25. Arielle #2
"Don't apologize at me naked. It's worse."
He drops to his knees in front of me on the rug. He sets his hands on the backs of my thighs, and he leans his forehead, gently, on the warm curve of my stomach, and he breathes there for a beat with his eyes closed.
"Hi, sweetheart," he says, softly, to her. "It's me. I have not been around. I am very sorry about that. I am going to do better. Your mother is letting me have tonight and that is more than I have earned. Go back to sleep."
I am not going to cry in this hotel room. I cry in this hotel room.
He kisses the small dark line. He kisses the underside of my breast through the soft cotton.
He works his way down with his mouth, slow, the way he did in Miami and the way he did in December, and when he reaches the place where my underwear ends he pulls them down with both hands and waits for me to step out of them, and then he sets his mouth on me and the first long drag of his tongue against my pussy makes my hand fist in his hair and my breath go out of me sideways.
"Tell me, Arielle."
"You know what I want, Nolan. Don't make me coach you tonight."
"I'm not coaching. I am asking. Don't take the asking away from me. It is the only thing I have left."
“Then keep doing exactly what you’re doing, and don’t stop until I say Nolan. That’s the word. You’ll recognize it the moment it lands.”
He keeps doing exactly what he is doing.
He is patient about it. He is patient about it in a way that is humiliating in this room with this man on this night, because his patience is the part of him that I have always loved most and the part of him I am ostensibly here to leave behind in the morning, and instead he is using it, slow and steady on his knees on a rug in a hotel I did not pick, to take me apart inside of four minutes.
When I tip over the edge it is with his name in my throat the way he asked, and I am holding the back of his head, and my other hand is on the small swell of my own stomach because I am not going to forget for one second tonight which body I am doing this in, and he gentles me through it with his mouth and his thumbs and a small, low murmur against the inside of my thigh that I will not, on principle, ask him to repeat.
He stands. He sheds the shirt. He drops the trousers.
He is leaner than he was in December, the way I am rounder than I was in December, and the small old scar low on his ribs is the same and I lean forward and put my mouth on it because I have wanted to, every time, and I have not yet been allowed.
“Lie back, sweetheart. On your side. Pillow under your knee. I won’t put her at risk with the wrong position tonight. She gets every ounce of caution I have. You get the version you asked for — the one that doesn’t involve gentleness.”
"Bossy."
"You like it. Lie down."
I lie down. He arranges the pillow under my knee the way Dr. Ellis taught us in January, when the third-trimester class made him take notes on a tablet. He climbs onto the bed behind me. He kisses my neck, slow, and his hand comes around to rest for a moment on the curve of my stomach.
"Tell me if she protests."
"She will. I will tell you. Move, Nolan."
He guides his cock between us with his eyes on mine over my shoulder, and the first slow push into me is the kind of sound I do not have a word for.
Slick and hot and unbearably gentle, and he stays still inside me with his hand flat on my stomach and his mouth on the curve of my ear and his breath uneven against me, and we are not moving yet.
"I have missed you, Arielle."
"I have missed you, Nolan."
"Tell me when."
"Now. Now. Now."
He moves. Slow, on my side, the angle careful, his hand stroking the small swell of me with the same rhythm his hips have, and I have, in my entire life, never made love to a man I was leaving in the morning.
I do not have the architecture for it. I am building it in this bed in real time, with his name in my mouth and his hand on her and the small lamp on the table making the line of his jaw look like something somebody carved on purpose.
I reach for him, my hand laced through his on my stomach, and the moment I break he follows, his face pressed into the curve of my neck and a sound leaving him that I know I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
He doesn’t move for a beat.He stays there, breathing into my hair, his hand still covering mine, and in the quiet part of my mind a voice that has been silent for fifteen days begins speaking again — soft, certain, already settled on what will happen at four in the morning.
I let him hold me. I let him fall asleep against my shoulder. I lie awake in the lamplight, and around five-fifteen I slide out from under his arm, the way I slid out from under his arm in Miami, and I gather the dress from the chair, and I do not look at his face.
I leave the bow tie on the chair where he set it.
I do not, this time, tell myself a man like Nolan Ashford is a story I will tell once.
I already know the story is mine. I am leaving him in the hotel room because I am terrified of how much it cost me to stop loving him fifteen days ago, and I am not strong enough to find out what it would cost me to do it twice.
The elevator opens in the lobby. The doorman nods. The sun is starting to come up behind the Loop, and I am, again, walking out of a hotel into a sunrise that does not belong to me, and this time I do not tell myself anything at all.