16. Margot #2
"You're staring," I say, because I cannot help it, because deflection is the last clothing I have left.
"Yes." There is not one grain of apology in it. "And I intend to go on doing it. Lie down."
I go. I, who have never once done a single thing simply because a man told me to, lie back across the bed, and the obeying is the most honest thing my body has done in years.
He takes his time undressing, because of course he does, and I prop myself on my elbows and watch him do it, because I have earned that much tonight.
The shirt goes, and the dim light finds the hard, used economy of him, a body built and kept for work I have decided not to think about tonight.
Then the rest of his clothes go as well, and there is not one shy bone anywhere in him.
When he finally comes down to me the first full slide of his bare skin against mine drives the air clean out of my lungs.
He is warm everywhere I have gone cold. He braces above me on one forearm, not giving me all his weight, and for a moment he only holds there, looking down, and the look is so open, so far past anything he has let me see before, that I have to pull his mouth back to mine simply to survive it.
His mouth begins a slow way down my body and refuses to be hurried through any inch of it, and by the time it reaches the curve of my breast I am saying things into the dark that have lost all their grammar.
He learns me by touch and by taste, finding every place that makes me arch and filing each one away with the same unsparing thoroughness he brings to the rest of his life.
When his hand finally slides between my thighs I am already so far gone that the first slow, deliberate stroke of it pulls a cry out of me that the whole quiet building must hear.
"That is it," he says against my skin, watching my face while he works me, relentless and unhurried at the same impossible time. "Let me hear you. There is no one in the world tonight but me, and I want all of it."
He takes me apart with his hand first, slow and without mercy, holding my eyes the entire time so that I cannot hide inside the dark the way I hide inside everything else, and when I break it is with his name in my mouth and his other hand laced tight through mine, pinned to the pillow, an anchor I did not know I needed until he gave it to me.
I am still finding my way back into my body when he settles his weight fully over me, braced on one forearm, the other hand guiding himself to exactly where I want him, and there is a question in the stillness before, a pause where he holds himself just barely against me and waits.
I answer it by wrapping my legs around him and lifting, and taking the last of the choice out of both our hands.
He takes me in complete command of it, and I, who have spent my whole life needing to hold the pen, hand it over and let him write.
He presses into me slow, one inch and then another, watching my face the whole long way down, and the stretch and the heat and the sheer fullness of him crowd every thought clean out of my head until there is nothing left inside it but the fact of him.
When he is seated as deep as I can take him he goes still for a moment, buried and breathing hard against the curve of my shoulder, and the low rough noise that tears out of him then is the sound of a man at the very end of his restraint.
"Look at me," he says, when I close my eyes against how much it is.
So I look. He holds my gaze and does not let it go, without blinking, without letting me hide anywhere at all, and only then does he begin to move, slow and deep and deliberate, keeping me present and seen and utterly undefended for every second of it, until the pleasure and the sheer terror of being this known run together into one bright unbearable thread.
He sets a rhythm that is patient and ruthless in equal measure, reading every catch of my breath and answering it, giving me exactly as much as I can take and then a fraction more than that.
My hands find the working muscle of his back and hold on for my life.
He murmurs things into my hair in two languages, and I understand none of the words and every bit of the meaning, and the years between us stop being a number and turn into the entire reason this works, because he knows precisely what he is doing and he is doing it to me, on purpose, with his eyes open.
And somewhere in the middle of it his control cracks.
I feel the precise moment the discipline he wears like a second coat slips its buttons, when his hands stop being quite steady and his careful breathing comes apart against my ear and he says my name, my real one, not in the low even way he says everything else but rough, like a word he has kept under his tongue far longer than any man should have to.
The unshakable one shakes, and I am the reason.
I have never once felt power like it, and I have never felt so tender toward another living person as I do in the second I watch him lose the single thing he has never once set down.
He feels me start to climb a second time and he chases it with me, his rhythm going deeper and more certain, his forehead dropped to mine so that we are breathing the same small pocket of air.
When it takes me it takes the whole of me, every last defended inch, and I feel him follow me over with my name still coming apart in his mouth.
For one long suspended moment there is nothing left in the world but the place where we are joined and the sound of two people who have finally stopped pretending to be careful.
After that there is no more talking, or none that would survive being written down.
There is only the dark and the rain at the glass and the two of us, wrung out and undone and slowly relearning how to breathe, and a long stretch of time in which I am not a bookseller or a novelist or a woman who has spent months feeling watched from somewhere she cannot see.
I am only this. I am only here. I am only his.
Afterward we lie tangled together in a bed built for one very careful person, both of us winded as though we ran the whole way here, and I open my eyes to discover that we are not alone.
Hemingway sits on the dresser in the gray storm light with his tail curled around his feet, considering the pair of us with the flat, wounded dignity of a Victorian chaperone who witnessed the entire event and fully intends to write a strongly worded letter about it.
"Ignore him," I say. "He reviews everything. He gave my last book two stars and a hairball."
"He is protective." I feel the low rumble of the words move through his chest more than I hear them. "I respect that in a colleague."
And here is the genuinely humiliating part, the confession I will carry to my grave and very possibly publish one day under a name that is not mine.
Even then, even wrecked and warm and happier than I have any right to be, some traitor back room of my head has already started drafting it.
She lay in the dark, the sentence went, and felt, for the first time in her life, completely known.
I think it in the third person, with a semicolon I regret before I have even finished it.
I try to stop. I cannot stop. The scene is simply too good, and I have never in my life managed to leave a good one un-narrated, not even when I am lying inside it, not even when I am the scene.
"You are doing it," he says into my hair. It is not a question.
"I'm absolutely not."
"You are narrating. You go still in a particular way, and you did it just now. What did the sentence say?"
"That I'm comfortable," I lie. "That the storm's passing. Nothing worth stealing."
He does not believe me, and he does not press it, and he draws the blanket up over the both of us with a gentleness that undoes me all over again.
Later, when the rain has gone soft and the block is still dark and his heartbeat has slowed under my ear into something I could set a clock by, I say the thing I have been circling for weeks.
I do not decide to say it. It simply arrives, the way the truest things always do, in the safety of a dark room, beside a man who asked me, before anything else in the world, whether I was hurt.
I whisper that I feel like he already knows me. He goes still, and instead of answering, he pulls me closer. "You have no idea." I hear romance. I should have heard a countdown.