2. Nick #2
She makes a small sound against my mouth, surprise finishing as a yes, and her hand comes up to my jaw like she’s done it before, like there’s a version of us somewhere that’s been doing this for years.
It’s slow. Nobody’s watching, nobody’s selling anything, and I kiss her the way you do something you’re not going to get to keep.
The seatbelt sign bongs. Descent. She laughs, half a breath into my mouth. “We’re landing.”
“I know.”
“This feels like a chapter break.”
“Whatever this is” — I make myself pull back, one inch, two — “it doesn’t get finished in a seat.”
The pilot comes on with the voice they save for bad weather.
Spring blizzard sitting on Denver, we’re one of the last ones in, and by the time we’re at the gate the airport is a slumber party nobody wanted.
Ground stop behind us. Interstates closing, rideshares gone feral, her phone lighting up with a friend named Cami who is snowed in and typing in all caps.
I make one call, to a hotel that answers on the first ring and doesn’t ask twice, attached to the terminal by a skybridge. There’s a room. One. I book it before I finish deciding why and hand her the key card at the desk like it’s nothing.
“You’re taking it,” I say. “I’ve slept in worse than a gate. It’s practically the job.”
She looks at the key card. Then at me, thumbnail nowhere near her teeth, and for once in the entire night she says something short.
“Stay with me.”
I should say no. Forty years old, five months an orphan, one season left in a body held together by tape and stubbornness, and a decision on my phone that a smart man would go make alone in a quiet gate. That’s the read. That’s the whole scouting report.
“You sure?” I say. Not a question so much as a door held open.
“Nick.” My name is the whole sentence. She learned that from me an hour into knowing me, and she’s already better at it. “I have never been more sure of a plot point in my life.”
***
The room is on the ninth floor with the storm throwing itself at the glass, and neither of us turns on more than the one lamp. The cap comes off. First time all night she sees my entire face, and I stand there and let her look, pulse going like a fourth line on fresh legs, waiting for the flicker.
Nothing. No recognition. Just a woman looking at a man like the man himself is the interesting part.
She steps in close, tips her head, and studies me with the same open curiosity she gave the dinner service, and then she reaches up and touches the gray at my temple like it’s a feature and not a countdown.
“There you are,” she says.
Three words. Twenty years of cameras finding this face, and not one person behind them ever said that.
I could kiss her for that, so I do, and this time there’s no seatbelt sign, no descent, nothing to save either of us from meaning it.
She kisses the way she talks, warm and headlong, always one more thing to say, and I slow her down out of pure selfishness, one hand in her hair, the other spread at the small of her back, because I want to feel every clause of it.
She makes a sound into my mouth that the storm doesn’t cover. My whole body votes at once.
We take it slow because I want it that way, because everything in my life is scheduled and this is the one appointment nobody made.
Her sweater goes over her head and takes some of her hair sideways with it, static everywhere, and she laughs.
Storm-light and lamplight and a lot of soft skin, freckles scattered down her shoulders in no pattern I can find, though God knows I look.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I’m reading.”
Her mouth drops open, delighted. “Did you just use a book metaphor on me?”
“It seemed fitting.” I hook a finger under her bra strap and follow it down. “Cover to cover.”
“Oh no.” Her breath goes uneven while her voice stays dry, and I already love the gap between the two. “He’s got material.”
My shirt goes next, and her fingers find the scar on my shoulder, the long one, and she traces it with exactly zero horror, which is not how anyone has touched my body in years.
My body gets handled. Tables, clipboards, gloves, a man saying does this hurt in a bored voice. Nobody just puts hands on it.
“What’s this one’s name?” she asks.
“My scars don’t have names.”
“Everything has a name.” Her mouth follows where her fingers were, and my breathing goes somewhere unprofessional. “This is Steve.”
“It was hard work.”
“Steve,” she says, with finality, and moves down.
The ribs. The forearm. She christens as she goes, and by the third one, I’ve stopped keeping count of anything for the first time in living memory.
Then her thumb finds the newest one, low on my hip, surgical, still angry, and she pauses.
I feel the question arrive in her hands.
“It’s the reason I retired,” I say. Half true. Half is the most I’ve given anyone in years, and I gave her the other half an hour ago at altitude.
