Chapter 6 #2
"Counter first."
"Callum."
"For a minute. Just — for a minute. Let me look at you."
She lets me look at her. She steps backward into the kitchen, and she lifts herself up onto the counter beside a row of canisters labeled flour, sugar, oats, and she sits there in the open dress and the cream-colored set with her legs hanging down, and she watches me cross the floor toward her, and the watching of her watching me is — I am going to fail this description, but I will try — the watching is the thing that recalibrates the rest of my life.
I stop between her knees. She opens them for me without being asked.
I step in. I am taller than her by enough that, with her on the counter, our faces are exactly level, and I put my hands on her bare thighs — just above the knee — and I let them rest there for a second, palm-flat, fingers fanned, feeling the warm of her under my hands.
She makes a small sound. She is not, I have learned in the last ten minutes, a quiet woman, when she is given permission not to be.
I kiss her again. I kiss her with my hands sliding up the outsides of her thighs, slow, all the way to her hips, and I find skin under the open dress, and I find the warm dip of her waist, and I find the small of her back, and I press her gently forward against me so that her chest is against mine through the cream-colored fabric, and she gasps into my mouth — a real gasp, the kind she has not given any vendor in eleven weeks — and her legs come up around me, and her ankles cross at the small of my back, and her hand goes to the front of my T-shirt and she fists the fabric.
"Take it off."
I take it off. The T-shirt comes over my head and goes — somewhere; I am not going to track its trajectory; it is not a load-bearing element — and her hands come immediately to my chest. She splays them across me.
She runs them down over my ribs to my stomach, and the inside of her wrist trails the gold chain across my skin, and the cold of the chain against the warm of me is — let me put it this way — a thing I am going to remember when I am old.
She finds the small scar on my collarbone. The jukebox one. She runs her thumb across it.
"This is from the jukebox?"
"The jukebox came down on me on the way out."
She laughs, low, against my mouth, and she leans forward and kisses the scar, and her mouth moves down my throat, slow, and she finds the hollow at the base of it, and she presses her lips there, and then her teeth, just a grazing of them, and I have to take a slow breath through my nose to stay where I am, because what she is doing with her mouth is undoing what is left of my plan to take this carefully.
Her hands are working at my belt. Her hands are working at my belt with the same efficiency she brings to a vendor contract, and she has it open in three small motions, and the button of my jeans, and then she runs her palm flat down the front of me, over the fabric, and I do not — I am going to be honest — I do not have words.
I have a sound. The sound comes out of me without my consent, low and rough, and her mouth on my throat smiles into my skin.
"Found you," she says.
"Noor."
"Yes."
"If you keep doing that, this is going to end in your kitchen, and I have plans for the bedroom."
"Plans."
"A serious plan."
"All right." She lifts her hand. She moves it, deliberately, to the back of my neck. "Take me to the bedroom, Callum."
I lift her off the counter. She wraps her legs around me properly.
I carry her down the hall — there is a hall, with framed prints, and a small console table with a bowl on it that my hip clips on the way past, and the bowl wobbles but does not fall, which is what passes for grace in my biography — and she is laughing, low and warm, against my throat, and she says, into my skin, "Are you jinxing it already?
" and I say, "Probably," and she says, "Good.
I could use something unpredictable," and then she bites — gently, deliberately — the side of my neck, and I lose, for one solid second, the ability to walk.
I recover. I find the bedroom door.
The room is — the room is not what I expected.
The room is the soft side of her. There are fairy lights along the headboard, and not just a few — a real, deliberate constellation of them, a small private galaxy that she will, I am going to bet, deny owning if I ever bring it up, and which I am going to bring up.
There are too many pillows on the bed. There are like nine pillows on the bed.
There is, on the wall over the bed, a single sentence in pencil framed in a small black frame, written in her hand: the universe rewards women who color-code.
"You framed it."
"Don't."
"Noor."
