24. Margot
MARGOT
Ichose him with my eyes open. I just didn't know they weren't open all the way.
I have lost track of the days in any order that would help me. What I have kept instead is a decision, and I have been holding it in both hands since the sun went down.
Here is the thing no one tells you about choosing a dangerous man.
Everyone assumes it has to be a failure of eyesight, a woman who simply did not see the knife.
But I saw the knife. I have watched him use it.
On the drive here I said to his face every way he is wrong for me and every way his protecting shades quietly into his owning, and none of it moved the decision a single inch.
I understood that I was going to choose him regardless.
Not blind. Not swept off my feet. On purpose, the way you decide to jump only after you have measured the whole of the fall.
He let me keep that kiss. The first time, in a dark shop with fear still sharp between us, he took it straight out of my hands.
Not tonight. There is no storm now and no fresh violence cooling in the dark behind us, only a buzzing lamp and a decision I have made with the whole of my open eyes.
He lets me set the pace, and I can feel exactly what it costs him, the deliberate laying down of a control he hands to no one, and I understand that he is giving me the single thing he owns that is truly his to give.
He kisses me back the way you finally answer a question you have wanted asked for months, and his hands come up to my face, careful, cradling, not the grip of a man taking something but the hold of a man who cannot quite believe he is allowed to touch it.
I have been kissed hard before. I have kissed him hard before, in a dark shop with fear still sharp in my teeth.
This is not that. This is slow on purpose and thorough on purpose, a man and a woman deciding each other one degree at a time, and I feel the decision travel all the way down through me.
I undress him this time, and he permits it with a stillness that is its own confession, his eyes never once leaving my face while my hands learn the history his mouth has never told me, the old hurts, the places life built hard, the heart going faster under my palm than he would ever say out loud.
When the shirt is gone I do not hurry past what I find.
I have spent this whole thing being read down to the studs, and tonight I read him back, slowly, and I watch what being seen does to a man who has arranged his entire life so that no one ever looks.
He returns the favor without hurry, and where the first night was all economy and command, tonight his hands ask permission at every turn.
He pauses at the hem of my sweater until I lift my arms. He pauses at the clasp of everything until I nod.
By the time I am bare against him I have said yes with my whole body a dozen separate times, and every single yes was mine to give.
There is a power in that I did not see coming, in being asked, in being the one who decides.
He has spent weeks keeping me safe by making my choices for me.
Tonight he hands every choice back, one at a time, and it is the most romantic thing he has ever done, and neither of us says a word about it.
He lets me take my time, and then all at once he cannot, and the moment his restraint finally gives is not the defeat it was the first night but an offering, set down on purpose.
He draws me onto the narrow bed and we undress the rest of each other clumsily, and we laugh once, quietly, when an elbow goes somewhere an elbow should never go, and that laugh matters more to me than anything else that happens tonight, because it is the first time either of us has been anything but deadly serious about wanting the other.
We take our time getting to the rest of it, because for once there is time, no storm and no clock and no boots coming up a stair.
I map him with my hands and then my mouth, the hard plane of his chest, the old silvered marks I do not ask about, the flat muscle of his stomach that jumps under my lips when I drift lower than he was braced for.
His breath snags. His hand comes to the back of my head, not pushing, only holding, as though he needs something to keep hold of, and when I take him into my mouth the sound that breaks out of him is the least guarded thing I have ever heard him make, torn loose and helpless, and I feel it land low in my own body like a struck match.
I have never wanted anything the way I want to be the reason this careful man forgets how to be careful.
He lets me undo him for a while, and then his patience frays through all at once, and he draws me back up the length of him and rolls us so that I am beneath him again, and there is nothing gentle left in the way his mouth takes mine.
"My turn," he says against my lips, low and wrecked, and then he works his way down my body with a slow and merciless attention, and I learn that a man who has spent a lifetime studying exactly what people want can put the knowledge to uses that leave me arched off the thin mattress with my fist in his hair and his name dissolving on my tongue.
He undoes me slowly and then not slowly at all, reading every sound I make and chasing it, bringing me up to the edge and easing me back down from it twice, three times, until I am past pride and past whole sentences and openly begging, which is a thing I have never once done in my life.
He lifts his head to watch me do it, and what is on his face is not triumph but something much nearer to awe.
When he finally lets me fall it is with his fingers curled inside me and his eyes locked on mine, and I go over with the lamp buzzing overhead and nowhere in the lit little room left to hide.
When he moves over me there is a question in it, the same wordless one from before, and tonight I answer it a different way.
I do not simply pull him to me. I take his face in both my hands and I make him hold my eyes, and I say it out loud, that I choose this, that I choose him, the parts of him I have seen and the parts he still keeps locked behind his teeth.
