CHAPTER 7 #2
His mouth is on my mouth.
The kiss is light. The careful approach of a man who has not done this in too long, and who knows he will be heavy if he is not careful first. His upper lip is a fraction cooler than his lower.
His breath has the trace mineral note I have been smelling for three days at the back of his diction and not naming — copper and a faint iron, the inside of him, the thing that he is.
The first kiss lasts maybe two seconds. He lifts a quarter of an inch. His eyes have not closed; mine have not closed.
"Yes still," he says.
"Yes."
He bends back to my mouth. The second kiss is not the lightest thing in this room.
His palm leaves my jaw and goes to my right hip.
He grips. The grip is over the wool of my trousers; the wool absorbs and transmits the cold of his palm; the palm prints itself across the iliac crest. He pulls me, gently, off the angle I had been standing at.
I am pulled against the front of the writing desk; the edge takes me at the small of my back; he does not press me into it.
The cold of him through the silk of the blouse and the wool of the trousers is a frame. The temperature gradient on my skin is mappable.
His tongue enters my mouth slowly. He waits at the threshold.
I open. His tongue is warm — warmer than his mouth was a second ago; warmer than the rest of him; the only warmth on him is his tongue.
I have not understood what this means and I will not understand it until tomorrow.
The inside of my mouth is the inside of a private room I have not let anyone into in three years and eight months.
My left hand moves of its own accord and fists in his lapel.
The charcoal cotton of the shirt twists in my knuckles.
I do not pull him closer; the fist is the choosing.
The fist is the way I sign the page. He registers it.
His right palm at my hip flexes once and then holds — a single pulse of pressure; the wool gives and comes back.
He does not move his hand below the waistband.
He does not move his hand to my breast. He does not move his hand to my throat. The kiss is the kiss.
But his mouth does move. It moves along the line of my lower lip and along the line of my jaw — the side his thumb had marked. He finds the freckle. He puts his lips there. He does not bite. The not-biting is a presence. He moves up under my ear and kisses the place where the jaw meets the neck.
He does not lift the silk of my collar; he does not push the blouse down; he does not put his mouth at the carotid line of my throat. The kiss is at the hinge of the jaw. It is enough.
I make a sound. I do not know what the sound is. It is small. It is the sound a person makes when they have not made any sound in this register for a long time and the body has remembered how.
He comes back to my mouth.
The radiator ticks. The radiator ticks. The cast iron in the bay under the south library window expands against itself, the sections clicking small against the layers of cream-on-cream paint added by every careful house staff for a hundred years.
I hear it now. I hear it underneath the kiss.
He has been hearing it for the full hour we have been in this room, because his hearing is older than my bones — a sentence I cannot have thought yet, because I have not been thinking sentences. I have been kissing him.
His hand at my hip flexes again. He kisses me deeper.
I lift my right hand to the side of his face.
His jaw is shaved smooth. The skin is cool.
I trace the corner of his jaw the way he has traced mine.
He inhales — sharp; the only sharp sound he has made; the inhalation is the first thing in this house I have caused.
The body of the auditor in the body of the woman files it: the inhalation is the first thing.
He moves his mouth from my mouth back down to my jaw.
He moves from my jaw down toward the hollow of my throat and stops two inches short.
He puts his forehead against my forehead.
He is breathing carefully. The breath against my mouth is mint and copper and the iron at the back of him. He is the man holding.
I go still.
I do not mean to go still. I have not used a word; my hand is still on the side of his face.
But my body has gone still. The muscle of my jaw at the corner he has been watching for three weeks and four days has flexed once.
His right palm at my hip lifts off me like a hand lifting off a hot stove he had not meant to touch.
He pulls back a quarter-inch. Then a half-inch. Then a full step. The kiss is over. I have not asked him to stop. He has stopped.
He says: "Quinn."
I say: "Julian."
I say his given name a second time and I know in saying it that I have used it up.
He does not nod. His pale gray pupils are blown; the gray of them eaten by black to the rim of the iris; the cold off his skin has dropped the temperature of the library by a degree and a half.
The cold is not menace. The cold is restraint.
He says, low: "I am going to leave the room now or I am going to do more than kiss you, and that is not the agreement we have."
I do not answer. I nod once.
He steps back. He puts the back of one wrist to his mouth — the gesture so old it is not quite of this century; I have only seen it in oil portraits.
He lowers the wrist. He walks to the door of the library and stops in it.
He turns. He looks at me where I stand with my back against the writing desk, my left hand still curled — the lapel of his shirt is gone from it; my fingers are still in the shape of the fist.
He says: "The radiator is ticking."
I open my mouth. I close it.
He has been listening to it for an hour. He is telling me he has been listening to it for an hour. He says it the way a notary signs.
He leaves.
The door of the library closes behind him with the small click of a brass tongue against a brass plate.