Sophia #2
"This is the one we said we'd build." He laid a hand flat on the seat, not gripping it, just resting it there.
"We used to draw it — backs of receipts, the inside of his folder, anything that'd hold a pen.
Then he was gone, and I went into the Navy, and for thirteen years I built it in my head instead.
Some nights you've got nowhere to put your hands, so you put them on something that isn't there.
Came home, finally had the time and the tools to do it for real.
Took me two years even then — not because it's hard.
Some days I'd get an hour in and have to set the airbrush down and walk out, because the whole thing is him.
" He lifted a shoulder. "But. Here it is. "
I'd carried mine eighteen years and never once let it out where anyone could see. He'd given his a body and a name and a coat of paint, and ridden it into the daylight on purpose.
I laid my hand against his cheek. The stubble caught my palm.
"Thank you," I said. "For telling me his name."
He shut his eyes, drew a long breath, and turned his face the smallest amount into my hand and let it rest there — let me take the weight of it, a six-four man setting his head down into the palm of a woman he'd known a month. I didn't move. I'd have stood there till the sun went down.
He opened his eyes and turned his face the rest of the way out of my hand, and the ease drained out of it — the half-grin, the slow lean, the man who'd called breakfast dessert the law, packed away behind his eyes.
The brown of them had gone dark, and they moved over my face like he was settling something.
"Sophia."
I turned the rest of the way to face him. My hand was still up between us where his cheek had been; he took it — the first time he'd reached for me since he'd walked me across the road — and pressed it flat to his chest, and under my palm his heart was going harder than the rest of him let on.
Then he put his other hand to my jaw, tipped my face up, and kissed me.
It wasn't careful. He'd been careful with me for a month and that was long enough.
His mouth came down warm and sure, and the first press of it was soft, almost a question, his lips moving over mine slow enough to feel each one.
Then his hand slid off my jaw into my hair, his fingers spread against my scalp and tilted my head where he wanted it, and the question was over.
His tongue traced the seam of my lips, unhurried, asking me open — I opened, and he licked into my mouth like he had all day and meant to use it.
That was what undid me: the no-hurry. He kissed me like the kiss was the whole point and not the toll on the way to something more, deep and slow and thorough, his tongue stroking against mine until I lost the edges of myself and made a sound into his mouth I'd never have made on purpose.
I tasted the coffee from my table on him.
I tasted the low groan it pulled out of him when I kissed him back — and I felt that groan more than heard it, the rumble of it going through his chest and into mine and down.
My hands were moving before I'd okayed it — up the front of him, under the hem, flat to the hard warmth of his stomach.
The muscle there jumped under my palms. He made another sound, rougher, and the hand in my hair fisted gentle and the other dropped to my hip and pulled, and the kiss went from slow to deep to something with weight behind it, his mouth working mine open wider, no part of him hurrying even now and all of it certain. The back of my thigh met cold steel.
He felt it the instant I did, and had me up and clear of the bike and set down a foot away before I'd registered what I'd backed into — one arm banded around me, done without his mouth leaving mine, the kiss never breaking through the whole of it.
Then his mouth went to my jaw, the soft place below my ear, his teeth grazing once and his tongue after it, his thumb at the underside of my ribs, and a sound I hadn't cleared got out of me, and my fingers shut in his shirt.
He stopped, slow and deliberate, like setting down something breakable. His forehead came to mine. We were both breathing hard. His hand lay open and wide and unmoving at the small of my back; I had two fistfuls of his shirt and no memory of taking hold.
"Fuck," he said against my mouth, low and wrecked. "You're beautiful."
For a month he'd kept his language clean around me, like he'd clocked I didn't swear and fallen into step without being asked, and the one word getting loose now was the whole of where he was.
I didn't have words to put against his. Nothing I had was the size of it, so I said nothing.
He held there. Then, quieter, almost into my hair: "Thank you."
"For what?" It came out thin.
His arm tightened, barely. "For hearing me."
I crossed back over the road on legs that weren't quite taking instruction.
I don't remember the asphalt — only letting myself into my kitchen, where the abandoned coffee still sat going cold and the table was still laid for a breakfast that felt like it had happened to two other people, and standing with both hands pressed to the counter, working out how to stand up straight.
I spent the rest of the day keeping busy, starting the laundry, trying — and failing — to read, all while keeping the same silly grin on my face the whole time.
At noon I lay down for a nap and lay there two hours instead, eyes shut, his hand on my jaw running on the backs of my eyelids, until I gave up.
Eventually, I called it enough and decided to head to the hospital early.
I drove in with the radio off and my heartbeat loud in my ears.
Ninety minutes early, I stood in the trauma-bay locker room and wound my hair up tight in the lavender tie, and caught my face in the mirror over the sinks — color still up, mouth still half his, a woman I knew and didn't. The thought came plain and certain.
Whatever comes through those doors tonight, I’m not the woman I was yesterday.