Chapter Twenty-One
The plates are done and the lamps are down to the one low level and Graham is on the couch with a folder of drawings open on his knee.
I come back from the bathroom in the camisole and the seamless pair and I don't take my end of the couch.
I cross the room and I go down on the floor between his feet and I put my hands flat on his thighs.
He looks up from the drawings. He isn't surprised. He's never surprised. He just slides the folder off his lap onto the arm of the couch, easy, no hurry in it, making the room I came for.
"Hi," he says. Low.
I don't say anything back. There's nothing to ask him for.
He didn't call me over. He didn't pat the floor by his knee like he does some nights.
I got up off nothing and crossed the room and put myself here because this is where I wanted to be, and the wanting got here before he lifted a finger, and that's the new part, the part I don't turn over too long.
I used to wait to be walked down the hall.
Then I stopped needing to be walked. Now I'm the one who starts the walk, and starting it feels like the closest thing to a gift I've got to give.
He rests his hand on the top of my head. Not steering. Just weight. The good weight.
"Go on, then," he says. Like he already knew what I came in the room to do. He did. That part never bothers me anymore. It's one of the things I like best about him, that I never have to explain the reach before I make it.
I work his belt open. Slow, because there's no clock on this and I don't want one.
He watches me do it, one arm along the back of the couch, settled, a man letting a thing happen that he's glad to have happen.
I get him out and he's already half there, heavy in my hand, thick like he is, more than my hand can close around, the way he has always been in this apartment.
My own hand looks small on him. It always has.
I stopped minding the comparison a long time ago.
Tonight I go looking for it on purpose. I hold him and I feel how much of him there is and I let the fact of it settle the useless small thing in its shell between my legs, and the settling is warm, and it's mine, and nobody put it there.
I lean in and I kiss the base of him first. Not the tip.
The base, where the shaft meets him, and then up the underside slow, one kiss and then the next, taking my time getting there.
This isn't the fast version, the version where I get him off because he wants off.
He hasn't asked for anything. That's the whole point of tonight.
I want to do the long one. I want to give him the kind of thing you only give somebody when nobody's making you.
"There she is," he says, quiet, above me.
His thumb moves once at my hairline. The warmth in it lands a half-beat after the words, the way a light in the next room comes on a moment after you've already found the switch in the dark.
I feel the small gap in it and I don't read anything into it.
It's just how he is. I go back to what I'm doing.
I work him with my mouth the way he taught me and the way I've made my own since.
I take him deep and hold him there until my eyes go wet and my throat opens around him, and then I come back up for air and go down again, and I don't rush the coming back up.
In between I use my hands and my lips on the parts of him my mouth can't cover.
I kiss down the side of him. I take his balls one at a time, gentle, the way I learned worship is gentle, and he shifts and settles deeper into the couch, and the small sound he makes is worth more to me than anything the front of me could ever have done for anybody.
That's the thought that comes up, plain, and I let it stay.
The front of me was never going to do this for a person.
It was never going to make anyone settle into a couch and go easy.
The little thing behind the pink shell couldn't earn a sound like that if it had ten years to try, and it had ten years, and it never did.
This does. My mouth does. The part of me that opens and the part of me that kneels, those do the work the man's part was always too small and too quiet to do.
I go looking for the shame in that, the old spike, the thing that used to send me up to float on the ceiling, and it's there, it's always there, and it doesn't send me anywhere now.
It pools low and warm and turns into more of the thing that's already running me.
I want it. I reach for it. I press my tongue flat under the head of him and I think the smallest, truest word I've got for what I am down here and I let it sharpen everything.
Clitty. Mine to think now. I set the snag myself and I ride the little drag it leaves and it makes me kiss him deeper.
"Look at you," Graham says. Warm. Not moving, not pushing my head, just watching me down there with his arm along the couch. "You didn't used to know what your mouth was for."
"I know now," I say, off him for a second, my lips against the side of him. My voice comes out low and easy. There's no float in it. I'm all the way in the room. "I like knowing."
"I can tell." He lets his hand rest heavier on my head. "Keep going. You're doing it right."
I keep going. I take him back down and I stay down longer than is comfortable because the discomfort is part of what I'm giving, the water in my eyes and the stretch of my jaw and the small helpless sounds I make around him that I don't try to hide.
He gets to have all of it. That's what devotion is, I think, kneeling here with him filling my throat.
It's giving somebody the parts of yourself you can't dress up.
I used to keep everything tucked and managed and hidden, the shame and the size and the freeze, a whole life spent making sure no one saw the small true shape of me.
Down here I hand it over on purpose. Here's the thing I am.
Here's the mouth. Here's the part of me that works.
I give it to him and he takes it like it's his, because it is, and being taken like that is the warmest I ever am.
He lets me set the pace, and after a while he stretches out into it, sliding down into the couch and letting his knees fall open, giving me more of him to get at.
He doesn't guide me anywhere. He just makes himself easy to worship and lets me do it, and that, him going loose and open above me while I work, undoes me more than anything he could say.
"Don't do anything," I say, low, off him for a breath. "Just let me. I've got it."
"I know you do." His hand leaves my head then and comes to rest along the back of the couch with the other one. Both arms up and back, all of him open, nothing on me, nothing steering. "Take your time. I'm not going anywhere."
So I take my time. I go back to the base of him and work up slow, learning him by heart the way you learn a thing you love.
I mouth along the thick vein on the underside.
I hold him in my hand and rest him against my cheek for a second just to feel the size of him there, the plain weight of it against my face, and then I turn my head and kiss him there too.
I take his balls one at a time again, unhurried, my tongue soft, the way he taught me worship is soft and the way I mean it now on my own.
He makes the low easy sound and his thigh shifts under my hand and the whole of him settles another notch into being served, and I would kneel here an hour to feel him do that again.
I press the front of me against his shin while I work him.
On purpose. The little caged nothing nudged up against his leg so I can feel the two of us laid right next to each other.
His in my mouth, filling it, more than my mouth can hold.
Mine tucked locked against him, doing nothing and needing to do nothing, a thing I live inside and reach for myself because the reaching is part of what I'm giving him.
I press it closer to prove to myself I'd have it no other way.
The plug is seated deep from this morning.
It's been in all day, background, how it lives now.
Kneeling like this, folded down over him, working, it stops being background.
Every time I move to take him deeper the plug shifts in me and pulls at something low, and the low thing starts to build, slow, on its own, with nothing touching the cage and nothing needing to.
I know this build now. It's the only one I get.
It doesn't come from the front. It comes from the part of me he trained to answer, from the fullness and the kneeling and the giving, and it climbs while I worship him and I don't chase it and I don't stop for it either. It isn't the point. He's the point.
It lets go while I've got him deep in my throat.