Nadia #2
"I've found it's the only approach that works."
I look at him for a long moment. At the tired eyes and the careful face and the man who checked the circulation twice and left the window unlatched and brought the coffee back without asking and has been sitting two feet away from me for five days making an argument to himself that I've been watching him make and waiting to see which way it landed.
I reach up.
I close the distance.
I kiss him.
Not the performed version, not the calculated version from three days ago that he stopped with his hand on my wrist and his voice saying my name. This is the other kind. The direct kind, the kind that is just the true thing with no architecture around it.
He goes still for one second.
Then his hand comes to the side of my face, slow and deliberate, and he kisses me back in the way of someone who has been making an argument to himself for a long time and has just heard the verdict.
It is not brief.
When we separate, his hand is still at my jaw and we are still close.
"You're going to make this very complicated," he says.
"I know," I say.
"I need you to know that I know that."
"You've been remarkably clear about knowing it," I say. "For weeks."
Something moves in his expression that is the closest I've seen him come to being undone by something that isn't grief or exhaustion. He presses his forehead briefly against mine, which is so much more intimate than the kiss that I have to make a conscious decision not to step back from it.
I don't step back.
His thumb moves, slow, against the line of my jaw.
That is all. Just the thumb, the small deliberate drag of it across my skin, and the smallness of it is what undoes the first thing in me.
He is close enough that I can see the grain of his stubble and the tiredness around his eyes and the place at his collarbone where his shirt is open a button, and I can smell him, which I have not let myself notice before now.
Soap. Coffee. The wool of the jacket he wore yesterday. Under that, him.
I breathe in.
"Tell me," he says. Low. "Tell me if this is not what you want."
"This is what I want."
"Tell me again."
"This is what I want."
He kisses me again, and this kiss is different. The first was an answer. This is the question, asked properly, with the patience of a man who has been waiting to ask it.
I let him ask it.
His mouth is warm and unhurried. His hand at my jaw slides into my hair, finds the base of my skull, holds me there. Not restraint. The opposite of restraint. The weight of a hand choosing to be exactly where it is.
My hands find the front of his shirt.
I work the buttons one at a time. He lets me.
Does not help, does not move, just stands there with his hand in my hair and his mouth still on mine and lets me do this thing at my own pace.
The buttons are pearl, small, turning under my thumb.
My fingers shake on the third button. I do not try to hide it.
When the shirt opens I push it aside and put my palms flat against his chest.
Both hands. Skin. He is warm, surprising even though it should not be surprising. Under the heat, his heartbeat. Slower than mine. I can feel the fine dark hair across his sternum and a small scar at the edge of his ribs that I have not asked about and will not ask about today.
His hand comes up and covers mine. Just that. Holds it there against his chest.
"Nadia," he says.
"I know."
He guides me back, his hands at my waist, careful, until the back of my legs finds the couch and I sit and he follows me down.
The cushion gives under us. He stays standing for a moment between my knees, looking at me, and I look up at him, and the angle of him above me in a room we have been sitting at opposite ends of for five days does something to my breathing.
"Come here," I say.
He comes.
He kneels between my knees on the worn carpet and pushes the skirt up to my waist with both hands, slow, his palms hot against the outside of my thighs.
He looks at me there, between my legs, in only my underwear, with an attention that is not clinical and not performed and which I feel as heat across my chest and my throat and my face.
"Christ," he says, quietly. Almost to himself.
His mouth comes to the inside of my knee.
He kisses up the inside of my thigh, slow, his lips warm, his stubble scraping. He bites, once, near the top of my thigh, gentle, and the heat of it travels everywhere it travels. When he reaches the edge of the cotton he stops. Looks up at me from where he is kneeling. Waits.
"Yes," I say. The word comes out lower than my voice usually goes.
He hooks his thumbs into my underwear and slides it down my legs. I lift my hips to help him. He drops it on the floor beside us. Then his hands are back at my thighs, pushing them gently apart, opening me to him.
He looks.
I have been looked at by men. I have not been looked at this way. He looks at me like a man who has been allowed to look at the one thing he has been wanting to look at and is not going to rush through the looking.
"Liam—"
"I know," he says. "Give me a minute."
He gives himself a minute. His thumbs trace along the crease of my thigh, slow, and the not-touching of me where I most want to be touched is its own thing. When he finally puts his mouth on me I make a sound I have not made for anyone, half a gasp and half something more.
His mouth is warm and his tongue is careful and he learns me with the same focused attention I have watched him bring to every room he walks into.
The first slow drag of his tongue along the length of me.
Then a slower one. He finds my clit and circles it with the flat of his tongue and the response of my body to this is so immediate and so absolute that I hear myself say his name out loud and do not try to take it back.
He pulls back just enough to speak. "Tell me what you want."
"That. What you were doing. That."
He goes back to it.
He slides one finger inside me while his mouth is on my clit and the dual sensation does something to my vision, narrows it, the lamp light going close and warm and the rest of the room going elsewhere.
He works the finger slow, curls it forward, finds something that makes my hips lift off the cushion without my permission.
"There," he says, into me. "That."
"Yes."
He adds a second finger. The angle is correct on the first try, which says something about him I do not have time to examine, and his mouth keeps its rhythm on my clit, and his free hand has come up and flattened against my lower stomach, holding me, steadying me, the warm weight of his palm against the skin under my navel.
I look down at him.
He looks up at me from between my legs with his mouth on me and his eyes on mine and the directness of it is the thing that pushes me up against the edge.
"Liam, I am going to—"
"I know," he says, into me, and his mouth does not slow and his fingers do not slow.
I come with one hand fisted in his hair and the other gripping the edge of the couch and my back arched off the cushion and a sound coming out of me that I have not made for anyone.
He keeps me there, his mouth gentling but not stopping, his fingers slowing inside me, working me through it until my body has finished and gone loose against the couch.
His mouth lifts. He kisses the inside of my thigh once.
Then the other one. Then he comes up onto the couch beside me, his fingers sliding out of me slowly, and he kisses me with his mouth still wet from me, which is its own deliberate thing, and I taste myself on him and the taste does something I do not name.
"Hi," I say, when I can speak.
"Hi," he says.
Something at the corner of his mouth that is not quite a smile.
I look at him. At the open shirt and the dark hair and the mouth still slick from me, and the very deliberate evidence of him through the front of his trousers.
I reach for his belt.
He catches my wrist. Not stopping, just pausing. "You do not have to."
"I want to."
He looks at me.
"I want to," I say again. I want this to be a thing I gave you. Not a thing you did for me. I do not say that out loud. He sees it. He releases my wrist.
I slide off the couch and onto the floor in front of him, on my knees, the way he was a moment ago. The carpet is rough under my bare knees. I do not mind.
I open his belt. The leather is warm from his body. Button. Zipper. He helps me push his trousers and his boxers down to his thighs, and his cock is hard against his stomach, dark and thick and flushed, and I look at it for a moment before I touch it because I want to look.
He lets me look.
I wrap my hand around the base of him. He is hot in my hand and heavier than I expected. I move my hand once, slow, root to tip, and a bead of precome wells at the head. His breath goes out of him in a way that is half breath and half something else.
"Nadia."
I lean down and lick him from the base to the tip.
His hand comes to the back of my head. Careful, not pressing. Just resting.
I take him in my mouth.