9. Exposure #2
Then firmer. Two fingers now. Pressing flat against my clit.
Circling with intention. Slow, deliberate rotations that built pressure with each pass, his eyes still locked on mine from below, watching my face change, watching my lips part, watching my hips start to grind forward into his hand without my permission.
"Can I taste you?" he asked. His fingers still working. Still circling. Still building.
The question. Even here, even in his domain, even when he was in charge: the question. Not taking without asking. Wanting me to say yes. Needing the word.
My hand found his head. Gripped his hair. Pulled him forward.
"Yes."
His tongue was warm and firm and devastatingly focused.
He licked like he was studying me. Like he was learning the topography of my body with his mouth the way I'd learned his with my hands.
Slow at first. Broad strokes that gathered the slickness between my legs and spread it.
Then narrow. Pointed. Finding my clit and circling it with a precision that made my thighs shake.
"Fuck," I whispered. My head falling back against the chair. "Fuck, Jarvis."
He moaned against me. The vibration sending sparks up my spine.
His hands slid under my thighs, lifting them over his shoulders, pulling me closer to the edge of the chair so his mouth could press deeper.
His tongue pushed inside me. Hot. Wet. Fucking me with it while his nose pressed against my clit.
I gripped his hair harder. My hips rocking against his face.
His mouth sealed around my clit. Sucked.
His tongue flicking fast while his lips held pressure.
My back arched off the chair. My thighs clamped around his ears.
The sounds leaving my mouth were high and broken and I didn't try to contain them because this was his studio and he wanted to hear what he could pull from me without a single command.
"Right there," I gasped. "Right there, don't stop, don't..."
He didn't stop. His tongue relentless. His hands gripping my thighs, holding them open when my body tried to close from the intensity.
He looked up at me. Looked up. Eye contact from between my legs, his mouth on my pussy, his gaze saying: I see you.
All of you. Not just the woman in the back room.
This one too. The one who receives. The one who lets go.
I came.
Hard. My body seizing on the chair, my hand yanking his hair, my hips grinding against his mouth while the orgasm rolled through me in waves I couldn't control and didn't try to.
Loud. Wet. The sound of his tongue still working me through it mixing with my moans mixing with the afternoon quiet of a studio where a hundred women had found themselves powerful.
None of them had been found like this.
He eased me down. Gentled his mouth. Soft licks. Slow. Letting the aftershocks pass. Then he pressed one kiss against my inner thigh. Warm. Tender. And stayed on his knees with his forehead resting against my leg, breathing me in.
I ran my fingers through his hair. Soft now. Not gripping. Just touching.
"What was that?" I asked. Breathless. Still trembling.
He turned his face against my thigh. Kissed the skin there. "That was me showing you what I'm capable of wanting."
And I was capable of receiving it. Without directing. Without controlling. Without needing to hold the reins in order to feel safe.
That's the lesson they don't write in manuals. The one you can only learn in the body of someone brave enough to show you: power isn't about who's on their knees. It's about who's honest enough to want something and say so.
He wanted me.
I pulled him up by his shirt. Kissed him. Tasted myself on his lips. Slow. Deep. The kind of kiss that doesn't lead anywhere except closer.
When I pulled back, his eyes were soft. Open. Unmasked.
"Come sit with me," I said. "I want to talk."
He smiled. "Yeah. I'd like that."
Lights off. Shoulder to shoulder on the floor. Photos importing blue on the laptop.
His hand found mine on the floor. Fingers interlacing without either of us looking down.
"Can I tell you something?" he said.
"Yeah."
He was quiet long enough that I thought he'd changed his mind. Then: "I notice you. I've always noticed you. In rooms full of people, I know where you are in them."
"Why didn't you ever say anything?" I asked.
"Because you covered for a reason. And I wasn't going to be another man who made you feel uncomfortable.” He squeezed my hand. "I waited until you came into my space on your own."
"And if I never had?"