I watch it hit him harder than any touch could, and for a moment the most dangerous man I have ever known looks as though a single kind word might be the thing that finally takes him apart.
He settles between my thighs and does not rush a moment of it, and I feel him notch against me and pause there, giving me the same space to change my mind that he has given me at every gate tonight.
I do not change my mind. He presses in slow, an inch and then another, watching my face the whole way down, and the stretch of him and the sheer fullness of it crowd the air clean out of me, and this time there is no merciful dark to hide the size of what is happening.
When he is seated as far as I can take him he goes still, buried and breathing hard, his forehead dropped to mine.
It is almost past bearing, being watched like this while he holds himself inside me, being held in his eyes and his hands and the whole unblinking force of his attention all at once.
I do not look away. Looking away is the old me, and the old me does not get to live in this room tonight.
Then he begins to move, and we move together the way two people move once they have stopped keeping score of who is in charge, and I lose the words, every last one I have ever hidden behind.
And then, because tonight belongs to me every bit as much as to him, I plant my hands flat on his chest and press him back into the mattress and rise up over him, and I watch his hands come to my hips and go still there, letting me, giving me this too.
I take him into me again, slow and deliberate, and the fullness of it and the sight of him laid open beneath me, this lethal and guarded man looking up as though I hung the lamp and every light behind it, very nearly ends me before I have moved at all.
I set the pace and he lets me keep it, his hands holding my hips like an anchor while he murmurs things filthy and tender in two languages, and he lets me ride us both to the brink, and it is the most powerful I have ever felt with my clothes on or off.
And then, when we are both close enough to taste it, he sits up and folds me into his arms and turns us over in one unbroken motion, and I let him, because tonight we keep handing it back and forth, the lead and the weight and the say, and neither of us is keeping any count at all.
We find the rhythm together, two people who have decided the very same thing at the very same moment.
He says my name into my hair, and then he says other things, low and rough and in no language I can hold, and I answer with the only truth I have left, which is his name, and the word yes, and then, once, helplessly, three words I have written a hundred times for other people and never once meant until now.
He goes still for half a heartbeat when I say them, as though I have reached into his chest and closed my hand around something, and then he moves like a man who has decided to stop protecting even himself.
Somewhere in it I stop being able to tell where the wanting ends and the sheer terror of being this happy begins, and I feel him arrive at the same place, feel the exact instant he stops managing even this, and we go over the edge of it together, holding on, my name breaking apart in his mouth and something that is nearly a word breaking apart in mine.
For one held breath there is no danger and no lie and no city full of men who want us in the ground.
There is only the two of us, chosen and choosing, at the top of the only thing I have ever been entirely sure of.
For a while neither of us moves. His weight is over me and I do not want it lifted, and he seems to know that, because he stays, braced just enough, his face buried in the crook of my neck, and I feel his breathing slow against my skin by degrees.
I have never once been held by someone who was not, on some level, already planning the way he would leave.
He is not planning anything. He is only here, heavy and spent and mine, and I run my hands up the length of his back the way you would gentle a thing that has finally, against all its training, decided to trust you.
Afterward he holds me the way you hold the one thing you managed to carry out of a fire, and I lie with my ear pressed to the loud animal proof that he is alive and human and here, and for the first time I let the dangerous thought run all the way to its end without flinching from it.
I am in love with him. Not with the idea of him, not with the danger stitched through him, but with the specific man breathing under my cheek, the one who checks a lock four times and cannot sleep and made me coffee once, exactly right, before he had any earthly business knowing how I take it.
"You are doing it again," he says into my hair, and I can hear that he is very nearly smiling, which on him is the equivalent of a brass band.
"I'm not doing anything. I'm lying here being a person."
"You went still. Your breathing changed. You just narrated this, all of it, in that particular voice." He waits, letting me squirm. "You always talk like a book. Even now. Even here."
"You have no evidence."
"You composed a sentence about my heartbeat less than a minute ago. I felt you write it."
"That is a slanderous accusation, I am deeply wounded, and also, for the record, it was a genuinely lovely sentence.
" And he laughs, really laughs, low and startled, the sound of a man discovering something he did not know had survived in him.
"See," I whisper, mortified and delighted in exactly equal measure, "now you've gone and made me narrate the laugh.
This is entirely your fault, and I hope you can live with it. "
The laugh fades, and something older moves into the room behind it, the thing that has been standing at the edge of every good moment we have ever managed to steal. I feel him gather himself beneath me. I feel him reach a decision he has been circling for as long as I have known him.
"There is something you have to know," he says, and his voice has gone somewhere I have never heard it go. "About how I found you…" He cannot finish it tonight. And I fall asleep certain that whatever it is, we can survive it.