Chapter 23 Mehar
MEHAR
I don’t know why I said it. The words left my mouth before my brain approved them, and once they were out there was no pulling them back. Don’t go home yet. Four words that changed the entire temperature of the car and the entire trajectory of whatever this thing between us was becoming.
He didn’t say anything. Just looked at me. And I looked back and neither of us blinked and the silence in the Maybach shifted from heavy to electric.
“You sure?” he asked. No cockiness. No smirk. Just a man making sure.
“I said what I said.”
He turned off the engine.
We walked up three flights because the elevator was still broken and I was in heels and by the time we reached my door my heart was beating so loud I was sure he could hear it.
I fumbled with my keys because my hands were shaking, and he stood behind me close enough that I could feel his warmth, but far enough that he wasn’t crowding me.
He was always doing that. Giving me space I didn’t ask for but desperately needed.
The door opened and I stepped inside and suddenly I was very aware that no man had been in my apartment since I moved in. This was my space. My sanctuary. The place I came to decompress after the dungeon, after therapy, after the cage.
And now Quest Banks was standing in my living room looking around like he was reading a book I’d written without knowing I was writing it.
“This is you,” he said.
It was me. The orange accent wall I’d painted myself on a Saturday afternoon with Erykah Badu playing and a joint burning on the windowsill.
The black and white photos I’d framed and hung in a gallery arrangement—portraits of beautiful Black women I’d collected from thrift stores and vintage shops, women whose names I didn’t know but whose faces made me feel seen.
My navy blue leather sofa that I’d saved for three months to buy because I wanted something that felt substantial when I sat on it.
The green plants on every surface—pothos on the bookshelf, a snake plant in the corner, a monstera by the window that was growing wild because I talked to it more than I talked to most people.
And my coffee table—an abstract piece shaped like an Afro pick, black iron with a glass top, that I’d found at an art market in Southeast and nearly cried over because it was perfect.
“You want something to drink?” I asked because I needed to do something with my hands or I was going to crawl out of my skin.
“Whatever you’re having.”
I poured us both red wine. A Cabernet Sauvignon that Zainab had given me months ago that I’d been saving for I don’t know what.
I handed him his glass and our fingers brushed during the exchange and the contact sent something warm up my arm and into my chest and I took a sip to cover whatever my face was doing.
He sat on the sofa and I sat on the other end, leaving a full cushion of space between us because I wasn’t ready to close it yet. I needed to ease into this. I needed to feel safe in the transition from woman-who-said-don’t-go-home-yet to whatever came next.
“You were wrong tonight,” I said. “For stepping in like that.”
“We already been over this.”
“I know. But I need you to understand why it bothered me.” I looked at my wine instead of at him.
“Every man I’ve been with has taken something from me.
My father took my freedom. Ahmad took my body.
Thad took my trust. And they all did it under the excuse of protecting me or loving me or knowing what was best for me.
So when you stepped in tonight and handled something that was mine to handle, it triggered something in me that doesn’t have anything to do with you.
It’s about every man who came before you who used his strength to take away my choice. ”
He was quiet for a long time. Then he set his glass down on the Afro pick table and turned to face me fully.
“I hear you,” he said. “And I’m sorry it triggered that.
But I need you to hear me too. I’m not those men.
I don’t hit women. I don’t control women.
I don’t take shit from women that they don’t offer.
But I will always—always—step in when somebody puts their hands on you.
That’s not about control. That’s about me.
That’s who I am. And I’m not going to apologize for it. ”
“I’m not asking you to apologize.”
“Then what are you asking?”
I looked at him. Really looked at him. “I’m asking you to be patient with me,” I said. “Because I want this. And wanting things terrifies me.”
He reached across the cushion between us and took my wine glass out of my hand.
Set it next to his on the table. Then he took my hand, brought it to his mouth, and kissed my knuckles.
One at a time. Slow. His lips warm and soft and deliberate against each knuckle like he was counting them, like each one was a promise he was making without words.
I leaned into him. He met me halfway.
The first kiss was gentle. Testing. His lips on mine, soft, no tongue, just contact and warmth and the taste of wine between us.
He let me lead it for about three seconds before his hand came up to the side of my face and he deepened it, and when his tongue touched mine something in my lower belly caught fire and I inhaled sharply through my nose because the sound I almost made was not a sound I was ready to make in front of this man.
But my body had other plans.
The kiss went from gentle to urgent in the span of a breath.
His hand slid from my face to the back of my neck and he pulled me closer and I went willingly, climbing over that cushion of safety I’d put between us and settling into his lap with my knees on either side of his thighs.
His hands found my waist through the dress and his grip was firm but not rough, holding me steady, not holding me down.
There was a difference and my body knew it even if my brain was still catching up.
I reached for the buttons on his shirt because instinct was kicking in, and the instinct was the same one I’d operated on with Thad—take control, get on top, run the show.
My hands moved to his chest and I pressed him back against the sofa and tried to pin his wrists above his head the way I did with Thad, the way I would with any man, because being on top was the only way I knew how to be intimate without panicking.
