Chapter Fourteen - Elias
"Can I," he said, and didn't finish the sentence, because he thought she'd know what he meant, and she did.
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, okay."
He came around the table slow, no urgency in it, though urgency was sitting somewhere under his ribs doing its best to argue with the pace he'd set.
He crouched by the chair instead of pulling up a seat, close enough now that he could see the chip in the polish on her second toe — a new one, he noted, not the one he'd catalogued weeks ago from three feet further away; he'd been looking long enough now to have watched one replace the other — could see the faint pink line the day's flats had left across the top of her feet.
"You can tell me to stop," he said. "Any point."
"I know."
He took her feet into his hands like it was something that mattered, like something so important, because it did matter, to him — cradled the heels in one palm, let the other rest along the arches, and felt her breath catch, small, before she let it go slow.
Her skin was warm. Warmer than he'd let himself imagine, which surprised him, the gap between the thing he'd pictured and the thing that was actually happening under his hands.
He didn't move for a second. Just held it — the whole weight of her feet settled into his palm, her toes curling once, involuntary, against nothing — and let himself feel the unreasonable satisfaction of finally, actually having what he'd spent three weeks only allowed to want from a distance.
Up close there was more of her to notice than he'd let himself catalogue before: the fine bones shifting under his thumb when he pressed, the softer give right below her ankle, the way her whole leg went a little loose at the knee the second his hand closed around her.
He pressed his thumb into the arch, the exact spot she'd worked on herself that first night, and watched her head tip back against the chair, eyes half closing, lips parting around nothing, some tension he hadn't realized she was still holding finally going out of her shoulders in one long unraveling breath.
"Oh," she said. Just that. Quiet, involuntary, the same unglamorous exhale he'd heard from across the room three weeks ago and hadn't been able to stop thinking about since — except this time it wasn't across a room.
It was an inch from him, warm against the back of his hand where her breath landed when she let it out.
"Good oh or bad oh."
"Very good oh. Keep doing that."
He kept doing that. Worked the arches slow, deliberate, no rush in his hands even though every other part of him had opinions about rushing — traced his thumb up along the high curve of it, over the balls of her feet, back down, found the places that were tight and eased them, found the ones that made her breath catch and lingered there, longer each time, watching her face do the thing he'd wondered about for weeks.
Unguarded. Present. Her toes flexing slow against his palm every time he found a spot that undid her a little further, small helpless movements she wasn't controlling anymore, and he felt every one of them like something given to him on purpose, a currency neither of them had needed to name.
He let his fingers trail once, light, along the underside of her arch, just to feel her shiver — and she did, a full-body thing, her breath catching audibly this time, and for three weeks he'd have filed that sound away somewhere he could get at it later.
He didn't have to do that anymore. He could just have it.