She doesn’t ask. She bends and puts her mouth on it, soft, one time, and stands back up, and something behind my sternum comes off its hinges.
The rest of her clothes I take my time with, jeans peeled down, her hands on my shoulders for balance, and when she’s down to nothing she does a thing I feel in my teeth: she fights the urge to cover herself, loses for a second, then wins, chin up, letting me look the way she let me look at nothing else all night.
“In my defense,” she says, “I dressed for a red-eye.”
“Frankie.” I wait until her eyes stop touring the carpet and come back to mine. “I’ve been in locker rooms my whole life. I know bodies. This one’s the best thing I’ve seen all year, and I watched the northern lights from a hotel roof in February.”
“That’s—” Her thumbnail starts toward her teeth. I catch her wrist, gently, and kiss the nail instead, and her entire face goes quietly to pieces. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay, Just Nick.”
I lay her down on a bed the size of a defensive zone and take her apart the way you play a long shift: patient, no wasted motion, all of it on purpose.
“Tell me what you like,” I say, against her throat.
“Oh.” A breathless little laugh. “We’re doing dialogue.”
“I’m forty, not psychic. Tell me.”
She tells me. It takes her two false starts and a joke she abandons halfway, and then her voice drops into a register I haven’t heard from her all night, quiet and specific, and I file nothing, list nothing, count nothing. I just do exactly what she said, slower than she said it.
My hand learns her first. The inside of her knee, the crease of her thigh, and then between, where she’s already so wet that we both make a sound about it.
I take my time. Two fingers, patient, curling until her hips answer, my thumb finding her clit in slow circles while I tell her, low, right against her ear, exactly what I’m feeling and exactly what I plan to do about it.
She grabs a fistful of the duvet. Her breath climbs.
The commentary is a tactic, I’ll admit that much, because every filthy, unhurried sentence makes her clench around my fingers, and a man my age takes his advantages where the data points him.
“The woman is about to—” she starts, high and unsteady.
“Don’t you dare third-person this.”
“Then give her something first-person to say.”
So I move down her body and give her something first-person, her thighs over my shoulders, my hands sliding flat under her hips to tilt her up to my mouth. The first pass of my tongue is slow, one long unhurried line, and the sound she makes is a whole sentence with no words in it.
I take my time, because there’s no clock in this room and I intend to abuse the privilege.
I learn what makes her breath catch, then do it again, slower.
My mouth settles on her clit, patient circles, and I slide two fingers into her, curling, until her hips lift off the bed and start asking better questions than she’s asked all night.
“Nick.” Her hand finds my hair. “Nick, I—” and whatever the rest was, it dies somewhere above me.
I smile against her, which she feels, and swats me for, and forgives immediately, because I don’t stop.
She quits being clever entirely. She’s just my name and a vowel, thighs trembling against my ears, and when she comes she comes hard, back arching off the bed, heel pressed into my spine, the storm making the only noise she doesn’t.
I work her through it, gentler and gentler, until she pushes weakly at my head like I’m a large animal that has to be told twice.
“Okay,” she manages, staring at the ceiling. “The books undersell forty.”
“The books.” I kiss the inside of her knee. “Plural.”
“Shut up. Come here.”
She reaches for me instead, palm flat on my chest, and pushes until I’m on my back, and then her hands go traveling, and this is the part I wasn’t braced for.
Not the wanting. The being touched. She maps me slow: shoulders, ribs, the bad hip, the trail of hair below my navel, and when her fingers close around my cock, I exhale like a man taking a hit he skated into on purpose.
She watches my face the whole time, unhurried, learning me back, narrating me now in a murmur I can barely hear, and every stroke undoes a knot I’d been calling my personality.
“I’m naming this too,” she murmurs.
“You are not.”
“Everything gets a name, that’s the system—”
I pull her up and kiss the sentence out of her mouth, and she laughs into it, and then the laugh goes quiet because I’m reaching for my wallet on the nightstand.
She plucks the condom out of my fingers. “Confidence.”
“Hope.” It comes out more honest than I planned. “There’s a difference.”
She goes still for a second, reading me the way she reads everything, and whatever she finds on the page, she doesn’t say it out loud. She rolls it onto me herself, slowly, watching my jaw tighten, and lies back and pulls me down over her.