“Nah,” he said against my mouth. Calm. Not aggressive. Just certain.
He took both my wrists in one hand, gently, and brought them down between us. Then he looked me in the eyes and I could see that he understood exactly what I was doing and exactly why I was doing it and he wasn’t going to let me hide behind it.
“You don’t have to be in control with me,” he said. “I got you.”
“Quest—”
“I got you. Trust me.”
He lifted me off his lap and laid me back on the sofa and the panic flared for a second—being on my back, being underneath, being pinned—and he must have seen it in my face because he stopped. Hovered over me with his weight on his arms, not on me, and waited.
“You good?” he asked.
I nodded. I wasn’t sure I was good but I wanted to find out.
He started at my neck. Pressed his lips right below my ear where the pulse was hammering and kissed me there so softly that my eyes closed on their own.
His mouth trailed down the side of my throat, slow, tasting, taking his time in a way that no man had ever taken with me.
Ahmad took what he wanted. Thad performed.
Quest was doing something else entirely—he was learning me.
Mapping out my body with his mouth like he had all night and nowhere else to be.
His hands found the hem of my dress and pushed it up slowly, past my thighs, past my hips. The air hit my skin and I shivered but not from cold. He hooked his fingers into my underwear and pulled them down my legs in one smooth motion and dropped them on the floor like they were irrelevant.
Then he lowered himself between my thighs and looked up at me from down there with those dark eyes, and I swear to God my soul left my body for a second because no one had ever looked at me like that from that position.
With hunger and reverence at the same time.
Like he was about to do something sacred and filthy in the same breath.
“Relax your legs,” he said, his voice low and vibrating against my inner thigh. “Stop clenching. Let me in.”
I tried. My thighs were shaking and I couldn’t tell if it was nerves or anticipation or both.
He kissed the inside of my left thigh, then my right, alternating, moving closer to the center each time but never arriving.
Teasing me. Making me wait. Making me want it so badly that by the time he finally got there I wouldn’t be thinking about control or fear or anything except his mouth.
And then he got there.
The first contact of his tongue against my pussy made my back arch off the sofa and my hand fly to his head.
He didn’t rush it. He licked me slow, one long stroke from bottom to top, tasting me like he was savoring something he’d been craving.
Then he did it again. And again. Each stroke a little firmer, a little more deliberate, finding the rhythm my body was responding to and locking into it.
“Your pussy taste so good,” he murmured against me, and I felt the vibration of his voice against my clit and my hips bucked involuntarily. He pressed his hand flat against my lower belly to hold me still. “Be still. I’m not done.”
He sucked my clit into his mouth and my vision went white. The sound that came out of me was something between a moan and a gasp and a prayer and I grabbed at his head, nails in his scalp hard enough that it should’ve hurt but he just groaned against me like the pain turned him on.
“That’s it,” he said between strokes, his lips slick and his breath hot against my pussy. “Stop fighting it. Let go for me.”
“I can’t—”
“Yes you can. You’re already there. I can feel it.
” He slid his tongue inside me and my whole body jerked.
He fucked me with his tongue slow and deep, and then pulled out and went back to my clit, circling it, flicking it, applying pressure exactly where I needed it like he’d been studying me for years instead of minutes.
“Quest—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. His name was the only word left in my vocabulary.
“Say it again.”
“Quest.”
“Again.”
“Quest, please—”
“Please what? Tell me what you want.”
“Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop. He went harder, faster, his tongue relentless against my clit while his hands gripped my thighs and held them open and I was shaking now, my whole body trembling, the orgasm building from somewhere deep in my pelvis like a wave gathering strength before it crashed.
“I’m about to—”
“I know. Come for me, Mehar. Let go.”
I came so hard that my back arched completely off the sofa and my hand found the armrest and gripped it like my knuckles were about to bust through my skin.
The orgasm ripped through me in waves, the first one sharp and electric, the second one deeper and slower and rolling, and the third one a tremor that left my legs shaking and my eyes wet and my chest heaving and every wall I’d ever built in complete ruins on the floor of my living room.
He kissed the inside of my thigh. Then the other one. Then he pulled my dress back down and came up and lay beside me on the sofa, pulling me against his chest.
I was crying. I didn’t mean to be crying and I didn’t want to be crying but the tears were falling and I couldn’t stop them.
It wasn’t sadness. It was release. It was years of men taking from my body without giving anything back.
It was Ahmad and his violence and Thad and his lies and my father and his control and the cage and the dungeon and every night I’d spent convincing myself that the only way to be intimate was to be in charge.
And this man had just laid me down and made me come undone without taking a single thing for himself.
“You good?” he asked, his arm around me, his lips against my forehead.
“No,” I said honestly. “But I think that’s okay.”
“It is.”
He held me while I cried and he didn’t ask why and he didn’t try to fix it and he didn’t make it about himself.
He just held me. And at some point I stopped crying and started breathing and the breathing turned into sleep and the last thing I remember before I went under was his heartbeat against my ear, steady and unhurried, and the thought that maybe—just maybe—there was a version of intimacy that didn’t require me to be in control to survive it.