38. Kolya #2
I lingered there too. I had no intention of rushing one second of this.
I learned her with my tongue the way I learn anything that matters, with patience and total attention, until her thighs were shaking on either side of me and her spine had left the sheets and the clever, relentless mouth that always has an answer ready for me was stripped down to a single broken syllable, my name, again and again.
She came apart against my mouth with her fingers fisted in my hair to the bright edge of pain, and I stayed with her through the whole of it, easing her down, until she was loose and laughing and pulling at my shoulders.
"Now," she said, hauling me up the length of her, finding my mouth, tasting herself there and not caring in the slightest. "I want you. With me. And don't you dare be careful with every part of me."
I had lost the rest of what I wore somewhere I would not find before morning.
She reached between us and closed her hand around the hard length of me and stroked once, unhurried, studying my face as it broke open with the same hunger I bring to hers, and it cost me everything I had not to finish against her palm like a green boy.
"Then come here," I said, my voice gone to gravel, and I lay back against the pillows and drew her up over me, because I wanted her weight in my hands and her face above mine and not one ounce of mine bearing down on the two of them.
She came without hesitation and straddled my hips, and for a moment she only held herself there, poised above me, the heat of her hovering a breath away while we both went quiet.
Then she slid a hand down between us and took hold of me again and guided the blunt head of me to where she wanted it, and I felt the first slick press of her open against me, and I made myself hold still, letting her set the pace of this the way she has come to set the terms of everything.
She sank onto me by slow degrees. The first inch was a tight, perfect stretch, her body opening around me a little at a time, and her breath snagged high in her throat while mine stopped altogether.
She paused, taking the measure of me, then drew down a little more, and a little more, easing along the length of me in unhurried increments until I was buried to the hilt in her wet heat and there was nowhere left for either of us to go.
We went still then, fully joined, her forehead dropped close to mine and both of us breathing into the same narrow column of air, and the feel of being seated that deep inside her after all we had bled through to reach it moved through me like a current with no name.
I watched her face the whole way down, reading every flicker of it the way I have spent a lifetime reading a room for the thing in it that means me harm, except that here there was nothing to fear and nowhere I would rather have been.
She rolled her hips, testing, and the breath left me in a rush, and she smiled down at me like a woman who has just found the last argument she will ever need to win.
For a long while we stayed like that, unhurried, Ruby riding me in slow deep rolls while my hands learned the fuller curve of her hips and held her to a pace we drew out on purpose, because nothing was chasing us from the room and nothing ever would again.
No clock. No door. No exit kept in the corner of my eye.
Only her, above me and around me, her breath climbing higher with every slow fall of her body onto mine.
"Look at me," she whispered, and I did, and she held my eyes the way no one alive had ever been allowed to, all the way to the bottom of me. "Now say it."
I knew the words she meant. She had written them into her terms, and I had signed.
"I love you," I said, out loud, in plain language, sober and certain, exactly the way she had made me promise on the day she said yes. "I love you. You, and the half of you in here that is going to have your mouth and my temper."
She laughed and broke and wept all at once, and her rhythm faltered, and I caught her hips and rolled up into her, deeper, steadier, chasing the release I could already feel drawing tight around me.
When she went over this time she went with her brow pressed hard to mine, and my name and the words I love you too tumbling out of her on the same ragged breath, and the clench of her took me with her, and I spilled into her with my mouth at her throat and her name breaking out of me, low and helpless, the truest sound I have ever made.
After, when she had folded down onto my chest and I had eased her gently to her side and gathered the warm length of her against me, I lay with my hand spread over the swell of her, and the small certain shape beneath it, and I had never in forty-one years been so completely undefended and so entirely unafraid.
"We need a name," she murmured, drowsy and pleased with herself.
"Preferably one that does not start a fight."
"Bogdan," she offered. "After nobody. I just want to yell it."
"Absolutely not."
"Okay, you go."
"Yuri."
"He'll be beaten up by lunch. Next."
"For a girl," I said, "Marisol."
Ruby went quiet, then, in a different way, and I felt her smile against my shoulder. "My grandmother will pretend she hates it and then cry into the masa for a week."
"Galina will demand a Russian middle name."
"Galina can fight Marisol for it. We'll sell tickets." She tipped her head up. "What about the terrible ones? Get them out of your system."
"Vladlen."
"Disqualified."
"Engelbert."
"Now you're just describing a man I would have to divorce."
"One more. Boy or girl, your call."
"Hear me out. Ruby Junior."
"You wish to name our child after yourself?"
"I want to find out whether you can still tell me no about anything at all."
"No."
"There he is." She grinned into my shoulder. "Welcome home."
I laughed then, actually laughed, a thing that still surprises me coming out of my own chest, and she watched me do it like it was the best trick she had taught me. And in the warm wreckage of that bed, with the worst names in two languages still hanging in the air, I decided it was time.
I carried the ring for weeks like a live round. Then I gave it the right way: one knee, no exits planned.
I got up, ignoring her question, found the small box where I had kept it hidden in the one drawer she never searched, and I came back around to her side of the bed and went down on one knee on the cold floor, in nothing but the dark and my own skin, which is not how the magazines stage it.
"Kolya. I already said yes. In a hospital, remember? With conditions."
"You said yes to a man in a bed who could not stand, with no ring and no knee and an exit mapped behind every word, because that is the only way I had ever known how to ask for anything.
" I opened the box. "You deserved the version with no exits.
So. Ruby. Marry me. I am not deciding it.
I am asking, on the floor, with both hands empty and nothing behind me. "
She was crying and trying very hard to pretend otherwise, a thing her face has never once managed to pull off.
"Yes," she said. "Still yes. Get up here before you ruin your knees, old man. You're going to need them."
I slid the ring onto her finger, and it fit, because I had measured it months ago off a glove she left at my place and never once told her, and then I climbed up beside her, where she had wanted me all along, and pulled the blanket over the two and a half of us, and for the first time in a life built entirely on what came next, I wanted nothing at all except exactly this, exactly now, going on as long as it was allowed to.