17. Frankie #2
His hand slides down my body first, deliberate, detouring at everything that makes me shiver, and then his fingers are between my legs and his breath goes rough at what he finds there.
“All this for a broken-down winger,” he murmurs, working me slowly, two fingers, his thumb exactly where I need it, watching my face with an attention that would be clinical if it weren’t so hungry.
“Retired ghost,” I correct, breathless, moving against his hand, and his low laugh does as much to me as his fingers do. He works me right to the edge and then goes still, patient, saving it. “Not yet,” he says, quietly. “With me.”
When I finally slide my leg across him and rise over his hips, he exhales like a man setting down something heavy, and his hands settle at my waist, and for a moment we just look at each other in the gray light. Messy, exhausted, wide open. I have never wanted anyone so much in my life.
“Tell me if anything hurts,” I say, reaching for the nightstand drawer.
“You won’t hurt me.” And then, very quietly: “Everything hurts tonight, Frankie. Everything except you.”
I have to close my eyes for a second before I can breathe.
Then I roll the condom onto him with hands that aren’t quite steady, and I sink down onto him slowly, so slowly, both of us exhaling together, and I go still with my palms flat on his chest, his heart beating hard under the scar named Steve.
“Okay?” he asks.
“So okay.” My voice comes out wrecked. “Don’t move. Let me.”
So he doesn’t move, and I do, in small, slow rolls of my hips, careful of every fragile part of him, and it is somehow the most intense thing my body has ever been asked to survive.
He keeps his hands on my hips, not steering, just holding on.
He tells me I’m beautiful in the plainest words there are, watching my face in the half-light, and when I need more I take his hand and press it between my legs, and he touches me exactly where I put him, patient and steady, while I move.
“Look at you,” he murmurs once, hoarse. “I could watch this every morning for the rest of my life.”
“Careful.” I can barely produce words. “That sounds like a plan.”
“It is a plan.”
We find a rhythm that costs him nothing and gives me everything.
I keep my hands on his chest and my weight where it helps, and he watches me with those steady dark eyes, and every so often his breath catches and his head presses back into the pillow, and knowing I can do that to him, with this small motion, makes me feel powerful and tender at once.
“Slower,” he asks at one point, hoarse, and I go slower, nearly still, just a deep, unhurried movement that makes us both stop breathing, and the room fills with small sounds. The sheets. Our breath. His low voice saying my name like it’s the only word he needs.
It goes on a long time, because neither of us wants it finished. Twice I feel him get close and go still until it passes, his jaw tight, his hands flexing on my hips, and each time he settles he pulls me down and kisses me, deep and slow, until we’re moving together again.
The light comes up gray and then gold across the bed. I whisper things down into the space between us that I have never said to anyone, and every one of them is true, and none of them will ever be in any book. His breathing goes ragged. His grip tightens. “Frankie. I’m — ”
“Me too. Stay with me.” And I come in a long, slow pull that closes my eyes and arches my back, saying his name, Nico, into the gold light, and he follows me with his eyes open and his hands hard on my hips and my name breaking apart in his mouth, and I fold down onto his chest and stay there, his heartbeat loud under my ear, his fingers moving through my hair, the morning fully arrived around us and neither of us in any hurry to meet it.
“We should talk about the drawer,” I say, eventually, into his chest. “Inventory’s getting low. And I have an IUD, a recent clean panel, and a filing system.”
He tips my chin up so he can see my face. “You’re saying you want—”
“Nothing between us. Going forward. If you want.” His words, handed back.
He hears it, and the kiss he pulls me into is remarkably thorough for a man who couldn’t stand upright four hours ago.
“Clean on my side,” he says, against my mouth.
“The league tests everything. You would not believe the paperwork.”
“Romance,” I sigh. “Documentation. My genre.”
“What I know now,” I say, to his chest, because I have to put it somewhere and for once it’s not going in a note, “would fill a book I’m never going to write.”
His fingers pause. Resume.
“I know,” he says. Just that. Two words.
A fused neck, nothing held back, the whole of him quiet.
It is the closest thing to I love you that either of us has said out loud, and we both let it be that.
He falls asleep first for once, mid-breath, his guard all the way down.
I lie there in the December morning light doing the thing I do now instead of reading last pages.
I stay in the middle of the story, wide awake, holding it.
Down in the driveway, Gladys ticks as her engine cools.
Somewhere in a phone I deliberately left in another room, in an inbox wearing a little green seedling, the manuscript is already in motion, and the vow I just made with my whole heart is already running out of time, and the woman holds the sleeping man, I narrate, silently, because some things you say in third person or you break.
The woman holds the whole director’s cut.
The woman would burn every page she’s ever written to keep it, and the terrible thing is that nobody has asked her to burn pages.
They’ve asked her to write them.