15. Nina #2
He stripped the rest of me bare without hurry and laid me back against pillows that smelled of him, of cedar and cold air and the warmth underneath that I had never once managed to forget.
Then he set about taking me apart. His mouth found the racing pulse in my throat and moved lower, learning the weight of me, his tongue and the rough scrape of his jaw pulling sounds out of me I had not made in half a decade.
He closed one big scarred hand over my breast and set his mouth to the other, and the heat of it went through me like a struck match, and I arched up off the bed with his name already breaking apart on my tongue.
“I know every sound you make,” he said against my skin, his voice gone to gravel.
“Five years. I never let myself remember, and I never once forgot.” His hand slid down over my belly, over the scar he had called his favorite, lower, until he was tracing me slow and knowing through the heat already gathered there, and my whole body clenched around the promise of it. “Let me hear all of them again.”
Then he touched me exactly where I had been aching since the hallway, since the kiss, since some buried part of me had recognized him through a restaurant window weeks ago and started counting down to this.
He stroked me slow and then less slow, reading every hitch of my breath, every helpless lift of my hips, patient as a man who had all night and meant to use every minute.
When his mouth followed his hand, when he settled low and put that ruthless, knowing attention right where I was coming undone, I broke embarrassingly fast, one fist in his hair and the other in the sheets, my cry tearing out half sob, the first time in all those starved years I had come apart in someone else’s hands.
He kissed his way back up while I was still shaking, unhurried and pleased with himself, and my hands had forgotten how to be shy.
I got him out of the last of his clothes and finally had all of him, the new scars and the puckered map of every close call that had kept him from us.
I set my mouth to one and then another, mapping him the way he had just mapped me, and when my hand closed around the hard, heavy length of him he shuddered and dropped his forehead to my shoulder and breathed my name like a warning.
I stroked him slow, relearning him, drunk on the discovery that I could take him apart too, until his hand caught my wrist and stilled it.
Not like this, the grip said, his breath ragged at my neck.
He had waited too long to spend the first time in my hand.
He wanted to be inside me when his control finally broke.
I felt the patience start to cost him then.
The old Lev, the one from before, had been all heat and hurry, two kids racing each other to the rest of their lives.
This man had learned restraint in whatever dark he had been surviving in, and watching it fray, watching what wanting me did to a man who controlled everything down to his own breathing, was almost more than I could take.
He settled between my thighs and I felt him there, notched against me, and we both went still at the edge of it, neither of us breathing.
Then he pushed in, slow, so slow, giving me every inch by degrees, his eyes on my face the whole way down for any flicker that was not want.
There was none. There was only the long, exquisite stretch of being filled by him after five years of an empty bed, my body opening around him and then closing tight, like it had spent all that time waiting to remember the shape of him.
When he was fully seated, when there was no space left anywhere between us, he stopped, his forehead dropping to mine, and we breathed like we had run there from somewhere very far away.
“Look at me,” he said. “I need you to know it’s me.”
“I know it’s you.” My voice broke on it. “I always knew it was you. That was the whole problem.”
And then there were no more words worth the breath, only the old language, the one the body keeps when the mind has filed everything else under grief.
He moved and I met him, slow at first, both of us shaking with the work of making it last, and then not slow at all.
He set a rhythm that wound me tighter with every stroke, one hand splayed under the small of my back to pull me into him, his mouth at my ear saying my name and rougher things besides, the kind he had never once said in the daylight.
I wrapped myself around him and held on and let it climb past anything I could manage, until I shattered a second time with his name in my mouth, and felt him follow a breath behind me, his control completely gone, his mouth open against my throat like a man going under for the last time.
I had braced for it to feel like a stranger moving over me.
It felt like coming home to a house I had been told burned to the ground.
Somewhere in it I stopped keeping the careful inventory I keep of everything I love, stopped counting what I stood to lose, and simply let myself have it.
Have him. For the length of one impossible night.
After, we lay tangled in a dark gone soft and enormous, his heart still going too fast under my ear, my leg thrown over his like I could pin him to the living world by weight alone.
Neither of us spoke for a long time. The fear came back the way it always does, not while you’re falling but after you’ve landed, when you finally understand how high up you’d been.
“I can hear you thinking,” he said into my hair.
“I think very loudly.”
“What’s it saying?”
I considered lying. I had gotten so good at it. But lying was the thing that had cost us the five years, and I was done paying that particular bill.
“I buried you,” I whispered into his chest. “And here you are, alive under my hands, and I’ve never been so afraid in my life, because now I know exactly how much I have to lose.”