"Then I'd still be noticing you from across the room. Keeping my mouth shut. Respecting your quiet." A pause. "But I'm glad you came."
"Me too."
Silence. His thumb tracing the back of my hand. Small circles. Absent and deliberate at the same time.
"Jarvis."
"Yeah."
"This feels like more than sessions."
He turned his head. Looked at me in the blue glow of the importing photos. My face appearing frame after frame on the screen beside us.
"It's been more than sessions since the parking lot," he said. "Since we went for tacos. Maybe before that."
"What is it then?"
"I don't know yet." Honest. Not performing certainty he didn't have. "But I know I think about you every day. The version of you that’s carefree and happy. The goofy one, that’s always smiling and uplifting people. That's the one I can't stop thinking about."
I leaned my head against his shoulder. He pressed his cheek against my hair.
We sat like that until the photos finished importing. Until the screen went dark. Until the only light was Atlanta through the windows and the only sound was two people breathing in the same rhythm.
JARVIS
I watched her taillights disappear down Peters Street and stood in the dark of my studio with my hands in my pockets and the taste of her still on my tongue and thought about my father.
Not something I do often. Not something I allow. But tonight cracked something open that I usually keep bricked shut, and the old man crawled through the gap the way he always does when I'm not looking.
My father was a controlled man. Measured.
Precise. The kind of man who never raised his voice because he didn't need to.
He ran his household the way I run my studio: with quiet authority that nobody questioned.
My mother moved around him like water around a stone.
She adjusted. Adapted. Made herself smaller in every room he occupied until she was a whisper of the woman she'd been when they met.
I was nine when I realized she was unhappy. Fourteen when she finally left. Nineteen when she told me: "Your father wasn't cruel, Jarvis. He was just the only one who ever got to be himself in that house. And I forgot I was allowed to be someone too."
I built my whole life around being the one in control because I watched what control did when it lived in only one person's hands.
I thought if I was always the one holding the reins, nobody could be diminished the way my mother was.
I'd never be the man in the corner adjusting. I'd never be the whisper.
But I got it backward.
The lesson wasn't to be the one in control. The lesson was don't let control live in only one direction.
Years of relationships. Years of women who let me lead. Who wanted me to direct. Who showed up to be told what to do and left when it was over and never once asked me what I wanted. Because I never let them see that I wanted anything at all.
And then Nailah.
Nailah, who gave me the thing I didn't know I was starving for: the freedom to not be the one deciding. To exist inside someone else's authority and feel safe there. Not diminished. Not whispered. Held.
But here's what I didn't expect. Here's the thing that has me standing in my studio at midnight with my chest rearranging itself:
I don't just want her.
I need Nailah.
Tonight I put my camera down. Crossed the room. Got on my knees because my mouth needed to be on her more than my lungs needed air. And she let me. Didn't direct. Didn't command. Just said yes with her eyes soft and her thighs opening and her trust landing in my hands.
She let me give.
Not direct. Not perform generosity as control. Give.
She said: "This feels like more than sessions."
It's been more than sessions since the parking lot. Since tacos on Northside Drive. Since she told me where she lived and I thought: fifteen minutes. She's been fifteen minutes away this whole time.
I locked the studio. Drove home. Sat in my driveway for ten minutes with my hands on the wheel and the streetlight cutting across my lap.
My phone glowed. A text from her, sent two minutes ago:
Thank you for tonight.
Not the session kind.
Just... thank you.
I typed back:
You don't have to thank people for being wanted, Nailah.
Maybe I'm not used to it yet.
Get used to it.
I set the phone down. Went inside. Lay in bed. Didn't sleep for hours.
Because every time I closed my eyes I saw her in that chair. Robe open. Legs apart. Eyes on me past the camera with an expression that said: I'm allowing you to see me.
And the scariest part wasn't that she let me see.
It was that I let her see back.
Every ugly, scared, hungry, tender, breakable part of me that I'd kept locked behind the lens for fifteen years.
She saw it all.
And she's still here.