Chapter 11 #2
“I mean I’m scared.” Melissa took June’s hand, turned it over in hers. “Not of what I feel. Of what happens when people find out. The scrutiny. The way it could hurt you—your reputation, your family. You didn’t sign up for that.”
“I know what I’m getting into.”
“Do you? Because I’m not sure I do.” Melissa lifted June’s hand to her lips. “And if we’re going to do this—really do this—”
“We are doing this.” June cupped her face with her free hand, tilting it up. “Melissa. Look at me.”
She looked.
“Michael doesn’t get to decide what this is,” June said. “Neither does the press, or whoever’s feeding him information, or anyone else who isn’t in this room right now.” Her thumb traced along Melissa’s jaw, slow and deliberate. “The only thing I care about right now is that you came home.”
Melissa’s breath caught.
“I texted you about the otter constellation,” June added, softer. “I wanted you home.”
“I know.” Something cracked open in Melissa’s chest, clean and sharp. “I know you did.”
She kissed her.
Not the careful way she usually initiated, the controlled press of lips that felt like testing the temperature of water.
She kissed June the way she’d been wanting to all night, while Michael sneered and the room glittered and she stood there pretending to be untouchable.
June made a soft sound of surprise and then kissed her back, her hand sliding into Melissa’s hair, and the careful, composed Senator Brandt dissolved entirely.
When they finally broke apart, June’s lipstick was gone and Melissa’s heart was pounding.
“Hi,” June said, breathless.
“Hi.”
“Better?”
“Much.” Melissa leaned her forehead against June’s, closing her eyes. “Stay with me tonight. Not the couch—actually stay. I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts.”
June pulled back just enough to look at her. Checking.
“Okay,” she said. “Yeah. Okay.”
They went upstairs quietly, past Lila’s closed door, into Melissa’s room that had only ever been hers.
June borrowed a t-shirt. Melissa washed her face at the sink and watched in the mirror as June appeared in the doorway behind her, leaning against the frame in the oversized shirt and bare feet, and felt something loosen in her chest that she hadn’t known was tight.
She turned off the bathroom light and crossed to where June was waiting.
“You’re still scared,” June said quietly. Not an accusation.
“Yes.”
“Of me?”
“Of how much I want this.” Melissa reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind June’s ear, letting her fingers trail down to her jaw. “I haven’t—it’s been a long time. Since anyone.”
June’s eyes were very steady. “I know. We don’t have to—”
“I want to.” Melissa’s voice came out certain, even if her hands weren’t quite steady. “I’ve been wanting to. I just needed—” She exhaled. “I needed tonight to stop pretending I was fine standing in that room, performing, while Michael smiled at me and you were here.”
June reached up and covered Melissa’s hand with her own, pressing it gently against her cheek. “Then stop pretending.”
Melissa kissed her. Slower than downstairs, more deliberate—a question and an answer at the same time.
June kissed her back and walked her, step by step, toward the bed, and when the backs of Melissa’s knees hit the mattress she sat down and looked up at June standing over her and felt none of the things she’d expected to feel.
No hesitation. No voice in her head tallying the reasons this was reckless.
Just want. Clean and uncomplicated and entirely hers.
“Come here,” she said.
June came.
What followed was slow and careful and then not careful at all.
Melissa had thought, in the abstract way she’d been thinking about this for weeks, that she would feel uncertain.
That the unfamiliarity of it would be the loudest thing—a woman’s hands, a woman’s warmth, the geography of someone built differently than Michael had been.
That she’d be in her head about it, cataloguing and second-guessing.
She wasn’t.
June kissed her until the thinking stopped, which didn’t take long.
She was warm everywhere, unhurried in the way she was unhurried about things she cared about—moving through this like she moved through a kitchen, with the confidence of someone who trusted her own instincts and didn’t feel the need to rush toward the end when the middle was worth staying in.
She paid attention in a way that made Melissa understand, slowly and then all at once, that attention was the thing she’d been starved of for longer than she’d realized.
June’s mouth found her throat and Melissa’s head fell back against the pillow.
She was aware of her own breathing, uneven now, and of June’s hands—one in her hair, one tracing the line of her ribs like she was mapping something—and of the heat of June’s body against hers.
No space between them. No distance maintained.
Her own hands, which had been careful until this moment, found June’s waist and pulled, and June came willingly, settling against her with a soft exhale that Melissa felt against her collarbone.
“Hi,” June said, into her skin.
“Hi,” Melissa managed.
June lifted her head and looked at her—really looked, the way she did, thorough and unhurried—and then she smiled, private and warm, and kissed her again. Deeper this time. Her hand slid from Melissa’s ribs to her hip and stayed there, deliberate, and Melissa’s breath caught.
“Okay?” June asked, against her mouth.
“More than.”
June took her time after that. A brief flicker of the old instinct toward composure surfaced in Melissa and June dissolved it immediately by doing it again, watching Melissa’s face in the low light with an expression that made self-consciousness feel beside the point.
This is what it’s supposed to feel like, Melissa thought.
She was louder than she expected to be. That registered dimly, a brief flicker of embarrassment that June dissolved immediately by doing it again, without apology or commentary, just with intention—watching Melissa’s face in the low light of the hotel room with an expression that made the embarrassment irrelevant.
“Look at me,” June said, quiet and certain, and Melissa did, and that was what undid her.
Not the touch, though the touch was…
The looking. Being looked at. June’s eyes steady on her while everything else went unsteady, while Senator Brandt dissolved entirely and there was just Melissa, undone and present, with nowhere to hide and no instinct left to try.
She said June’s name. Just her name—rough, unpolished, nothing performed about it—and June’s expression shifted into something soft and fierce at once.
“I’ve got you,” she said.
And she did.
Afterward, Melissa lay in the not-quite-dark, June’s head on her shoulder, one lamp burning across the room. Her whole body felt rearranged. Not dramatically—more like something that had been slightly out of alignment for years had quietly, finally, settled into place.
June’s thumb moved against her ribs. Slow. Absent. The touch of someone who had stopped thinking about what their hands were doing because it had become simply where their hands wanted to be.
“Still scared?” June asked, later, tracing the line of Melissa’s collarbone with one finger.
Melissa considered the question honestly. “A little. But not of this.”
June pressed a kiss to her shoulder and said nothing, which was exactly right.
Melissa closed her eyes, June’s hand warm against her ribs, and for the first time in days—maybe longer—she didn’t dream about any of it.