30. Vadim #2
I came up the length of her, and she caught my face and kissed her own taste from my mouth without shame, and her hand moved down between us and closed around me, slow and sure, and I held still and let her, let her learn the weight of me in her palm until my control was a single thread with all my weight hung from it.
She wrapped a leg over mine and pulled, and I let her pull, let her set the pace, let her have the lead in a thing I had never once in my life surrendered the lead of.
Her hands moved over me everywhere, my jaw, my throat, the back of my neck, the width of my shoulders, holding hard, harder than the moment asked, and I felt the strength in her fingers and thought only that she wanted me close.
I did not ask why a woman holds a man as if the floor is going out from under them both.
I braced over her, and she reached between us and guided me, and I settled against her, poised there, notched to the soft heat of her and no further, waiting, my forehead against hers, both of us shaking now with the effort of the pause.
She went still under me and pressed her palm flat to my chest, and everything in me stilled with her, and held.
"Nothing between us," she whispered. "Do you hear me? I want nothing between us."
There was one thing still in place between us, the last reserve, the one folded inside all the others, the barrier a careful man does not spend even in his own bed with his own wife.
She was asking me to spend it. I looked down into her eyes, bright and steady and full of something enormous, and I did not answer with words.
Some vows are too large for the mouth. I answered with my body.
I let it go. I took the last of myself out of reserve and set it down, and then there was nothing between us at all, and I pressed forward into her, bare, for the first time in my life.
I felt the soft give of her yield to me, felt her body open around the blunt insistence of mine by slow degrees.
She drew a long breath and took the crown of me, and the heat of her closed over it, tight and slick and living, gripping me as I began to sink.
I did not rush. I fed myself into her a fraction at a time, feeling the whole of the slide, the snug drag of her drawing me deeper, the small catch of her breath against my jaw with every advance, the way her body stretched to hold what I gave it and then took more.
I sank until I could sink no further, seated in her to the root, as far inside her as a man can be, with nothing at all between her flesh and mine.
Then I stopped. I held there, fully buried in her, wholly open, and let us both feel the plain astonishing fact of it: no barrier, no hedge, no card kept back, only the two of us joined skin to skin in the one place I had never once let the world touch me.
This was the surrender. Not the door, not the dead phone, not the empty hall.
This. Bare inside her and going nowhere.
She felt the meaning of it move through me and she made a sound that was half a sob, and her arms came around my back and locked, harder than I could account for, and we were not two players across a table any longer.
There was no table. There was no exit I owned.
There was only this, slow and deep and given whole, a promise made in the one language I had never learned to lie in.
"There," she breathed, tears at the corners of her eyes, and I kissed them, and I did not understand them. "There you are. All of you. Finally all of you."
"All of me," I said against her cheek. "There is nothing left back. Do you feel it? There is nothing left."
"I feel it." Her voice broke clean in two. "God, I feel it."
We moved together, slow at the start, a long unhurried give and take, her hips rising to meet mine and mine sinking to meet hers until moving was its own country and neither of us owned the border of it.
The rhythm built without either of us deciding that it should.
I felt her tighten around me by degrees, felt her nails set into the muscle of my back, heard my own name come apart in her mouth.
She wrapped both legs around me and drew me deeper and told me not to stop, told me low against my ear that she had me, and I put my face in her throat and let go of the last thing I was still holding, which was myself.
I could not have told you the number of floors below us or the way down through them.
The only geography left was her breath and mine folding into one rhythm, faster now, then past speech, then past thought.
When it took her I felt it take her, the whole length of her drawing tight and breaking open around me, and she said my name once more like it was the only word she had left.
I let it take me right behind her, undefended, unhedged, pouring everything I had ever kept locked into the one place I had sworn nothing would ever go.
I did not hold a single thing back. I gave her the last card and every card and the deck itself, and I lay over her heart while it slammed, and I was, for one measureless moment, a man with no exit and no fear of needing one.
Afterward the room was very still. The city kept burning below without us.
She held me with my head over her heart and her hand moving slow through my hair, and I listened to the drum of her under my ear, and I felt a thing I had no prior record of, a thing my whole life had been engineered to make impossible.
I felt safe. Not guarded. Not covered. Not one move ahead.
Safe, the plain animal thing, watched over by someone who was not myself, so that for once I did not have to be the one awake at the table.
"You're quiet," she said softly.
"I am not counting anything," I said. "I do not know where the exits are."
Her hand went still in my hair. "No?"
"No," I said. "For the first time I cannot find them, and I do not want to. Is this what you laid down? That night. Is this what it felt like?"
"Yes." Barely a word at all. "This is exactly what it felt like."
"I did not understand it then." I turned my mouth against her skin. "I understand it now."
Her arms tightened around me, too hard again, that same fierce grip that asked nothing and gave everything, and I felt her press her lips to the top of my head and hold them there a long time, breathing me in as though she were trying to keep the shape of me somewhere words could not reach.
"Sleep," she whispered. "I've got you. I told you. I've got you tonight."
"Stay," I said, already going under, unhedged, certain.
"I am here," she said. It was not the same word. I was too far into sleep to hear that it was not the same word.
For one night I held nothing back, and fell asleep certain, for the first time in my life, that I wasn't alone at the table. I woke to a cold bed and a folded note. She'd taught me to hold nothing back, and then she was gone.