CHAPTER 19 #2
I'm naked in the cold ordered room and my body stays open, unguarded.
That's what I notice even now, even with my pulse going — that somewhere across these nine weeks the bracing emptied out of me, the old flinch, the half-second brace for for a woman your size that none of them ever delivered and that finally stopped renting space inside me too.
I stand in the lamplight in my warm ivory skin and my full heavy breasts and my round soft belly and my wide hips and my thick thighs, and Emil Sokolov takes me in like a man who's just been handed a proof he swore couldn't exist.
"Look at you," he says, and the catalog comes out tender, the way it always secretly ran under the math.
He steps back into me and sets his palms — both of them — flat against the slope of my hips and simply holds them there, feeling the give of me, the heft, and his eyes close for a second like a man steadying.
"Do you understand," he says, low, "that I have spent my life making myself smaller.
Quieter. Taking up less room so that less of me could be hit.
And you take up exactly as much room as you take up and you have never apologized for one inch of it, and the first night I saw you I wanted to climb inside that and learn how it's done.
" His hands slide up, slow, the heels of them dragging over my ribs until both my breasts fill his palms, thumbs crossing my nipples until they tighten and I make a sound I don't plan.
"That is one observation. I have many. Lie down, kotyonok. Let me make them in order."
I lie down on the geometric bed. He undresses without performance, just efficiency, and lean and pale he comes over me, and then he makes good on the narration.
He puts his mouth on me everywhere, exactly as promised, in order, like a man working through a list he wrote in advance and is savoring.
The hollow of my throat. The thimble's chain.
He kisses each breast slow and reverent and names their heft out loud, fuller than I modeled, I am pleased to be wrong, and I laugh and the laugh turns to a gasp when he draws a nipple into his mouth and stays there until my hips lift off the bed on their own.
He kisses down the soft heavy weight of my belly and treats it as a destination, lingering there with his mouth and the flat of his tongue where I once braced for him to rush, worshipping the belly as if it's the whole reason he came down here, and "soft," he says against it, like a man recording data he wants to keep, "you are so soft here, I think about it during meetings, it ruins my concentration, I would like you to know the figures I have miscalculated because of this exact softness. " Then his mouth travels lower.
He pushes my thick thighs apart with both hands and studies me there, wet and open in the lamplight, and I watch the model leave his face entirely.
"Tell me first," I manage.
"I am going to use my mouth on your cunt," he says, precise and filthy in the same breath, the clinical word for the act and the rawest word for the place, "and I am going to count, because counting is the last thing I have, and I would like you to take it from me. Yes?"
"Yes."
He puts his mouth on me and the first stroke of his tongue over my clit arches my whole back off the bed.
He takes his time. He's unbearably exact, learning me by increments, finding the rhythm that makes my hands fist in his sheets and then keeping it, relentless and controlled, two ink-stained fingers sliding into me and curling, and the slick sound of it and the cold ordered room and the bare lamp and the man between my thighs cataloging me with his tongue — I come the first time so hard I hear myself say his name like it's the only word I have left.
"That is one," he says, lifting his head just enough to speak, his mouth wet, his voice still — barely — level. "I calculated three. We are not finished. I have you for hours and I have indexed all of them."
He gives me the second one slower. Crueler.
He brings me to the edge and stops, holds me there with his fingers still inside me and his thumb just not on my clit, and watches my face while I shake and curse him, and "patience," he says, "I am demonstrating a principle, the principle is that I can make this last longer than you think you can bear and you will thank me," and I tell him to go to hell and he smiles against my thigh and lets me fall, and I come on his hand sobbing.
"Two. " His voice cracks on the count, only slightly, the first hairline running through the glaze, and I file it away like a pin held between my lips.
"Emil. " I get a hand in his hair and pull until he comes up the length of me, his mouth slick with me, his pale eyes blown dark and his careful breathing gone, finally, ragged. "Now you. I want you inside me. I want to feel the exact moment you lose the model. Say yes."
"That is my line," he says, hoarse, and almost laughs, and the almost-laugh is the most undone I have ever seen him.