just didn't know what I was missing." She rose on her toes and kissed me. "So. Tonight?"
"Tonight," I said.
I rode to work with the desert morning air cold and clean against my face and the long road ahead wide and clear. Somewhere around mile three, the thought arrived fully formed and settled quietly, without fanfare, the way true things usually do.
For the first time in longer than I could name, I wasn't bracing for something to end.
I was thinking about what came next.