Chapter 6 #3
I come back to her. I come back over her on the bed, careful, slow, taking my weight on my forearm so I am not pressing her into the mattress, and she reaches up and pulls my face down to hers, and she kisses me, deep and slow, and she does not flinch — she does not pull back from the taste of her on my mouth, she takes it the way she takes everything she has decided to take.
Her free hand finds me. Her free hand wraps around me, and she strokes me once, deliberately, watching my face — once, slowly, root to tip — and I have to drop my forehead to her shoulder for a count of three to keep from doing something embarrassing.
"Sorry," I mutter into her skin. "It's been —"
"It's all right."
"Noor."
"Callum. Look at me."
I look at her. She is below me on her pillows with her hair spilling everywhere and her eyes very dark and her lips flushed pink, and she is looking at me like I am the thing she has been planning toward, and her hand is still on me, working slow now, deliberate, and she says, into the quiet between us, "There is a condom in the top drawer of the nightstand. "
I lean. I open the drawer. There are, of course, three condoms in the drawer, in a small lacquered tray, arranged in a neat row. I am going to be in love with this woman until I am dead.
"You prepared."
"Of course I prepared."
"Noor Abbasi."
"Get on with it, Callum."
I get on with it. She helps. Her hands are warm and certain and she puts the condom on me herself, and when she is done she pulls me down to her again, and she guides me — patient, exact — and I slide into her, slow, careful, watching her face the entire time, and she makes a sound, low in her throat, that is the most honest sound I have ever heard a human being make, and her eyes close for one second, and they open again, and they find mine, and she says, " Yes. "
I do not move yet. I hold there, just inside her, my forehead pressed to hers, and I am letting both of us adjust to the fact that this is real, that we are doing this, that the contract is dissolved and the rule is rewritten and we are in her bed, in her constellation, in her color-coded apartment, joined at the place where the eleven weeks ends and the rest of it begins.
Then I move.
I move slowly at first. She wraps her legs around the small of my back, and her hands grip my shoulders, and her face is so close to mine that I can feel her breath on my chin.
I move with her, into her, deeper each time and slower than I would have thought myself capable, and she meets me.
She meets me. She lifts her hips to me each time I come down, and the rhythm builds the way I have been hoping rhythms would build, and her breath catches in time with mine, and she breathes my name again and again into the small space between us — Callum, Callum, Callum — and I am going to remember the rhythm of her saying my name for the rest of my life.
She tells me what she wants in pieces. She tells me slower and then she tells me harder and then she tells me yes, like that, don't change anything, stay, and I obey every instruction, because I have wanted, for eleven weeks, to take orders from this woman in this room, and the chain of command is finally clear.
At some point — I lose track of when — she pushes gently at my shoulder, and I let her roll us, and she comes up over me, and she straddles me, and she sits up, and the fairy lights are behind her, lighting the small loose strands of her hair into a halo, and she looks down at me with her hands flat on my chest, and she rocks against me, slow, finding her own rhythm now, and I have — I will tell you the truth — never seen anything in my life as beautiful as Noor Abbasi above me in the constellation of her own bedroom, taking what she wants from me on her own terms.
I bring my hands up to her hips. I help her, just barely, just guiding, because she does not need help.
She moves on me with the same precise patience she brings to everything, and her head tips back, and I watch her throat go long, and I watch her hand come up to her own chest, and I watch her undo herself the way she has been undoing me for eleven weeks, and when she comes apart the second time she comes apart with her hands flat on my chest, over my heart — the same hand, the same place — and she says my name, and she folds down onto me, her hair falling across my face, and I follow her over with my arms wrapped around her back and my mouth pressed to her temple, and I say her name into her hair as I go, and she catches it on her skin and keeps it.
The fairy lights, for the record, do not flicker this time. The fairy lights stay on.
I do not move for a long minute. I stay where I am, her weight settled along my chest, her breath warm and slowing against my collarbone, and she runs her fingers, slow, through the back of my hair, and neither of us speaks.
We do not need to speak yet. The room is doing the speaking for us.
The fairy lights, the books, the pillow she will admit she has too many of, the small framed sentence on the wall — all of it is doing the speaking.
Eventually she rolls off me, and I deal, briefly and quietly, with the condom, and I come back, and she pulls the duvet up over both of us, and I gather her against my side, and she ends up with her head on my chest and her leg thrown across both of mine, and her fingertip — idle — traces the small jukebox scar at my collarbone.
"Callum."
"Yes."
"I am going to delete the spreadsheet."
"Keep it. I want to read it at our wedding."
She lifts her head. She looks at me. She hits me, almost gently, with one of the nine pillows.
"You are insufferable."
"You want me anyway."
"I want you anyway."
She lays her head back on my chest. The fairy lights cast everything in low warm pink and gold. The duvet is, of course, exactly the right weight. My body is humming. My brain, for the first time in twenty-four years, is completely quiet.
"Callum."
"Yes."
"For the record."
"Yes."
"This was not a jinx."
"It really wasn't."
"This was the universe finally clearing the path."
She is quiet. She is quiet for a long time. Then, very softly, against my skin:
"Yeah. It was."
She falls asleep against me before I do.
I lie there with her hand still on my chest and her breath even against my collarbone, and I watch the fairy lights for a while, and at some point I knock — I am not sure how — the glass of water on the nightstand with my foot, and it tips and spills onto the floor, and I do not get up to clean it, because getting up would require moving her, and I am not, for any reason in any universe, going to move her tonight.
I will deal with the water in the morning.
I close my eyes.
I sleep.
In the morning she will laugh at the wreckage — the spilled water, the book I have somehow knocked off the nightstand, the bedside lamp at an angle it was not at when we arrived — and she will laugh at me, gently, and she will say, "Jinx," and I will say, "I know," and she will say, "Welcome to the apartment," and I will say, before I quite mean to, "I love you," and her face will register it, and she will go still for the half-second before the cutting thing, except the cutting thing will not arrive.
What will arrive is her hand. Flat on my chest. Over my heart. The way she put it there last night in the kitchen.
"I love you too," she will say. "And I am going to update the master document accordingly."
"Don't ever change."
"I won't."