Chapter 36 #2
Her room was small, the bed unmade, the curtains half closed against the streetlight. She shrugged off her jacket and let it fall over the chair. I watched her reach for the zipper of her dress and had to close my hand once at my side to keep from moving too fast.
She saw that too.
“You can touch me,” she said.
I crossed the room.
Slowly.
When my hands settled at her waist, she leaned back into me. Her body fit against mine like an answer I had been trying not to write down.
I lowered my mouth to the side of her neck.
Her breath caught.
“Still okay?” I asked.
She turned her head enough for her mouth to brush my jaw.
“Yes.”
I unzipped the dress with more control than I felt. The fabric slipped down her body and pooled at her feet. She stepped out of it, then turned to face me in the dim light, in nothing but dark underwear and a careful expression.
No camera.
No wall between what I saw and what she chose to show me.
“You’re staring,” she said.
“Yes.”
A small smile. “At least you’re honest.”
“Trying something new.”
Her laugh broke on the end when I kissed her.
I walked her backward to the bed without breaking the kiss. She found the buttons on my shirt and worked them open with the same steady focus she used behind a camera. When she pushed it off my shoulders, I let it fall.
“Belt,” she said against my mouth.
I undid it. She undid the rest. By the time my jeans hit the floor I was hard against her, and the breath she let out told me she felt it.
“Evan.”
“Yeah.”
“On the bed.”
I sat down. She stood between my knees and ran her hands up my chest like she was learning me by touch instead of frame. I caught her wrist when her thumb dragged over my ribs.
“Bruise,” I said.
“I know exactly where the bruise is.”
“Of course you do.”
She bent and kissed it. Then she kept going.
Her mouth moved down my stomach. My hand went into her hair without instruction. When she reached my thighs and pushed them apart so she could settle between them, I had to brace my good hand behind me on the mattress because I had stopped being capable of holding myself up.
She looked up at me before her mouth touched me.
“Evan.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to watch.”
That was the part she could not have known she was asking for. Or maybe she did. Maybe she had photographed me long enough to know exactly which part of me had spent years refusing to be looked at.
I watched.
She wrapped her hand around the base of me and ran her tongue up the underside in one slow line.
The sound that came out of me was not a sound I had made before.
She took me in her mouth, slow, watching my face the whole time, and I understood for the first time in my life that being looked at and being seen were not the same thing.
I made it about ninety seconds before I had to stop her.
“Sam — wait —”
She lifted her head.
“You’re going to make me —”
“That was the plan.”
“Not yet.”
Her smile that time was something I had never seen on her face before. Pleased, patient — a woman who had just discovered exactly how much power she had over me and intended to use it carefully.
“Okay,” she said. “Not yet.”
She crawled up onto the bed. I followed her down to the pillows.
I unhooked her bra with one hand and worked her underwear off with the other, slow, because I wanted to feel her skin every inch she gave me. Her nipples were tight when I lowered my mouth to one of them. She arched up under me on a soft sound.
“Evan — fuck —”
I worked her with my mouth until her hand fisted in my hair and her hips lifted off the bed. Then I moved down.
She tried to pull me back up.
“You first.”
“You first,” I said. “Then I’ll stop being responsible.”
I settled between her thighs and pressed a kiss to the inside of one of them. She was already wet. I could feel it on my mouth before I tasted her, and the sound she made when I did was going to live inside me.
I learned her by sound. The hitch when my tongue touched her clit. The “Evan, please” that broke out of her when I worked two fingers inside her and curled them up.
I kept her there for a long time.
When she came, it was with one hand fisted in my hair and the other flat against the wall behind her head, like she had decided to brace for it. Her whole body shook. I stayed where I was through the last of it, and when I finally moved up her body, she was crying a little.
“Sam —”
“Don’t stop.”
“Are you —”
“I’m fine. Keep going.”
I reached for the nightstand. Her hand caught my wrist.
“Top drawer,” she said. “I bought them three days ago in case this happened. I am deeply embarrassed about it.”
“You bought condoms in anticipation of me.”
“Don’t make me say it again.”
I laughed against her throat. Then I got the condom on and settled between her thighs and looked down at her in the streetlight, and the laughter stopped being possible.
“Last chance,” I said.
“Evan. Get inside me.”
I pushed inside her slowly.
Her breath broke. So did mine. She was tight and slick, gripping me, and I had to hold still until I could trust myself to move without ending this immediately.
Her hand came up to my cheek.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Her thumb traced my cheekbone.
“Look at me.”
“I am.”
“No. Look at me.”
I understood what she was asking. She had spent three years being taken advantage of by a man who used her trust to make himself famous. What she wanted was the opposite of that. To be seen by a man who would never look away when it counted.
I held her eyes and started to move.
She kept her hand on my face the whole time.
I went slow at first. Long, deep strokes. Her hand at my jaw, her hips rising to meet mine on every stroke. Her breathing changed. She let me see all of it.
“Fuck. Sam.”
“Stay.”
“I’m here.”
I moved deeper, slower, the way she had asked me to without using words, and her hand fisted in the sheet beside my shoulder.
“Don’t stop.”
“I won’t.”
I reached between us and found her clit with my thumb. She made a sound I would think about for the rest of my life. Her hand came back to my face.
“Evan — please —”
“I know.”
“With me.”
“I’m right here.”
When she came apart the second time, she did it with my name in her mouth and her hand at the back of my neck holding on like she had decided I was hers and was not interested in negotiating the point. Her body squeezed around me hard enough to take what was left of my control.
I followed her over.
I came with my forehead pressed to hers, her hand still cradling my face, and for one long, breathless moment, I could not tell where I ended and she began.
That sound was going to ruin me.
I let it.
Afterward, she lay half across me with her hair over my chest and one leg hooked over mine like she had decided I was furniture with a pulse.
I did not move.
I did not want to.
The room was warm. The city made low sounds beyond the window. My hand rested on her bare back, moving slowly because stopping felt impossible.
She traced the groove in my palm again.
Sleepy now.
Still precise.
“You okay?” she asked.
I looked down at her.
“You’re asking me that?”
“Yes.”
“I should be asking you.”
“You did. Repeatedly. It was very responsible of you. Borderline excessive.”
I felt my mouth move.
She smiled against my chest.
“There it is.”
“What?”
“The almost-smile. My favorite endangered species.”
I pulled her closer, and she let me.
For a while, neither of us said anything.
Then she whispered, “Tonight felt safe.”
The words hit deeper than anything else she could have said.
Safe.
Not easy.
Not fixed.
Safe.
I pressed my mouth to her hair.
“Good.”
Her fingers tightened around mine.
“I mean that,” she said. “The date. Being seen. Coming home. This. It felt like I got to choose all of it.”
My throat tightened.
“You did.”
“I know.” A pause. “That’s the part I’m still getting used to.”
I held her in the dark and thought about the river lights, her hand in mine, her voice saying no when I asked if she was leaving.
I thought about the version of my life I had been afraid to want because wanting it made it possible to lose.
Then I looked down at the woman breathing against my chest and understood something clearly.
Loss was not the opposite of choosing.
It was the risk that made choosing matter.
“Sam.”
“Mm?”
“I’m glad we went downtown.”
She lifted her head, hair falling across one cheek.
“That is the least romantic sentence anyone has ever said to a naked woman in bed.”
“I meant it romantically.”
“Devastating. Truly. I may never recover.”
I rolled her under me before she could say anything else.
She laughed into my mouth, and the sound moved through me like light turning on in a room I had stopped entering years ago.
This.
The word came back, but softer this time.
A home.