36. Maeve #2
Lower. The flat of a stomach that has never once gone easy with trust, and went easy now.
The scar on my hip he has stopped asking about and started only kissing.
And then lower than that, his mouth where I have never let a man take his time unless I had already gone somewhere far away inside myself first, and this time I did not go anywhere.
I stayed. I put my hand in his hair and I was there for all of it, present and undone and wanting with nothing held in reserve, and he learned me the way he learns everything he has decided matters, slow and certain and in no hurry, until I came apart against his mouth with his name in my throat and my whole self still in the room, nothing watching from the corner, no one left guarding the door.
He came back up my body and I undressed him too, my hands not as steady as I would have liked and not caring, for once, and I put them flat over the furrow I closed with my own needle a lifetime ago and the newer marks this war had added to him, and I looked at him looking at me, and neither of us hid, and that was the whole of it, that was the thing my body had never once been allowed to do with another person, which is to want without calculating, to open without keeping the way out in view.
I ran my hands down the hard length of him and felt him shudder under my palms, and I took my time the way he had taken his, because for once there was all the time in the world and no reason on this earth to hurry toward the part a person can disappear inside of, since I was not disappearing anywhere tonight.
He came skin to skin against me then, the whole hot length of us pressed together, and settled at the very edge of me, notched against the wet heat of me and not yet inside it, close enough that I felt exactly what the waiting was costing him, both of us breathing like we had run a long way, and he lifted his head and looked at me, asking without words the way he asks me everything now, and I answered him by pulling him in.
He pushed into me slow, giving me the whole of him by degrees, and I felt every inch of it, felt my body open around him and take him and draw him on, one patient inch and then another, the stretch and the heat of him going deeper by the breath until there was nothing of either of us left outside the other and he was seated all the way home, as far into me as a man can get into anyone.
And I did not go anywhere. I did not slip off to the far room, I did not brace, I did not keep one hand on the door.
I stayed. I met him with my hips and my hands in his and my eyes open on his, and I let him feel me take the whole of him with nothing held back anywhere in me for the first time in my adult life.
It was not the fire of the first time or the grief of the last. It was the thing underneath both, the thing they were always standing in for, two people with no armor left choosing each other with the only honesty the body has, which is that it cannot lie about wanting.
He moved in me slow and deep and I rose to meet every stroke of him, my legs hooked around him and my mouth at his throat, and the pleasure of it built toward unbearable and also somehow beside the point, because the enormous thing was that I was there for all of it, undefended, spending the one thing I had sworn my whole life never to spend, which was the need for another person, and finding that the spending did not empty me the way I had always been terrified it would.
It filled the room. It filled the space where the exit used to be.
He gathered me up against him and drove deeper and I let him, I wanted him deeper, closer than I have ever let a living soul come to the middle of me, and not for a single second did I reach for the wall that was not there anymore.
When it took me the second time I did not turn my face away to hide it, the way I have hidden every true thing I ever felt.
I let him see the whole of it, my face coming apart with no one left manning the guard.
I said his name and I let him watch me mean it, and he followed me over with my name breaking out of him like the last word of a prayer he did not know he had been saying his whole life, everything he had spilling into me while I held every shaking inch of him, and we held on to each other in the wreckage of everything we had survived and made, and became, for one long moment, a single thing that no war and no father and no wolf-lesson could ever take apart.
After, I lay against his chest with his heart going steady under my ear, and I waited for the old thing to come, the reflex that has ended every soft moment of my life, the cold voice that says get up, rebuild, map the door, no one stays.
I waited for it. It did not come. And in the place where it had always been there was only the enormous quiet weight of him around me and the strange new certainty that had no evidence and needed none.
He was going to be here.
I have fallen asleep beside a great many dangers in my life, one hand always off the edge of the bed where the weight would be.
I have never once fallen asleep certain.
I have never closed my eyes on another human being and known, all the way down where the sixteen-year-old still keeps her watch, that the person breathing beside me would still be there fighting when I woke, that I could set the whole crushing weight of the vigilance down and someone else would hold the door.
I set it down. For the first time in my life, I set the whole of it down.
And I slept, all the way to the bottom, defended by nothing but him.
And when the gray came up in the window and I surfaced out of the deepest sleep I have had since I was a child, before I even opened my eyes, I felt it, the arm still around me, the heart still steady, the man still there, awake before me, keeping the watch I had spent twenty-two years believing no one would ever keep for me.
He was there. He was still there.
He was always, from that morning on, going to be still there.