"It was a gift to myself."
"It is the most you thing I have ever seen."
"Callum. Shut up and lay me down."
I lay her down. I lay her down on the bed in the middle of all those pillows, and the wrap dress falls open beneath her, and the cream-colored set is the only thing she is still wearing, and her hair has come fully loose from its clip, and she looks up at me from her own pillows like a question I have been waiting to answer for eleven weeks, and I take a knee on the bed beside her, and I lean down, and I start at her mouth and I work my way down.
I take my time. I take so much time. I kiss the corner of her jaw, and I kiss the line down her throat, and I kiss the place at her collarbone where the small mole is, and her hand comes up into my hair and she breathes my name, low, in the back of her throat.
I find the strap of the cream-colored set, and I push it down off her shoulder with my mouth and my fingers together.
I find her chest. I take my time with her chest. She arches when I do — small and surprised, her back lifting off the bed for a half-second — and she makes a sound I have not heard before, a low, breathy oh, not a word, and I do the same thing on the other side, slower, with my mouth and the flat of my tongue, and the sound comes out of her again, only longer, and her hand tightens in my hair, and the cream-colored bra is coming off in my hands without my having quite decided when, and her skin against the cotton sheet is — I will say this — perfect, just perfect, and she is the most precisely calibrated human being I have ever met, and she is, in this bed, in this moment, completely unmade.
I work down. I kiss the soft place under her breast where her ribcage starts.
I kiss the curve of her stomach. I kiss the small, narrow inch of skin below her navel where the cream-colored fabric still rides, and her hand stays in my hair, and her breath catches when my mouth gets to the waistband of it, and she lifts her hips just slightly off the bed, just enough to make herself clear, and I take that as the permission it is.
I take the last of the cream-colored fabric off her slowly, with my hands, and I run my palms back up the insides of her thighs from her knees, and I lean down, and I kiss the soft skin at the inside of her left thigh, and then the inside of her right, and she is — I will say this — already breathing in a rhythm that is not quite her rhythm anymore, and her hand has found a fistful of the pillow beside her head, and I take my time.
I take so much more time. I have spent eleven weeks watching this woman keep her composure, and I am, here, finally, allowed to take it apart, and I am not going to rush a single second of it.
I find her with my mouth. I find her slowly, and I find her carefully, and I find her with the kind of attention I have only ever given to club archives and to the engines of motorcycles I love, and her hand in my hair tightens, and her thighs come up around my shoulders, and she says my name in a voice I will, for the rest of my life, be willing to die to hear again.
I learn her. I learn what makes her breath catch, and I learn what makes her hand go still in my hair, and I learn what makes her hips lift up off the bed, and when I find the thing — the small, particular thing, the thing she has not, I will discover later, ever told a man about because no man had ever paid attention long enough to find it — when I find it, she makes a sound that is half a laugh and half a gasp, and she says, breathless, " There. Right there. Don't stop. "
I don't stop. I have no intention of stopping.
She comes apart for the first time with my mouth on her and my hand spread flat across her stomach to hold her steady, and when she does she says my name — not Jinx, not Mr. Brennan, but Callum, in a register I have never heard, and her other hand grips the headboard above her head, and the fairy lights along the headboard flicker once when she does — they actually flicker, I am not making this up, the small constellation pulses once, the universe contributing its small share — and she gasps out a laugh in the middle of everything, breathless, undone, and she says, into the dim, "Was that you? "
"Probably."
"You jinxed the lights."
"I would do it again."
"Come up here."
I come up. I pull the rest of my clothes off on the way — boots and jeans and the rest, in a hurry that I am not going to pretend was elegant; the jeans get caught at one ankle and I have to sit down on the edge of the bed to get them off, and she is laughing, watching me, and I cannot find it in myself to be embarrassed, because the laughing is so warm and the laughing is so hers and the laughing is, I am realizing, what the rest of my life is going to sound like.