Peyton #2
Not rushed. Worse. Decisive. He picks me up with one arm under my thigh and the other at my back, and I make a sound I would deny under oath. His mouth finds mine again while he carries me down the short hall. I kick off one boot, then the other, dignified about none of it.
At the bed, he sets me down like he is still giving me the choice.
I choose.
I pull the dress over my head and let it drop. Let him see what wanting looks like on me. It is more exposed than skin.
Ryan goes still. Not the controlled stillness I have spent weeks cataloguing. Something under it has come loose. He looks at me like a man who got very good at not reaching for things, deciding to reach.
“You can look,” I say. It comes out less steady than I meant.
“I know.” His voice is rough. He does not move, and I understand the stillness is the last of his control, spent on going slow.
So I take that from him too.
I hook my thumbs in my underwear and slide it down, slow, eyes on his the whole way. His jaw works once. Holding still is costing him, and I want it to cost him.
Then I get my hand on him before he can decide how this goes. He is hard, and his breath breaks on the first stroke, and the sound he makes is nothing he would let a room hear. He has spent weeks learning me. My turn to file something away.
“Peyton.” A warning. An ask. I cannot tell, and I like that I cannot tell.
“Stop checking.”
I take his hand off my hip and put it where I want it.
Show him. His fingers go careful, reading, and I press them deeper until careful is not the word for any of it.
He watches my face while his hand learns what I just taught it, and I let him see all of it, because hiding now would mean I was still pretending this was a story.
“There,” I manage. “There.”
He does not ask if it is right. He can feel that it is.
I come on his hand with my forehead against his and the broken front half of his name in my mouth. It is not loud. It is not a win for anyone. It is just true, and he does not look away from any of it.
He stays close while I shake, his breath uneven against my mouth.
“Hi,” I say, because I have nothing dignified left.
“Hi.” One side of his mouth tips up. He does not ask if I am all right. He can see the state of me, and he looks unforgivably pleased about it.
I reach for him and he helps, both of us less smooth than either of us would be alone, which is the point. The condom passes from his hand into mine, and he watches my face the whole time.
“Still sure?” he asks.
“I do not know how to do this halfway,” I say, handing him the fear because it is mine too.
His breath catches.
“Then don’t.”
He pushes inside me slowly, eyes open, one hand braced beside my shoulder. No grief to blame it on. No bad timing to hide behind. Just the two of us, certain and careful in the same breath, learning the last unfamiliar thing about each other.
I watch his face when he fills me.
I cannot protect myself from the seeing. Not the heat.
Ryan with his control stripped down to effort. Ryan holding still because my body needs a second. Not asking. Just giving it to me.
Ryan’s eyes going almost helpless when I wrap one leg around his hip and pull him closer.
“Move,” I whisper.
He does.
It is slow and certain. He learns me as he goes, the breath I pull when he changes the angle, the way I say his name softly instead of sharply, and he uses all of it. Nobody is performing. He is not running the room and I am not guarding the door. We just let each other watch.
He fits himself closer when I get close again, his eyes on mine.
“Let me see,” he says. Not a command. A request.
I do not look away.
The second one moves through me slower, deeper, leaving me open under him in a way that has nothing to do with skin. Ryan follows with a broken sound against my mouth, and I hold him through it without deciding to.
After, he does not roll away.
He stays over me, careful with his weight, breathing against my neck.
I run one hand up his back, over the marks I have made.
“You are heavy,” I say.
“You are mean after sex.”
“Only when trapped.”
He shifts immediately.
I catch him before he can move fully away. “Ryan.”
He looks down at me.
There is too much in his face.
I have no idea what is in mine.
So I do what I know how to do and make it survivable.
“Do not leave,” I say.
Something in him changes so fast it scares me.
He comes down beside me and pulls me in with one arm. Not managing. Not performing. Just holding on because neither of us has the language yet for staying.
For a while, we let the quiet hold.
I trace one finger over the center of his chest. Not idle. I am thinking. He has learned the difference.
“I get a question,” I say.
Ryan’s hand stills against my back.
Then he lets out one breath. “Ask.”
“Tell me something no one gets.”
He looks at the ceiling. “You ask terrible pillow-talk questions.”
“This is not pillow talk. This is investigative romance.”
His laugh moves under my hand.
Then he goes quiet long enough that I nearly take it back.
“I hate the captaincy sometimes,” he says.
My finger stills.
“Not the team. Not the responsibility. The way people use it to make every other part of me negotiable.”
I do not answer immediately. That is one of the things he has started to trust about me. I do not rush to reward honesty like it is a trained behavior.
“Do you want to stop?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
He turns his head. My face is close, soft in the low light and still too sharp to lie to.
“To be allowed to love it without becoming only it.”
The words land somewhere in me and stay.
“That is a better answer than most men give naked.”
“You have a sample size?”
“Do not become insecure now. It would ruin my theory of your emotional repression.”
He smiles despite himself.
I kiss him once. Not heat this time. Not exactly. A seal over the thing he gave me and the thing I have not taken.
“My turn,” he says.
“That sounds ominous.”
“Tell me something no one gets.”
Ryan
Peyton’s breath shifts.
For a moment, I think she will make a joke and I will let her because people survive in the ways they know.
Then she says, “I am still afraid my father is right.”
I stop.
“Not about you,” she says quickly. “About me. That I make things harder because I do not know how to be loved without treating it like a negotiation.”
I turn toward her fully. “He is wrong.”
“You cannot know that.”
“I can.”
“Ryan.”
“You made my life harder,” I say. “You also made it truer. Those are not the same thing.”
She stares at me.
Then she puts her face against my chest, and I hold her until she stops shaking.
At some point, Peyton sleeps.
Before dawn, I wake.
I do not mean to leave like a thief. I tell myself that while I find my clothes in the dark, while Peyton sleeps on her side with one hand under her cheek and the sheet low across the curve of her back.
I stand beside the bed past the point of pretending I’m not.
Staying feels impossible.
Leaving feels worse.
The article is on the table in the other room. The team is waiting. Jennifer. Silas. The whole machine that knows how to take a private thing and turn it into leverage if anyone gives it proof.
I bend and press my mouth to Peyton’s shoulder, light enough not to wake her.
Then I leave before morning because I know how to protect people from the outside.
I do not yet know how to stay.