Chapter 16 #2
I drew the sleep pants down his hips.
I did not kneel for his. I knew he wanted me standing. I held his eyes while I drew them down to the floor and he stepped out of them and there was nothing between us now except the small inch of warm air the lamp was making in the room.
He moved me onto the bed gently.
He set the back of one hand at my shoulder and the other at my hip and he laid me down with the kind of care a man uses on a thing he has been told he is allowed to break, and is choosing not to.
He followed me down on his elbows. The mattress took his weight beside me.
He kissed my mouth. Then he kissed my throat.
Then he kissed the small notch at the top of my collarbone, and he held the kiss there for half a second longer than the others.
He moved down my body.
I watched him go. I had been waiting to watch him do this exact thing with my permission again and I was not going to close my eyes for any of it.
He took his time at my breasts. He set his mouth on me and his tongue moved with the patience of a man who had done this before in a body that knew which slow worked, and the small low sound in the back of his throat was the same sound from a small life ago, the one I had been carrying like a coin.
He went lower.
His mouth between my thighs was the same mouth as the one in the shower of my apartment in another life.
I knew it on the first stroke. I knew it on the second.
The flat of his tongue slow, then the slow drag, then the kind of careful pressure that made my hips lift off the mattress without my permission.
His hands flattened up the insides of my thighs to keep me open for him and I let him because there had not been anywhere I had wanted to be in three months as much as I had wanted to be back here.
He set the heel of his other hand flat on my belly and pressed me back down.
The weight of his hand there was the only steady thing in the room.
My hand went into his hair.
He took his time. He found the rhythm and held it there.
His fingers slid up and curled in a small clean way that knew the inside of me from before.
One finger. Then two. The slow stretch I had not had since the last time he had touched me here.
The small white shape at the back of my eyes got larger.
My free hand fisted in the sheet beside my hip.
The other tightened in his hair. He made a low approving sound against me and the sound went through me like a second touch.
I came against his mouth with my hand fisted in his hair.
My thighs closed around the sides of his head.
My back lifted off the mattress an inch.
I made a sound that was not a word and was not a name and would have embarrassed me in any other life.
He stayed with me through it. He did not slow down until I did.
I heard the small short word he said against the inside of my thigh as I came down. It was not a word in English. It was the one he used to use, the one I had not known how to translate and had stopped asking him to.
I lay there a moment with my chest moving and my hand still in his hair.
He kissed the inside of my thigh once. He set his chin on the small flat above the bone of my hip. He looked up the length of me with the older eyes.
I sat up.
I pushed him gently back onto the pillows with the flat of my hand at the center of his chest. He let me. He went where I pushed him. I climbed over his hips and I set my knees on either side of his and I put both my hands on his chest and I looked down at him.
"Let me make you remember I used to own you," I said.
His mouth opened a little. The older voice came up through the Pete one, flat and low and certain.
"I am still yours," he said. "The memory does not change the deed."
The line landed in me like a coin dropped into a well, the small clean fall and the small clean sound at the bottom. I bent and kissed him long and slow.
I tasted myself on his mouth.
I moved down his body.
I kissed his throat. I kissed his collarbone.
I kissed the long flat of his sternum. I returned the favor in the same order he had given it, slow, careful, full of the way a woman moves over a man she has been remembering in the dark for three months.
I felt the breath he was not letting out, the steady tight catch under his ribs.
I went lower.
I set my mouth on him. He made a sound that he had not asked his body for, low and through his teeth, the heels of his hands going flat to the mattress on either side of his hips.
I went slow. I took my time the way he had taken his.
I felt every breath in him catch at the back of his throat and not come out clean.
His hand came down to my hair and his fingers threaded into it and they did not push, they only rested there for the small permission of touch.
He made another sound. This one was more of his older voice in it.
"Chloe..." he said.
He said it the way a man says a name he has only just been given back. He said it like the shape of it tasted right in his mouth even though he did not know yet why.
I pulled my mouth off him before we went all the way that way.
I came back up over him. I kissed his mouth. He tasted of me on my own mouth on his and I felt the small low sound he made into the kiss when he tasted it too.
He looked up at me. The older eyes were the ones doing the looking now.
His hands set themselves at my hips.
"I want you," he said. The contraction had gone out of him. "Now."
I lifted up over him. I took him in my hand, the velvet heat of him heavy in my palm, harder than the last time I had held him here.
I held his eyes while I guided him to me.
I lowered myself the first slow inch. His jaw locked.
The sound he made through his teeth was not anything English-shaped.
His hands went tight at my hips and then deliberately loosened, like a man reminding himself.
The first slow seat carried longing on both sides of it.
I closed my eyes. The stretch of him in me was the one I had been remembering for three months in a body that had not been allowed any of it, and the heat under it was the heat I had not been able to give myself with my own hand in the dark of my own bed, and my breath caught at the small lit place where he met the end of me, and I held there.
He said my name again.
"Chloe."
I opened my eyes. I gave him my face. He needed it. I needed it too.
I moved.
His hands at my hips fell into the rhythm I was setting.
He did not push. He only held. The pace built the way pace builds between two people who have been each other before, the small careful first half dozen, the slow lengthening, the place at which it stops being two bodies remembering separately and becomes one rhythm working together.
His thumbs at the underside of my ribs. His eyes on my face.
My hand found his where it lay against my hip. I drew it up. I set it over my own breast and held it there. He breathed out through his teeth at the small weight in his palm. He did not move his hand. He let me decide what we did with it.
I came again. Harder this time. The build was longer and the white shape at the back of my eyes was wider and the heat that had been low in me spread up under my ribs and along the inside of my arms. I made a small sound I had not made in three months, low at the back of my throat, his name in the middle of it like a word in a sentence I had not finished.
My back arched. My nails dragged down the small flat at the center of his chest without my asking them to. He let me leave the marks.
He followed me after a moment.
"Fuck," he said low, his voice gone wrecked at the edge.
"Chloe." His hand at my hip went tight and then steady.
His hips lifted up into mine once, hard, then again, and then the long held breath he had been carrying through everything came out of him in a single low sound against my throat.
He stayed inside me. He held me there with both hands at my hips while the last of it went through him.
He did not pull me off him after.
He kept me where I was until both of us had come back down. He kept his hand on my hip, his thumb moving slow over the bone. His other hand stayed where I had set it, low over the soft slope of my breast, the pad of his thumb at the underside, the weight of him still in me.
I slid off him when I was ready.
I lay down to his side on the pillow.
He pulled me against his chest with my back to his front.
His arm came across me heavy and warm and settled flat under my breasts.
His face went into the back of my hair and he breathed out the long breath of a man who had been holding something across days without knowing he was holding it.
I put my hand over his where it lay flat on my stomach.
I held my own over his a long minute.
"You were my first," I said, soft. "There hasn't been anyone since. No one ever touched me the way you did, even after you were gone."
He held the word first inside him for a beat. I felt him hold it. His arm at my ribs did not tighten and did not loosen and the small held second was him sitting with what I had given him.
"I guess being Daniil is less complicated than I thought," he said low into my hair.
I laughed into the pillow. The laugh came out small and wet and it was the first real laugh I had given the dark of a bedroom in three months. I turned my head and I kissed the inside of his forearm where it lay against my chest.
His breath slowed behind me. The big house held quiet on the other side of the door.
The lamp on the nightstand was a small warm shape at the edge of my eye and the unfamiliar room went dim around me at the edges.
The choice I had made on the front step of this house when I came back through the door for him sat quietly in my chest like a thing I would not be moving for a long time.
Mine again. For tonight.