Chapter 30 #4
The zipper kept going. Past the small of my back.
Past the curve where my hips started. The dress sighed open under his hand.
He set it free at the bottom and brought both palms back up the bare line of my spine, then ran them out along my shoulders and slid the silk straps off the points of both shoulders.
"Daniil."
"Sssh."
He eased the dress off my shoulders. His palms followed the fabric down, all the way to my wrists, and the cloth went with them, and then the silk slipped soft over the small rise of my belly and pooled around my ankles.
I stepped out of it. He bent and kissed the top of my left shoulder blade, just once, like a vow he was leaving on the skin.
I was standing in the things I had picked out for tonight, things that had never been worn before and would not be worn again.
A pale silk camisole, the color of the inside of a shell.
The smallest possible silk shorts under it, the same shade, with one thin band of lace at the top that lay just below the rise at my belly. Just for him. Just for tonight.
He stepped back one half step. He looked at me the way a man looks at a thing he is not sure he is allowed to have, and then his face shifted into the look of a man who knew, plainly, that he was.
"Beautiful," he said. It was not a word he used often. He used it now.
"I picked it for you."
"I know."
He stepped close again. He cupped the side of my face with one hand and ran his thumb along my cheekbone, and his eyes did the slow careful sweep he did when he was committing a thing to memory.
His palm came up and settled flat over the curve at my belly, on top of the silk, fingers spread wide enough to cover almost the whole of it.
His breath stopped.
I felt it stop. His chest, against my arm, went very still for a beat. Then it started again, slow, deliberate, like he was teaching himself how to breathe with that hand there.
"Both of you," he said, very low. "Mine."
"Yours."
I lifted my hands to his chest. I pushed gently at the lapels of his jacket until he let me slide it off his shoulders. I went to his cuffs first, because the cuffs came off cleanest.
I worked the small black links free, one and then the other, and set them on the nightstand. He let me. He watched my hands. I went to the front of his shirt next and started at the top button, slow, the way he had done the zipper. I could feel his breath under my knuckles.
"Look at me," I said, quiet, copying him.
He lifted his eyes from my hands to my face. They were dark.
I undid the last button. I pushed the shirt off his shoulders and ran my palms down his chest and over the long line of his ribs. The scar on his side. The cross on the chain. The plain gold ring on his hand.
I went to his belt last. I undid it. I undid the button at his waistband. I drew the zipper down with the same patient slowness he had used on me, and I felt him breathe out, low, controlled.
"Chloe," he said. Just that. Just my name. Soft and a little frayed at the edges.
"I know."
He lifted me. He carried me the few steps to the bed and laid me down on the white sheet. He stood at the edge for one long beat, looking at me. The lamp light caught the line of his shoulder and the long sweep of his ribs and the gold band on his hand.
"Look at you," he said, very low.
I held my hand out to him. He took it. He stepped out of the rest of his clothes and came to me on the bed.
He slipped his fingers under the strap of the camisole and slid it down off my shoulder, then the other. He drew the silk over the rise of my belly and off. The shorts went the same way.
He kissed me on the mouth, slow and deep, and then on the inside of the wrist, the inside of the elbow, the place just under my ribs where the curve began, then the curve itself. He whispered something there I did not catch.
Then he kept going.
He settled lower on the bed. He kissed the inside of my thigh on both sides, and the soft place where thigh met hip, and the place under my hip bone, and then he put his mouth on me and took his time.
I lost the room. There was nothing in the world except his mouth, careful, learning. He was not in a hurry. He had decided he was not going to be in a hurry. He kept one hand spread wide over my hip and the other came up and laced into mine, and he kept me there.
I slid my free hand into his hair, gentle, the way I never did anything with him gentle. I did not pull. I held him at the temple, felt the soft scrape of his close-cut hair against my palm, and let myself say his name out loud in the quiet room.
"Daniil."
He hummed an answer against me. I felt it more than I heard it.
"Daniil, I..."
"I am right here," he said, low, against the inside of my thigh, and then his mouth was back on me.
He took me up by degrees. The wave built clean. A long quiet swell that started low and warm and gathered, and gathered more, and his hand stayed laced in mine on the sheet and his other thumb stroked the bone of my hip.
"Stay with me," he said, quiet.
"I'm here."
"Stay with me, Chloe."
I came for him slow. Clean. I came with his name in my mouth and his hand still tight in mine, and the wave went through me long and quiet. He did not lift away. He stayed with me until the last of it had moved through, and then he kissed the place once, soft, sealing it.
He kissed his way back up. He did not skip an inch.
He kissed the rise at my belly and stopped there a long beat and pressed his forehead to it for one breath.
"You are mine," he said into my skin. "Both of you.
" Then up. The soft underside of my breast. The place over my heart.
The hollow at the base of my throat. My collarbone.
The line of my jaw. The corner of my mouth.
I pulled him down to me. He came down willingly. He kissed me, deep, and I could taste myself on him faintly, which made something low in me clench all over again.
