8. Bryson
brYSON
The bedroom is dark except for the streetlight coming through the window, casting silver-blue shadows across the bed.
She's sitting on the edge of my mattress and she's nervous.
I can see it in the way her hands are pressed flat on her thighs, the way she's not looking at me, the way her shoulders are doing that thing—curling inward, making herself smaller.
Not here. Not with me. She doesn't get to disappear in my bed.
I kneel in front of her. She blinks, surprised, looking down at me for the first time instead of up. I take her hands and place them on my shoulders.
"I'm going to undress you," I tell her. My voice comes out low and steady, the voice I use when I'm talking someone through a dangerous situation.
Calm. Certain. Unshakable. "And while I do it, I'm going to tell you what I see.
Not what you think I see. Not what anyone else told you they see.
What I actually see. And you're going to sit here and look at me and listen. Those are the only rules."
Her breath catches. "Bryson, you don't have to?—"
"I know I don't have to. I want to." I reach for the hem of her sundress—she changed before she came over, into something light and yellow, because this woman is physically incapable of wearing a color that doesn't match her personality.
I lift the fabric slowly. She raises her arms and the dress comes off over her head and she immediately crosses her arms over her stomach.
I pull her arms away. Gently. I uncross them and place her hands back on my shoulders and I hold her gaze.
"Don't," I say. "Don't cover up. Don't apologize. Don't say anything about what you think is wrong, because there's nothing wrong. You need to hear that so I'm going to keep saying it until you believe me."
She's trembling. Her bra is pale pink—practical, not trying to be sexy, which makes it sexier than anything I've ever seen.
Her stomach is soft, rounded, a slight fold at the waist where her body curves inward.
Her thighs are full and pressing together.
She's biting her lower lip and her eyes are glassy and she looks like she's bracing for a verdict.
I lean forward and press my mouth to her stomach. Right at the center, where the softness is deepest, where I know she hates it most. I feel her flinch under my lips and then I feel her exhale—long, shaking, like she's been holding that breath for years.
"Here," I murmur against her skin. "This. This is what I think about when I'm lying in bed at three in the morning trying to sleep. The softness of you. How you'd feel under my hands. How you'd feel against me."
I unhook her bra and slide it off her shoulders and she closes her eyes.
"Open," I tell her. She opens them. I hold her gaze while I look at her—all of her, everything she's been hiding under loose shirts and crossed arms—and I let her see my face.
I let her see what this does to me, unfiltered, uncensored.
"You're not cute." I watch the word land and I see her flinch, just barely, because that's the word she uses for herself.
The safe word. The small word. I take it from her.
"You're not fine. You're not 'pretty for'—pretty for a big girl, pretty for a teacher, pretty for whatever qualifier someone put on you to make themselves feel better about wanting you.
You're gorgeous." I press my mouth to the swell of her breast. "Devastating.
" To her collarbone. "Mine." To her throat.
She makes a sound that breaks something open in me—a sob or a gasp or both, tangled together and raw.
Her hands fist in my shirt and she pulls me up and kisses me with a desperation that tastes like relief, like a woman who's been waiting her entire life for someone to see her clearly and say what they see out loud.
I lay her back on the bed and I take my time.
I map every inch of her with my hands first, then my mouth.
I learn the places that make her gasp—the inside of her wrist, the curve of her hip, the sensitive spot below her ear that makes her writhe.
I find the stretch marks on her thighs and I kiss each one individually and she tries to push my head away and I don't let her.
I pin her wrist to the mattress—one hand, easy, because my hand wraps around both her wrists with room to spare—and I look up at her from between her thighs.
"Don't push me away." My voice is raw. "Don't redirect me. Don't tell me to skip the parts you don't like because I like every part and I need you to let me prove it."
She stops pushing. She stops fighting. She lies back and lets me worship her in the only language I've ever been fluent in—touch, attention, the steady and deliberate application of hands that know how to fix things and hold things and take things apart and put them back together better than they were before.
I make her come with my mouth and she nearly bows off the bed.
I make her come with my fingers and she says my name like she's discovering it for the first time.
And when I finally press inside her, holding her thighs open with both hands, watching her face while I fill her, she grabs the sheets and says "Oh my God" in a voice so wrecked it undoes the last four years of my life in a single syllable.
I don't go slow. She told me not to and I listen, because listening is the one thing I've always been good at.
I move with the precision and intensity I bring to everything—deliberate, focused, utterly consumed by the task of making this woman feel what I feel when I look at her.
I hold her down with one hand on her hip and fuck her with the kind of single-minded devotion I usually reserve for engines, and when she starts getting close I pull her upright into my lap, her legs wrapped around me, her face inches from mine.
"Watch," I tell her. "Look at me while it happens. I want to see it."
She watches. She holds my gaze while she falls apart, and I hold hers while I follow, and it's the most honest thing I've ever experienced—two people refusing to look away while the walls come down.
Afterward, she's curled against my chest, my arm around her, her breath warm against my skin.
My hand rests on the soft curve of her hip—the same place I first touched her in the station, the place where it all started—and I hold her the way I hold everything that matters: carefully, completely, with no intention of letting go.
"Bryson?" Her voice is sleepy, muffled against my chest.
"Yeah."
"You're not bad at feelings." She presses a kiss to my sternum. "You're just quiet about them. There's a difference."
I tighten my arm around her and press my mouth to the top of her head and breathe in the vanilla scent of her hair, and for the first time in four years, the silence feels like something I chose instead of something I'm hiding behind.
"Stay," I say again. The same word from the kitchen. She knows what it means now. She knows it means more than tonight.
"I'm not going anywhere," she says, and I believe her.