14. Nick #2
“It’s all good — ” Her breath catches as my mouth closes over her nipple again. “That. Do that.”
So I do that, for a long time, until she’s shifting under me and pressing up against my thigh.
Then I keep going down. Her ribs. Her stomach.
The crease of her hip. I settle between her legs with her thighs over my shoulders, and she props herself up on her elbows and watches me, flushed and bright-eyed and not embarrassed at all anymore.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.” I kiss the inside of one thigh, and then the other, close enough that she shivers. “You wrote a scene like this once. Chapter thirteen.”
“You memorized the — oh.” Whatever else she meant to say dissolves into a gasp, because I’ve put my mouth on her, and she is warm and wet and mine, and I’m done talking for a while.
I take it slowly. I learn what makes her hips lift, and what makes her gasp, and what makes her go quiet and concentrated, and then I use all of it, patiently, in order, my hands spread over her thighs while she comes apart by degrees.
Near the end she grabs for my hand and holds on hard, and she comes with my name in her mouth and her heels pressed into my back, and I work her through it gently until she pushes at my head, laughing, out of breath.
“Okay. Okay. Point made.” She pulls me up and kisses me, slow and thorough, tasting herself on my mouth and clearly not minding. Then she pushes at my shoulder until I roll onto my back, and she sits up and looks down at me with her hair wrecked and her eyes soft. “My turn.”
Her hands travel over me. Shoulders, chest, ribs, the bad hip, careful without ever making a show of being careful, and then her fingers wrap around my cock and my whole body pulls tight.
She strokes me slowly, watching my face, learning the rhythm from my breathing the same way I just learned hers, and being touched for no reason except wanting is still the rarest thing I know.
When her mouth follows her hands, I last about a minute before I catch her wrist.
“Not how tonight ends,” I manage.
“Spoken like a man with a plan.” She stretches out over me, no jokes now, her hand flat on my chest, letting me choose how, because she knows what my body needs tonight, and the fact that she knows without asking undoes me more than her hands did.
“Come here. Like this.” I draw her down and turn her so her back is against my chest, both of us on our sides. It’s the one position that asks nothing of my hip or my neck, which means every ounce of my attention belongs to her. I push into her slowly, and we both go completely still.
“Oh,” she says, faintly.
“Okay?”
“So much better than okay. Don’t stop.”
I don’t stop. I move slowly and deeply, my hand spread over her stomach, my mouth at her ear, and I tell her what she feels like in plain words I would never say in daylight, and every sentence makes her press back harder against me.
She reaches up and back to hold my neck, carefully, the good side, even now.
The care in that nearly undoes me before anything else can.
“Stay just like this,” she whispers, when I find the pace that makes her toes curl against my shin. “Exactly like this. Don’t you dare improve on it.”
“I wasn’t going to.” Though now I’m smiling into her hair. “The coaching is new.”
“The coaching is essential—” and then my hand slides lower and her sentence goes to pieces.
I keep my fingers there, moving with the patience I save for the last minute of a period, deep and even, no wasted motion.
At some point I stop entirely, buried in her, both of us breathing, just to feel her heartbeat everywhere we touch.
She doesn’t ask why. She presses my palm flat over her sternum and holds it there, and we stay like that, completely still, as close as two people get.
Then she moves first, one slow roll of her hips, and the stillness has sharpened everything, and there’s no slow left in either of us after that.
She pulls my hand down between her legs and shows me the pressure she wants, her fingers guiding mine, and I work her exactly there while my hips lose their manners, and her breath goes short, shorter, gone.
“Nico—” she gasps, and my name, the real one, nearly finishes me right there.
I hold on. I keep the rhythm she taught me until she goes rigid and cries out and comes around me, shaking.
Only then do I pull out and finish against her skin, my face pressed into her shoulder.
The sound I make has two years of grief and relief in it at once.
She doesn’t flinch from any of it. She holds my forearm with both hands and keeps me close.
Neither of us moves for a long time, her heartbeat slowing under my palm.
We stay tangled together for a long time afterward, her spine against my chest, my face in her hair, her fingers tracing slow patterns on my forearm. Outside the window the pines move against the stars. I count nothing. I schedule nothing. I just hold her.
“I’m glad it was you on that plane,” she says eventually, more than half asleep. “Out of everyone in the world who could have been in 3B. I’m so glad it was you.”
I press my mouth to her shoulder and hold her tighter, because there is no answer big enough for that, and some things a man can only say with his arms.
After, she lies facing me, one hand on my sternum like she’s keeping time with something.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
“That was—” She stops herself, laughs at herself, tries again, and I watch the professional wordsmith come up empty for the first time on record. “I don’t have anything. Not one word. Twelve years, eleven books, and you’ve left me with nothing to say.”
“Good.”
“Good, he says.” She pushes my shoulder; the shoulder clunks; she freezes; I tell her that’s just what it does, and I watch her mark it down as allowed, one more entry in a quiet inventory of my body’s permissions. It should feel like being scouted but it feels like being kept.
She sleeps first, mid-sentence. I stay up with my hand in her hair and do the accounting I’ve been refusing all day, because it’s Saturday night in a house with no cameras, and the truth doesn’t need Sunday’s ration anymore, it lives here now.
I’m in love with her. Past tense somewhere weeks back, past all fences, past the rules, past what the document allows or the season survives.
The fake romance is the truest thing in my life, and it has an end date printed in it, term concludes at the conclusion of the club’s season.
I am a man who finishes what he starts with no idea, for the first time in my life, what I’m trying to finish.
Downstairs, the door to my father’s room stands open. I left it that way. “Calisse,” I say, very quietly, to the ceiling, in my father’s language, and the woman asleep on my chest smiles at something in a dream, and I stay awake a long time guarding it like it’s mine to guard.
Terrified. All in. Both, the whole way down.