Chapter 18 #2
“This afternoon. On the back of a prep list. Nine words, and then seven different ones, and then I crossed them all out and did the walnut order.” I lean forward, elbows on my knees.
“I have been working on this since Thursday. I asked if you were busy tonight for this. I came up your hill with an actual sentence prepared, and you put me in a boat before I could say it.”
Something shifts in his face.
“You had a sentence.”
“I had several. One was medical. One sounded like I was offering you a snack.”
“I would like to hear that one.”
“You will never hear that one as long as you live, and you are going to live a very long time.” I hold his gaze. “This is my idea. I thought of it. I want it. You didn’t ask, you didn’t hint, and if you had, I’d have known.”
“I do not hint.”
“You edit.”
“That’s a different verb.”
“See? This is why I wrote it down.”
He laughs. Not much, and not steadily, but enough that the tension in his shoulders eases.
“Say it again,” he says.
I take a breath. “I want you to feed from me.”
Julian closes his eyes briefly. When he opens them, there is less distance in his face than there was a moment ago, and the faint red glow has appeared in his eyes.
“Then we will do it properly,” he says. “There are terms.”
“Of course there are terms.” He gives me a look, and I wave my hand. “No, I’m delighted. Give me the terms. Is there paperwork? On cream card stock?”
“You are enjoying yourself.”
“I’m nervous and I’m enjoying myself. I’m very talented that way.”
He gives me another look, then holds up one finger. “First. I will take very little, less than you will think is worth the trouble. I’m not hungry, but this isn’t about that.”
“What is it, then?”
His gaze rests on me for a beat too long. “Second. If you say stop, I stop. Immediately. I have four hundred years of practice at stopping.”
“Okay.”
“Third. You may be dizzy afterwards. Briefly. I brought sugar for that, and you are going to eat the cookies and not argue.”
The realization hits me all at once. “You planned this.”
“I provisioned for it. It’s not the same thing.”
“Julian, you packed a picnic for the woman you were going to refuse.”
He looks briefly, completely disarmed by the accuracy of that. “Yes.”
“Fourth?” I ask.
“There is no fourth.”
“There’s a fourth. Your mouth is doing the thing.”
He looks out at the water.
“Fourth,” he says finally. “I have described the experience as intimate. I would like to withdraw that description.”
“Withdraw it and replace it with what?”
“A warning.” His eyes stay on the water. “It is intimate for me. For you it will be a great deal more than that, and I would rather you knew beforehand than discovered it partway through.”
And I go very warm, everywhere, all at once, in a coat that smells of tar in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in December.
“Where will you do it?” I ask, and my voice comes out wrong.
“The wrist is for strangers.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s a preference.” His eyes come back to mine finally. “Your throat. Please.”
Well.
I have thought about this. I want that on the record, because in about ninety seconds I am going to stop being able to think about anything, and I would like it known that I got here on purpose.
“Okay,” I say. “Tell me where to be.”
He sits back and holds out his arm. I climb across the cockpit in an oilskin coat the size of a tent and settle between his knees with my back against his chest. He takes the hat off my head, then unwinds my scarf one turn at a time, unhurried and precise.
The cold finds my throat, and then his hand does.
A small noise I did not authorize escapes my lips.
“Penny.”
“I’m fine.”
“Your heart is going very fast.”
“Yes, well, you can probably hear that from the other end of the boat, so I’d stop bringing it up.”
“I can hear it from the road.”
I turn my head. “What?”
His arm curves around my waist and pulls me closer.
“Across a room. From the other end of your kitchen. From the road when I walk you home.” His voice is quieter now, rough underneath. “Since October I have known where you are by the sound of your heart.”
I stare at the black water.
“That is both incredibly romantic and a little alarming.”
“Yes. That’s why I did not mention it.”
I laugh, but the sound catches when his mouth brushes the place where my neck meets my shoulder.
“It is the loudest thing in the world,” he says against my skin. “And it is yours. And since Monday, it’s the only thing I can think about.”
Every thought I have ever had leaves the building.
His hand moves into my hair and gathers it away from my neck. He kisses the exposed skin once, cool and open-mouthed, then again, and waits until the tension leaves my shoulders and my head settles back against him.
“Penny, tell me again.”
“Yes,” I say. “Do it.”
It hurts. For perhaps a second it is a clean, bright sting. I gasp and my whole body tenses, and Julian’s arm tightens around my waist, holding me through the instinctive flinch. Then the pain disappears, and something else takes its place.
I don’t have a word for it. I make food for a living. I have spent nine years finding words for taste and texture and heat, and there is no word for this.
Warmth blooms from the place where his mouth meets my throat. Not his warmth—he is still cool against my back—but mine, spreading outward in slow golden waves, rolling through my chest and down my arms and lower, each one arriving in time with the steady beat of my own heart.
It feels like being filled with light from the inside.
My head goes loose and pleasantly heavy. My hands find his forearm where it crosses my waist and hold on, not because I want him to stop but because suddenly I need something solid in the world.
Then Julian starts to shake.
That’s the part I am not ready for. Controlled, courtly, three-seconds-to-answer-about-coffee Julian is trembling against my back as the arm around my waist gently pulls me closer. His mouth is hot at my throat, which no part of him has ever been.
And that, I realize through the warm golden haze spreading through me, is what I actually wanted. Not the biting. The surrender.
I’ve wanted to know what lives beneath all that stillness almost from the beginning, and here it is.
It’s not dangerous or uncontrolled. If anything, I can feel how much control he is using.
I can feel exactly how much he wants and exactly how little he will allow himself to take, and the distance between those two things may be the most naked thing anyone has ever shown me.
He said feeding was intimate. He was underselling it.