Holland #3
He pulled my underwear down and off, and then there was nothing between us but the warm studio air and the city lights and the sound of our breathing.
He knelt between my thighs, and he looked at me, all of me, with an expression that was not hunger or awe or any of the words I'd been taught to expect.
It was just attention. Pure, undivided attention.
"You're sure," he said again.
"I'm sure."
He reached for the side table and pulled a condom from the drawer, "I laughed, a short, surprised sound that released something tight in my chest. "You keep those in your drafting table?
"Theo keeps them in the drafting table. He says it's optimistic."
"Theo's a pragmatist."
"Theo's a lot of things." He rolled the condom on with the same efficiency he'd used to unclasp my bra, and then he was above me again, his weight braced on his forearms, his face inches from mine. "Last chance. Tell me to stop, and I stop. No questions, no pressure, no—"
I pulled him down and kissed him. "Stop asking."
He entered me slowly, a single deliberate stroke that made us both go still. I gasped, and he dropped his forehead to mine, his breath coming hard. "Okay?"
"Okay."
"More than okay?"
“Don't stop to ask."
He laughed, low and rough against my throat, and then he moved, and the laugh dissolved into something else entirely. I moved with him. We found a rhythm that built slowly, deliberately, the way a good structure does—load by load, each piece set in place.
"There," he said quietly, and adjusted his angle, and I gasped. "Yeah." His voice caught somewhere in his chest, barely reaching me. "There."
His gaze was fixed on my face, tracking every shift in my expression, searching for what I wanted next.
When I turned my head, he turned with me.
When my breathing changed, he changed with it.
His hand found the small of my back and pressed, lifting me slightly, and the sound I made was not one I recognized.
"Stay with me, Hol,” he said. "I've got you."
I believed him. I believed him completely.
"Finn—"
"I know." He moved deeper, slower. "I know, baby.”
I came with my teeth against his collarbone and my hands fisted in the sheets above his shoulders, his name reduced to a single syllable I couldn't even finish. He followed a moment later, the sound he made almost pained, and then he was still, forehead dropping to mine, both of us just breathing.
He pulled out carefully, dealt with the condom, and came back. He didn't speak. He just gathered me against his chest, one hand stroking up and down my spine, and held me while the city lights shifted on the ceiling and my heartbeat found its way back to something ordinary.
I couldn't remember the last time I'd been held like that, without agenda or expectation. Maybe never.
"That was—" I said, but the word vanished.
"Yeah," he said. "It was."
I laughed, a sound so loose and easy it felt foreign. "So," I said into the quiet. "What happens now?
"I'm going to try very hard not to make this weird." He kissed the top of my head. "But I'm also going to tell you the truth, which is that I'm in love with you. I have been for years. And I'm not asking you to do anything with that information tonight."
I went still against his chest. "Finn."
"You don't have to say anything."
"I know I don't have to. I want to." I lifted my head and looked at him.
His face was unguarded, with no strategy in it.
No angle. No play. Just a man who had told me the truth and was prepared to wait for whatever I did with it.
"I don't know if I can be in love with you.
Or with anyone, not right now. I'm still in the middle of this.
Still figuring out who I am when I'm not—
"When you're not his stepping stone."
"Yes."
He didn't hesitate. "Then figure it out. Take whatever time you need. I'm not going anywhere. I've been here for ten years, Holland. I can wait ten more."
I kissed him. Not because I had words for what he'd just said, but because touch was the only answer I had to give.
We lay there while the city outside the windows shifted from amber to blue, the way it does in Chicago after ten o'clock when the office towers go dark floor by floor and only the residential lights stay on.
His hand was still moving on my spine. I was watching a single point of light on the ceiling that I couldn't locate the source of—some reflection off the lake, maybe, or a passing plane—and I was waiting for the shame to arrive. It didn't.
What arrived instead was the smell of drafting linen and the particular silence of a room full of unfinished work, and the weight of his arm across my ribs, and the thought that I had not once, in the last seven years, fallen asleep to the sound of someone else's breathing without first calculating what it would cost me.
I pressed my palm flat against his sternum. His heartbeat was slowing back toward ordinary.
I didn't know what came next. The theater restoration. The vellum. The blank title block waiting for a name. But the light on the ceiling kept moving, unhurried, and for the first time in years I didn't need to know yet.