12. Kat #3
This is the thing I have been circling for weeks without letting myself say it: that the leashed part is the point.
Every held-back inch of him, every clipped sentence, every squared boot, every night he chose the floor against my door over a bed was pressure building behind glass, and I turned out to be the crack it finally came through.
The same control that could disappear a man in ninety minutes is the control that has him shaking to be careful of my ribs while he takes me apart, and the knowledge that he could stop being careful and chooses, thrust by thrust, exactly how much of himself to give me is the single most erotic thing I have ever had my hands on.
I do not want the safe version of this man.
I never did. I want the whole dangerous animal, all of it, aimed for once at keeping me instead of at the world and that wanting is going to wreck everything I built to survive not having it, and I open my legs wider anyway.
"Naveed…I'm…"
"I know. I've got you." His thumb presses harder, his hips slamming into me with a rhythm that's lost all pretense of control. "Look at me. Katarina. Look at me when you come on my cock."
I do. I hold his eyes through the building pressure, through the moment everything in me draws tight then shatters, wave after wave crashing through me as I cry out his name into the space between us.
He doesn't look away, not once, not even as his own control finally snaps and he throws his head back, holds himself deep and follows me over with a groan that's more beast than man.
Afterward, I lie with my head on his uninjured side, listening to his heartbeat slow under my ear, his fingers tracing lazy patterns against my shoulder unaware he's doing it.
Neither of us says anything.
There isn't a word small enough for what just happened, and neither of us reaches for a big one either.
I don't feel him leave. That's the worst part.
One minute his hand is warm and heavy across my hip, and the next there's cold air where his body was, and I surface out of half-sleep into an empty stretch of mattress that still smells like him. The sheet on his side cool under my palm.
He's dressing. Quiet, like he does everything, T-shirt over the bandage, jeans, boots he doesn't lace all the way. I keep my eyes half-closed and watch him through my lashes like a coward.
He checks the window. He checks the second window. He crosses the loft, and I hear the soft sound of him lowering himself to the floor with his back against the front door.
Ten feet. That's all. Ten feet and a stretch of concrete, and it might as well be an ocean.
He gave me his mouth and his hands and his voice, and every one of those was more than I expected to ever get. But he did not give me the bed. He did not give me the reason he's here, the thing behind his eyes when he moves my letters, the two-word answers he hands me like receipts.
He gave me his body. He kept his access.
And that is the cruelest, most precisely Naveed thing he could have done.
Any other man would have given me the bed and kept his body braced.
He gave me the exact reverse, everything of himself that could be spent in the dark, none of what could be audited in the light.
I have been handed a man's hunger and denied his history in the same night, the ache it leaves is worse than never being touched, because now I know down to the cell what it feels like to be reached, and then to watch the person get up and go stand a watch against the door.
He fed the starving thing in my chest one full meal and walked it back to its cage, and the part I will not survive looking at straight is that I understand exactly why.
He does it because he believes the cage is where I'm safe, because the last person he let all the way in, he carried out in pieces.
He is guarding me from the single danger he cannot count or put his body in front of, which is himself while I am lying here in his cooling sheets, aching, furious and already, God help me, halfway gone on the exact discipline that is going to break my heart.
I roll onto my back and stare up at the pipes running across the ceiling.
My skin is still humming. There's a soreness between my legs that I'd normally file under evidence of a very good night, now it reminds me how empty this side of the bed is.
I press my thighs together and it makes it worse, not better, wanting a man I can hear breathing on the other side of my own home.
That's a joke. The laugh's on me. I thought it was something. He was so verbal, unlike his usual stoic self, and I mistook it for the real him. The kicker is, he's closer than any man has been to me in years, and I still can't reach him.
My phone lights up on the nightstand, one buzz, muffled against a paperback.
Cami: Checking you're alive and appropriately ruined. One emoji. I'll interpret. Also I told you your problem had hands like that.
I read it twice. My thumb hovers over the screen and does nothing.
Because what do I send? A face? A flame?
There's no small yellow circle for the man who put his body between me and a bullet, took me apart in my own bed, and then went and sat down against my front door like a soldier who never came off duty.
Cami wants a punchline. I don't have one.
I have a bandage I taped myself, seventeen scars I counted without permission, and a man who won't sleep beside me.
I set the phone face-down and look at the door instead.
He's a shape in the dark. Head back against the wood, one knee up, hands loose. Awake. He's always awake.
I could get up. Cross the floor. Sit down next to him and ask.
I don't. I pull the sheet over my shoulder, on the cold side of the bed, and lie there watching the door he's guarding me from.