Chapter Eighteen
AVIANCE
I've thought about what I want this to feel like.
Not obsessively — not the way I used to rehearse things, used to script my own emotional responses so I wouldn't get caught feeling too much. Just — clearly. With intention.
I want it to feel like I'm here. I want to be in my body the whole time, not somewhere above it watching to see if I'm doing it right, not performing anything, not managing anyone's ego or managing my own anxiety about whether I'm wanted.
I've been wanted, I know now, in the wrong key for a long time.
Jayceon's hands are warm through the fabric of my dress and he is looking at me the way he looked at the grain of the walnut that morning in the studio — with full attention, with pleasure that is also respect.
"Tell me what you want," he says.
Just like that. No theater. No leading question dressed up as interest.
"I want to not be in my head," I say.
He nods. "Okay." He slides one hand up my back to the zip of my dress. "Can I?"
"Yes."
He unzips it slowly, with deliberate care, and the fabric loosens and he pushes it from my shoulders and it pools at my feet, and I'm standing in my apartment in my underwear in front of him and I feel — not exposed. Seen. Specifically and willingly seen, which is entirely different.
He touches the curve of my shoulder. My collarbone. The swell of my breast through the thin fabric.
"Still okay?" he says.
"Jayceon." I reach for his jacket lapels. "I will tell you if I want to stop. I'm not fragile."
He smiles. Takes my hand from his lapel and presses it flat against his chest, and I can feel his heartbeat — fast and steady.
"Neither am I," he says.
I push the jacket off his shoulders and reach for his shirt buttons. He lets me work through them unhurried, and when his shirt opens I run my palms over his chest, his ribs, the plane of his stomach, mapping him the way I map a new space — with attention, with the intention to remember.
He unclasps my bra. Cups my breasts in both hands, thumbs brushing my nipples, and I exhale sharply and he watches my face as he does it again, slow and deliberate.
"I want to take my time," he says, low.
"Take it," I say.
He walks me backward to the bed and lays me down and kneels over me, and for a moment he just looks — not performing reverence, not making it strange, just looking at me the way someone looks at something they're grateful to have near them.
Then he bends and kisses my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast, my nipple, and I arch into him and my hands find his hair and I stop being in my head because my body takes over the way it should, the way it's supposed to, the way it hasn't in longer than I can name.
He works downward — his mouth hot against my ribs, my stomach, the jut of my hip. He hooks his fingers in my underwear and looks up at me and I lift my hips and he pulls it off.
He looks at me for a moment.
"Tell me," he says.
"Your mouth," I say. "Please."
He dips his head and his tongue moves against me and the sound I make is nothing I'd have let myself make a year ago — raw and unguarded — and he responds to every one of them, reading me the way he reads wood grain, knowing where the pressure should go, where to be gentle and where to press.
I come with my fingers in his hair and my back off the bed and his name in my mouth, and he holds me through it, and when I come back to myself he is moving up my body, his lips at my jaw, my cheek.
"Okay?" he says, low.
"More than okay," I say. I reach for him, find him hard against his trousers, and he inhales sharply. "I want you," I say. Clear. Certain. "I want you inside me."
He reaches for his wallet on the nightstand — he'd set it there quietly at some point, and the forethought of that, the consideration of it, makes something in me warm in an entirely different register.
He rolls on the condom and settles between my thighs and looks at me one more time — that same full-attention look — and I bring my legs up around his hips and pull him in.
The first moment is its own kind of breath. Full and present.
He moves slowly at first, deep and deliberate, his forehead against mine, his hands braced on either side of my face.
I move with him, finding the rhythm, and the whole thing is — I think of the walnut table, of the sensation of knowing someone made this, of feeling the material.
That's what this is. I can feel that someone is here.
Specifically him, specifically me, specifically this.
He lifts himself to watch me and I look back at him without looking away — I don't look away — and he picks up the pace and I grip his shoulders and the pleasure builds sharp and insistent and I say yes and there and don't stop and he follows every instruction with complete attention, adjusting the angle, pressing deeper, one hand moving between us to touch me where I need it most.
I come the second time with my face turned into his neck and his name against his skin, and I feel him follow — three deep strokes and then he's holding himself inside me, shaking slightly, his breath against my hair.
We stay like that for a while.
Neither of us moving.
Heartbeats slowing.
Eventually he shifts his weight, disposes of the condom, and comes back and pulls the sheets up around us and puts his arm around me and I lie against his chest and the night is very quiet and the apartment is the specific kind of warm that means someone is in it.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey," I say.
"You were in your body the whole time."
I laugh. Short and real.
"I was," I say.
He presses his lips to my hair.
"Good," he says.