Sean #2
I stand. I pull her up. She comes against me without resistance, and I pick her up, and she puts her arms around my neck, and I carry her through the loft to the bedroom because the loft is small enough to carry her through it.
I put her down on the bed.
She pulls me down with her.
This is the third time we have done this. The brick wall behind the bar. The kitchen island in West 12th.
This is the time the others were earning.
She is under me, and my mouth is on hers, and there is no architecture between us, and there is no phone going to ring, and there is no Glock on a counter, and there is no woman in a chair across the river, and there is no man on the FDR.
There is her.
There is me.
The Brooklyn Bridge is lit in the window. We have not closed the blinds. We are not going to.
I take my time.
She lets me.
I get her t-shirt off. I get her jeans off. I study her in the loft light the way I have not been allowed to learn her in any room we have been in together. The cabin was bleeding. The alley was furious. The kitchen island was the surrender.
This is the slow.
I take her mouth. I take her throat. I find the place at the curve of her ribs where her body is most ticklish, because I am paying attention now.
She makes a sound when I find it.
The sound is not a sound she has made before.
The sound is mine now.
I get my mouth on her.
The first taste is her.
Sweet. Addictive.
"You have any idea what you taste like?"
Her hand tightens in my hair.
"What?"
I look up at her.
"Mine."
I work the outer first. The crease of her thigh where her hip meets her body. The soft ridge below her belly that flexes when she tries to press up.
She has her hand in my hair. The hand is not pulling. The hand is just there.
I find her.
She makes a sound I have not heard from her. Not the alley sound. Not the kitchen island sound. The third sound.
I am going to remember the third sound for the rest of my life.
Her thigh closes against my shoulder. I move her thigh. She lets me move it. Her hand tightens in my hair.
I stay where I am being told to stay.
I work at the place she wants me to work. I move down and get my tongue inside her, so I know what she is on the inside, the way I have learned what she is on the outside. She makes a different sound. Higher. Less guarded.
The higher sound goes into me through my mouth and does not come back out.
I come back up. I keep working her until her breath does the thing it does. Until her hand comes loose in my hair because every other muscle is doing the work of the moment.
She comes against my mouth.
I do not move.
I let her have it for as long as she needs.
When she is done, she pulls me up.
I take her face in my hands.
"Nadia."
"Yes."
"I love you."
"I know."
"Say it again."
"I love you, Sean."
"Again."
"I love you."
I push inside her.
I am as slow as I have been all night.
She arches up against me. Her hands are on my back. Her legs come around my hips. The wound in my side is healed enough that it no longer protests. Everything else is paying attention.
I move.
She moves with me.
This is the thing I have been wanting from the moment the warehouse door came off its hinges. Her body and mine, in a room where neither of us has to perform. Her face under mine. Her eyes open.
She comes again with my forehead against hers and my eyes on hers.
"Resta, Stay,” she says. Against my mouth. The word she has not used in any room we have been in together.
"Yes."
I follow her.
I stay inside her.
I do not move for a long second.
She does not move either.
When I finally roll us, she comes with me. She fits against my side the way she fit on the couch. Her head on my shoulder. Her hand on my chest. Her leg over mine.
She says, against my chest, "Stay."
"Yes."
"Always."
"Yes."
I close my eyes.
She is asleep before I am.
I am asleep a minute after.
I wake up at 6:14 a.m.
I do not know I have woken up at 6:14 until I look at the clock on her side of the bed.
6:14 is the time she said she made coffee at the cabin. I had thought it was a thing she said because she was performing.
The time the clock says is 6:14.
She is in the kitchen.
I can hear the Chemex.
I lie in her bed, and I listen to her grind beans in a kitchen sixty feet from me.
I get out of bed.
I find my pants. I find the t-shirt I had on under my shirt yesterday. I do not find my shirt. The shirt can stay where it is.
I go to the kitchen.
She is at the counter. She is in the t-shirt I had on yesterday. The t-shirt is too big on her. The t-shirt is the only thing she is wearing.
She is pouring water through the Chemex.
She does not turn around when I walk in.
"You said 6:14."
"I said 6:14."
"I did not believe you."
"You should believe me about coffee."
"I should believe you about everything."
She turns.
She is smiling.
I cross to her.
I take her face in my hands.
I kiss her.
She kisses me back.
The Chemex keeps pouring behind her.
After a second, she breaks the kiss.
"The coffee."
"The coffee can wait."
"The coffee cannot wait. I have rules about the coffee."
"What are the rules about the coffee?"
"The rules are that the coffee comes off the grounds in four minutes."
"What time is it now?"
"Three minutes thirty."
"That is a lot of time."
"It is enough."
I lift her up onto the counter.
The granite is cool against the backs of her thighs. She makes a small sound when she goes onto the counter.
It is a sound I am going to learn the names of over the next however many years.
I get my hand inside the t-shirt on her body, which is hers.
She is laughing.
She is laughing because the coffee timer on her phone is going to go off in two minutes and thirty, and she is going to have to choose between the coffee and what I am about to do, and she has, in some part of herself, already chosen.
She is choosing me.
The four-minute rule has been hers for ten years, and it is going to lose this morning.
I kiss her.
She kisses me back.
She is laughing into my mouth.
The phone timer chimes. Neither of us reaches for it. The coffee gets bitter on the counter behind her, and we drink it that way half an hour later.
The coffee is bitter by the time we get to it.
She drinks hers. I drink mine. The Chemex sits empty on the counter.
She is in the t-shirt that is mine. I am in the pants and nothing else.
The kitchen is full of the light of a Thursday morning in DUMBO that the rest of New York is also waking into and that nobody else has, this morning, the way we have it.
She is at the toaster.
I am at the counter.
My phone vibrates against the granite.
I look at it without reaching.
Matteo.
He's awake.
I turn the phone face down on the counter.
I do not say anything.
She is at the toaster. Her back is to me. She has not seen the screen.
The architecture is not closed.
I have until she turns around.