Brooklyn
Ican’t stop touching him, and I’ve stopped being ashamed of it.
It’s been two days since he broke down the door. Two days since he killed a man for putting a hand on me and then got down on the floor and held me while I came apart.
And in those two days I have become a person I don’t recognize. A person who follows her husband from room to room, who finds reasons to be wherever he is, who reaches for his hand the second he’s in range like a kid who got lost in a store and isn’t ready to believe she’s been found.
He doesn’t make me feel small for it. That’s the thing.
He just opens whatever he’s doing to let me in.
He pulls me onto his lap while he works, keeps one hand on me at the dinner table, lets me trail him into rooms a krye has no business letting anyone follow him into.
He never once says you’re being clingy or give me space.
Somehow he understands that the thing in me right now isn’t weakness, it’s a wound, and the only thing that closes it is the proof, over and over, that he’s still here.
Last night I woke up screaming with the shape of that closet door burned behind my eyes, certain the walls had closed back in around me. He was already awake, already turning me into his chest, already saying my name low and even until the real room came back.
He didn’t ask what I dreamed. He knew. He’s the one who broke the door down; he knows exactly what’s waiting for me every time my eyes close, and he held me until the windows went gray with dawn and never once treated a grown woman wrecked by a closet like it was something to be ashamed of.
Tonight the proof isn’t enough.
Tonight I get into our bed and I can still feel the closet floor under me, the gray taking me under, the two days of being alone with the worst version of myself, and the panic comes up out of nowhere.
I’m here, I’m safe, he’s right there, but my whole body is screaming that none of it is real, that I’m going to blink and be back behind that locked door, so I do the only thing that has ever made it stop.
I climb on top of my husband in the dark and I kiss him like I’m drowning.
He surfaces instantly, the way he always does, his hands coming up to my hips, and he must feel it in me, the shaking, the desperation that isn’t only want, because he pulls back an inch and searches my face in the dark.
“Hey.” His thumb strokes my cheekbone, careful of the bruise that’s finally fading. “Talk to me. What do you need?”
And that’s the thing I can’t do. I can’t talk, or name it, or ask for it like a normal person. So I just shake my head and press my forehead to his and grind down against him and beg with my body instead of my mouth. He goes still under me, reading me, the way he reads everything.
“Okay,” he murmurs. “Okay, baby. I’ve got you.”
He flips us. Gentle but absolute, my back to the mattress and his weight settling over me like the safest thing in the world. He takes his time getting me ready even though I’m already there, even though I’m pulling at him, frantic, because he won’t be rushed when it comes to my body, not ever.
He kisses me the whole time he opens me up, slow and filthy and unhurried, swallowing every desperate sound I make, two fingers working me until I’m shaking and slick and begging into his mouth, and only when there’s nothing left in me but the need for him does he line himself up.
And then he’s pushing into me, slow, that perfect ruinous stretch, the warm steel of him filling me up inch by inch until there’s no space left in me for the gray to grab, no room for the closet, nothing in my entire body but him, and I sob with the relief of it.
“There’s my girl,” he breathes against my throat. “I know. I know what you need.”
He starts to move and I lock my legs around him and my arms around him and hold on like the bed is a cliff edge, and it’s good, it’s so good, but it’s not enough. He’s not deep enough, not close enough, there’s still a half-inch of air between our chests and that half-inch is going to kill me.
“Lor.” It comes out wrecked. “Lor, please don’t stop fucking me. I just… I need—”
“More, baby. I know.” He gets an arm under the small of my back and lifts me into him, changing the angle so there’s nowhere left for him to go, so he’s as deep as a man can be.
He drops his chest flat to mine so there’s not a breath of space between us anywhere, skin to skin from my mouth to where we’re joined.
“I know what you need. You need me fused to you. You need us connected and you need to come multiple times. I got you. You’re mine. ”
And something in me breaks open. Surrenders.
The fight, the armor, the locked rooms, all of it, gone, because he said it, he named the thing I couldn’t.
He reached into the center of me and pulled out the exact shape of the need I’ve never been able to give words to and he’s giving it to me, all of it, without making me beg twice.
I come the first time almost immediately, clenched around him, crying, and he fucks me right through it without slowing, his mouth at my ear. “That’s one. Don’t you dare stop. I’ve got more for you.”
And he doesn’t pull back, doesn’t give me a second of the distance I’m terrified of, just keeps us welded together and works me back up before I’ve even finished shaking, his hand fisted in my hair, his heart hammering against mine.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, low and fierce, fucking the words into me. “You hear me? Two days alone behind that door, never again. There is no version of any night that ends with you alone, not as long as I’m breathing. I’m right here. I’m inside you. I’m fused to you. Come for me again.”
I do. Harder this time. My nails carving down his back, his name breaking apart in my mouth, and still he doesn’t stop, doesn’t separate us, keeps me full and held and connected for as long as my body can take it, because he understands.
God, how does he always understand? That what I need tonight isn’t pleasure, it’s proof. Proof that I’m not alone. Proof that someone in this world knows the exact shape of my gray and will climb down into it with me and not let go. Proof that I am wanted, and held, and his.
He rolls us without ever leaving me, settles my hips down over his so I’m astride him with his chest still sealed to mine, his hands spread wide over my back holding me down against him. All he says is “Again, Brooklyn. I can feel how close you are. Don’t think. Just give it to me.”
And I do, a third time, or a fourth. I’ve stopped counting as I shatter with my face buried in his throat and his name coming apart in my mouth, and even then he won’t let the connection break.
He just gathers me back down into him and keeps moving, slow and deep and endless, until the word multiple stops meaning a number and starts meaning a place I get to live inside, a place where I am never, not for one second, alone.
By the time he finally lets himself go, I’ve lost count, I’ve shed the gray, I’ve removed everything but the weight of him and the place where we’re joined and the slow hot flood of him filling me, marking me from the inside, his face buried in my throat and his whole body shuddering and a sound coming out of him that I feel more than hear.
He doesn’t pull out.
He never pulls out, not right away, and I used to think it was a control thing, a possession thing.
Tonight I understand it’s the same thing I need.
The staying, the connection, the refusal to let even an inch of air back in.
He stays inside me, soft now, both of us wrecked and sweating and breathing each other’s air.
I wrap myself around him and hold him there and I never want to move again.
“Don’t go,” I whisper. It’s the most naked thing I’ve ever said. “Just… stay. Like this. A little longer.”
“As long as you want.” His mouth moves against my temple. “All night. The rest of my life. Whatever you need, you have it. You’ll always have it.”
I believe him. That’s the part that should scare me and doesn’t.
I have spent my whole life braced for everyone I love to be a door that eventually closes.
And this impossible, dangerous man has spent two months and one broken-down door teaching my body something my head still can’t quite hold: that he is the one thing in my life that will not leave.
I lie there in the dark with him still inside me, and I let myself, finally, all the way, believe it.
And here, fused to a man who stole me, sated and safe and connected in a way I have never once been with another human being in my entire life, I let myself think the thing I have been refusing to think.
I love him.
I love him, the man who took me, the monster, the husband, the impossible person who reads me like scripture and kills for me, who gets down on closet floors and knows the exact shape of every dark place in me.
I don’t care anymore how it started. I don’t care which man he is. I love him so much I can’t breathe around it, and I’m going to tell him, tomorrow, when I’ve found the nerve, because tonight I’m too wrecked and too happy and too safe in his arms to do anything but feel it.
I fall asleep fused to my husband with his heart beating slow under my ear, deciding to give him my whole heart in the morning.