2. Nick #3
When I slide into her, it’s slow and it’s an entire conversation with no words.
First push, and we both go still, her breath caught somewhere in her chest, my forearms shaking with the effort of taking it at half speed.
For once in the entire night, she has nothing to say. I feel obscenely proud of that.
“Okay?” I ask.
“Extremely.” Her hands slide down my back. “More.”
So I give her more. Long, deep, even strokes, her legs wrapping high around my waist, and I watch every one of them land on her face, because a man should watch.
She feels incredible, tight and hot around me, and I tell her so in both languages.
The English makes her flush. The French makes her clench.
I say more of it, low, against her ear, my hips never once changing pace.
When the bad hip sends up its flare a few strokes in, she feels the hitch and just moves with me, shifts underneath.
No comment. No clipboard. She finds the angle that works for both of us like it’s choreography instead of accommodation.
Nobody has ever done that. I didn’t know it could be done.
The new angle takes me deeper, and now we’re both swearing quietly, and slow stops being a plan and becomes a fight.
“Look at me,” she says. I do, and it’s a mistake, the best one I’ve made in years.
Her eyes stay open on mine, reading, while her second one builds, and I feel it start before she does, the flutter, the caught breath.
I work her through it with my thumb between us and my mouth at her jaw, telling her exactly how she feels wrapped around me, and her back arches, my name breaking in half in her mouth, and she’s still coming when she turns her lips against my ear and says, “Nick. Just Nick.”
And control turns out to be one more thing I only thought was load-bearing.
I come apart with my face in her neck, hips losing every plan I had for them, driving deep and staying there, and whatever sound I make against her skin, it isn’t the Captain’s.
It belongs to a man nobody in this room has met before tonight. Both of us included.
After, she lies against my chest with one leg thrown over mine, doing the thing I already know means she’s happy, which is narrating. “Chapter two. The woman is stranded by an act of God with a man built like one. Her critique partner will never believe her.”
“Don’t put me in a book,” I say, into her hair, half asleep and unarmored, and I feel her smile against my sternum instead of answering.
***
Sometime before dawn she reaches back for me, half asleep, her spine warm against my chest, and murmurs something that is mostly my name with a request folded inside it. The snow has gone quiet outside. There is no hurry left anywhere in the world.
It’s slower this time. Drowsy. The second condom gets dealt with one-handed in the dark.
Her leg hooks back over mine and I slide into her from behind, my hand splayed across her stomach to keep her close.
She sighs, long and satisfied, and reaches back to grip my thigh, and neither of us says a full sentence for a long while.
Just her soft sounds, my mouth at the back of her neck, the slow roll of it.
No performance anywhere. Two strangers who somehow already know exactly how to fit.
“Stay awake,” she mumbles, when her breathing starts to climb, which is rich, since she’s the one drifting.
“I want—” My hand slides down between her thighs, finds her clit, and finishes the sentence for her.
She comes with a small shocked sound, half into the pillow, squeezing around me so sweetly that I follow her over with my face in her hair.
Nowhere to be. No one to be. Holding on.
Afterward she falls asleep mid-sentence for what I’d bet is the first time in her life. I stay awake a while longer with my hand in her hair, listening to the plows scrape the world back open, letting myself have it. All of it. One night where nobody in the bed is anybody.
Morning shows up white and blinding, the storm spent, the whole city surrendered under a foot of it nine floors down. She’s wearing my shirt and watching the runways with her arms crossed like she’s cold, except the room isn’t cold.
“So,” she says. “This is the scene where we trade last names and pretend we’ll text.”
“Frankie.”
“Don’t.” She turns around. Thumbnail at her teeth, and this time she catches herself doing it and puts her hand down flat, honest on purpose. “Don’t tell me your last name.”
“Why?”
“Because I read the last page first. Always. You know that about me, it’s the only flaw I disclosed.
” Her voice does something that isn’t a joke wearing a joke’s clothing.
“If I have your name, I’ll look you up. I’ll read the reviews.
I’ll find out how it ends. And I’d rather —” She stops, the way I stop.
First time all night she hasn’t finished a sentence. “I’d rather keep the chapter.”
There’s a version of this morning where I tell her all of it, the name, the season, the stone with no Cup on it. It’s a good version. I stand there and let it go by like a train I’m not on.
“Okay,” I say. “Just Frankie.”
“Just Frankie.” She hands me back the ache in my chest with a smile on it. “The chicken lied to everyone.”
Then she’s dressed and at the door.
I sit on the edge of a bed that still smells like her and open my phone. Eleven days of my agent’s patience. The stone. Tu finis ce que tu commences. One season. Finish it clean, hang the whole thing up, and forget the woman in 3C.
I text back two words: I’m in.
Two of those three sound possible.