Gabe #2
“Do you want to ask what I’m doing,” she says, “or should we agree we both know and avoid the embarrassment?”
The honesty stuns me, and I almost admire it.
“We’re in here for seven minutes,” I say. I’m reaching for a certain tone: joking, light, businesslike. It comes out closer to desperate restraint. “What would you like to do with the time?”
She doesn’t answer right away. The blue light off the glass paints her in grayscale and that makes me want to step closer, to touch her, to see what she’d do if I reached out and set my hand on the small of her back.
But I don’t. Not yet.
She looks over her shoulder, watches me watch her for a beat, then turns away. She paces along the edge of the rug, trailing two fingers over the tops of the books on the nearest shelf.
“When I was in high school,” she says, “seven minutes in heaven was a weird balance between fear and wanting.” She pulls a book out by the spine but doesn’t open it. “Everyone pretended the game was a joke, but nobody actually wanted to be alone with anyone they didn’t want.”
The words are a test. I know this because Willow doesn’t bother with accidents.
“So, what is it that you want?” I ask, keeping my hands at my sides.
She considers, with her back to me, and then methodically shoves the book back into place, the motion a punctuation.
“Right now?” She turns. For once, she’s not hiding behind a smokescreen of quips or careful ambiguity. Just looking at me, open enough to be terrifying. “I want to see what happens when we stop pretending this doesn’t matter.”
I realize, at last, after all the games and the sidelong studies and the impossible-to-replicate data points, that I have no plan for what happens next.
Every scenario I’ve played in my head crumbles under what’s actually in the room: the stretch of her throat, the nervous tic in her wrist, the dare in her left eyebrow. The way she’s encouraging me to do something uncharacteristic, to tip the scale from deliberation to risk.
I move closer, because it’s the only move left. The distance wasn’t meant to protect her, I realize; it was meant to save me.
I close the gap and her pupils widen, an involuntary dilation that short circuits my own resolve.
I reach for her jaw and I expect resistance, but instead she leans into the touch, her pulse hammering against my fingers where they rest just under her ear. I taste her breath before her mouth.
It’s wine and something new, maybe anticipation.
She’s not passive. She meets me halfway, arms bracketed around my back, nails scoring a warning that she isn’t coming into this quietly. The kiss starts calculated, but then it’s not.
It’s just hunger, the kind that’s waited out patience and plans and can’t imagine another day of restraint. I kiss her because I can’t help it, because what I want isn’t just to taste her, but to take the moment and make it unrepeatable.
She bites my lip and takes pleasure in the shock, and I answer her. Hand at the back of her head, pulling her in, anchoring her so she can’t use momentum to slip away. Her breath hitches. She tastes of autumn, of the slant of night just after a storm.
I want her reckless. I want her exactly the way she is.
She tugs me sideways, a stutter step that smacks my hip into the desk. She doesn’t let go. Her hands come up under the edge of my shirt and span the small of my back.
I flinch, not from pain but from the shock of being seen. She makes a noise of protest, and pulls me closer, a single muscle movement that says, stop trying to be polite about this.
I drag my mouth down her neck, and her pulse leaps to my mouth. She tastes of defiance. She’s challenging me to prove I want her more than I want safety. I do. I want her even if it sets the room on fire, even if it writes a new, irreversible future across the bones of what I thought I’d protect.
I slide my hands down her back. Her body is more substance than I expect, more force. I grip her hard enough to remind her how quickly I could take this out of her control.
But she doesn’t let me.
Willow pivots, flipping the power axis the way she always does, and presses me back until the edge of the desk forces me down a half-step. I stumble then, just a little, which makes her smile into my mouth.
Her hands make quick, neat work of my shirt buttons, intentions far ahead of her nerves. She gets one hand flat on my chest and pushes me, hard, until I thump against the desk edge.
She leans in, mouth back on mine, and in the next half-second her other hand is curling behind my neck, fisting in my hair, pulling enough to elicit a stunned sound that I will not dignify by calling a whimper but is absolutely that.
She takes advantage of the momentary loss of control. She sweeps in, biting, lips hot and wanting, the kind of kiss that’s not about romance or comfort but about exorcising a possession. If she wants, she can have it all.
Everything. I’m right here. There’s nothing else.
I get her hips in both hands, and spin her, lifting her in one quick, decisive move to sit on the edge of the desk. She’s not a featherweight; she lands solidly and wraps her legs around my waist to anchor herself, locking in the torque, and tugs me into her until there’s no air left between us.
The shock of body on body, the friction of her thighs, is a circuit closing. I feel the power of it electric up my spine.
Her hands are in my hair now, yanking hard enough to hurt, and I let my head tip back, throat exposed, breath stuttering as she mouths along my jaw, teeth scraping.
I want to say something clever, something that puts me back in control, but the words float away, unreachable. All I can do is pull her closer.
Every muscle in my chest, my arms, straining to fold us together, to erase any possibility that she could slip free. I realize, with a desperation that borders on fear, that I don’t want to let her leave this room. Not ever.
I think she knows. Willow bites down at the base of my neck, and the pain is so clean I want to thank her for it, scream for it, die for it.
I crush her mouth again, hard, brutal and elemental, and when I feel her smile, wide and wild against me, the last loose thread holding me together goes slack.
My hands are everywhere, mapping that narrow waist, the impossible sweep of her thighs, the heat at the nape of her neck.
I sink my teeth into her shoulder and she meets violence with violence, nails in my back, her legs a vise clamp, and nothing matters but the square foot of space we’re fighting for.
We trade one breath, then another, every kiss hungry. She’s laughing under it, a rough sound that feels more alive than any laugh I’ve ever earned from her. My hands tremble, and when her fingers find my shirt hem and slip beneath, I let go of doubt and surrender. I’m already lost.
“Seven minutes,” she pants out, all scorched silk, “is barely going to scratch the surface.”
Seven minutes. I want seventy.
She arches her back against me, heat leaching out in waves, and I can’t stop tasting her, can’t stop mapping the twisted edge of wanting into something neither of us can explain away tomorrow.
My hands have lost all reason, all containment; I want to memorize every square inch, every accidental moan, every micro-gesture of defiance or surrender.
I want her wrecked. I want to be wrecked by her.