He came up over me. He braced one forearm by my head. His other hand found mine on the pillow and laced our fingers there. Both rings, his and mine, lay flush against each other, gold against gold, pressed into the cool white of the pillowcase above my head.
"Look at me," he said.
I did. His gray-green eyes were very close and very dark.
He pressed in. So slow. I felt every inch of it, the careful give of my body around his, the steady weight of him settling over me without pressing.
My breath went out of me in something small and wet.
His forehead came down to mine. He stayed there, foreheads pressed, breathing my breath, while my body adjusted around him.
"Chloe."
"Yes."
"Chloe."
"Yes, my love."
He moved. He kept his eyes on mine the whole time.
My fingers slid up into his hair and held him at the temple, right next to the small old scar I had kissed a hundred times.
His other hand slid up the long line of my ribs and splayed flat under my breast, warm and wide, anchoring.
My legs came up of their own accord and settled around his hips, and his weight settled deeper into me, and it felt right the way a key turning in a lock feels right.
He kept the pace easy. It was a slow that was harder than fast. I could feel his control held just barely. I could feel it in the tremor at the back of his shoulder under my hand. I could feel it in the way his jaw set when he breathed in.
"I am yours," he said, low, into the corner of my mouth.
"I know."
"Say it back."
"I'm yours."
"Again."
"I'm yours, Daniil. Always."
His forehead pressed harder to mine. The rhythm did not get faster. It got deeper. His hand under my breast slid up to the side of my neck and his thumb pressed light at the line of my jaw, tipping my face up so that I could not look anywhere but at him.
He said my name like he was learning it. Like he had forgotten it once and never wanted to forget it again. He said it on the inhale and on the exhale and into the corner of my mouth and against my jaw. I kept saying his back, soft. Daniil. Daniil. Daniil.
He did not chase. He did not rush. He moved like a man who had all the time in the world, because he did, because we did. The heat kept rising under the slow. I could feel it in me, the long quiet build, the wave I had ridden once already coming back for me, deeper this time, with him.
I felt myself start to climb. I felt my breath go shallow against his mouth. He felt it. His thumb stroked the back of my hand against the pillow, and his fingers tightened on mine, the bands pressing together.
"My wife," he said, very low, right at the edge of me.
It landed in me like a hand.
I tipped first. I tried to warn him. He shook his head once, small, foreheads still pressed, and said, "Together."
He waited for me. He held himself just over me.
When I went, I went with my eyes open on his because he asked me to, and he followed me right after, slow and shuddering, his eyes on mine the whole way, his mouth open just a little, my name on his breath like a prayer that had finally been answered.
He spilled into me on a long exhale with my name in it, and I held him there with my hand still laced into his on the pillow, both rings still pressed together.
He stayed in me a beat. He stayed forehead to forehead, both of us breathing the same warm small piece of air between our mouths.
I cried.
It was the good kind. The clean kind. The kind that comes out of you when something inside you is finally allowed to put itself down.
He kissed the corner of my eye where the tears came out. Then the other one. Then the bridge of my nose. Then my mouth, soft.
"I have you," he said.
"I know."
"I have you."
"I know, Daniil."
He pulled out slow. He was careful even there. He kissed the round point of my shoulder. He kissed my temple. He kissed my brow.
He turned onto his back and pulled me into him so that my head settled against his chest in the place just below his collarbone.
He drew the sheet up over both of us. His hand came to rest, wide and warm, low on my belly, splayed over the small life under my skin, and his other arm came up around my shoulders.
The window was starting to show pre-dawn. A thin gray line at the edge of the curtain. The compound was silent in the way only very late and very early houses are silent. Somewhere outside, somebody walked the perimeter still, quiet, and that was the closest thing to noise.
"I love you," I whispered.
"I love you," he said, low. "All three of you."
I laughed, soft, into the pillow.
"Four," I said. "You forgot Rhea."
His arm tightened around me for one beat.
"I do not forget Rhea," he said into my hair. "I count her separately because she is already a person."
I closed my eyes.
I lay there in the warm dark under his arm, with his hand splayed over the small life under my skin, and I thought about that girl in the basement studio in the bed that creaked.
The one who had been so good at not wanting.
I thought about how she had built her whole self at the edges of other people's lives, helpful and pleasant and easy to forget, because that was the only way she had known how to survive being in a room with anyone.
She had spent her whole life saying yes to other people's lives.
Today she had said yes to her own.
The man with his face in my hair was mine.
The little girl asleep down the hall, with her two white-ribbon braids loose on a pillow and Beom-Beom tucked under her arm, was mine.
The small life under my hand and his was mine.
The old woman in the guest room down the east wing, who had walked me up an aisle she had been waiting her whole life to walk, was mine.
I did not have to be smaller for any of them.
I did not have to leave.
For the first time in my life, I had a room I did not have to walk out of.
I closed my hand over Daniil's on my belly and I let myself fall asleep in it.
Their story does not end on the last page of Chapter Thirty. There is one more day waiting for you, the morning Rhea opens an envelope and the night Dahlia comes home. A bonus chapter, with love.