The Honest Answer to a Different Question #3
She did not stop him. She got a hand into his hair instead and held on and let him take twenty minutes over something she would have taken five over on Friday, and it was not generous and it was not service.
She understood the difference somewhere in the middle of it.
He was not doing this for her. He was doing it because he wanted to know exactly what she looked like getting it, and the lamp was on so that he could.
She came the first time like that, with her knees open and her eyes shut after all, and when she opened them he had come up on one elbow and was watching her face.
“Don’t say anything,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to.” He pushed her hair back off her forehead, which was damp, and left his hand there.
“You were absolutely going to.”
“I was going to in about four minutes.” He got a hand under her and turned her onto her side and came in behind her, and then stopped there and did nothing else at all. “Not yet, though.”
He held her like that, his mouth at the back of her neck, his cock against her, one hand flat on her stomach, until she said his name. Then until she said it again. The second time it did not come out level.
“Now?”
“Now.”
He turned her back over first. She kept that, afterward, out of all of it. He had her exactly where he wanted her, facing away, and he turned her onto her back before he did anything, because he wanted her face.
After that he did not hurry either, and it was worse, and she told him so.
“You’re doing it on purpose.”
“Yes.” He did not change anything about what he was doing while he said it.
“Say why.”
“No.” He got her leg up over his arm and went in deeper on the next one and watched her take it. “You’ve said enough true things tonight. I’ll do this one.”
So he did it, at a pace that gave her nowhere to go, with the lamp on and his eyes on her and both her hands eventually up over her head against the headboard where he had put them and where she chose to leave them.
She heard herself asking. She had not planned to ask for anything and she asked twice, and the second time she used his name, and he gave her exactly what she asked for both times and did not make her wait for it, which was the least merciful part of the whole evening.
She came the second time with her spine off the bed and her eyes open, because by then keeping them open had stopped being his idea.
“Stay with me.”
“I’m here.” Her eyes had shut again somewhere in the last minute.
“Look at me while you say it.”
She looked at him and said it, and he pushed into her slowly enough that she heard the sound she made from somewhere outside herself, and there was no counter to brace on and no urgency to hide inside and nowhere to put her face.
He was not rougher than Friday. He was not rougher at all.
He was simply not going to let a minute of it happen without her being looked at.
An hour after learning that she wanted something enormous and had spent years not saying so, he had stopped talking altogether and was making the whole of the point with his hands and his mouth and his eyes on her face.
She came with his forearm under her shoulders and her hand fisted in the sheet and her eyes open, and it went on longer than she was prepared for, and afterward she lay there with one knee still shaking and could not say anything for a while.
He didn’t fill it. He waited that one out too.
“That was different.” It took her a while to get to it.
“Yes.”
“Why.”
Alexander took a moment.
“Because you told me what you want,” he said, “and it wasn’t me, and I found I didn’t mind.”
Jo lay in the lamplight and did not move.
“You should mind a little.”
“I’d mind if it were another man. I don’t mind a building.” She heard the small dry pull of his mouth. “I’d have minded in March. I want to be accurate about that, because I don’t get to claim the improved version for free.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t.”
He fell asleep first, which almost never happened.
Jo lay awake in a room with a lamp still on and did the only arithmetic left available to her.
He had asked her the widest question he had. She had told him a true thing she had never told anyone, including Dani, including Reagan. She had watched it move him. He had declined to solve it, which was the single hardest thing she had ever asked him for and she had not even had to ask.
And every word of it had been load-bearing in the other direction too. Because now he knew she wanted to run something. Now, when she told him — Thursday, next week, whenever she found the hour — he would not be blindsided by the wanting. He would only be blindsided by the six days.
She had, without deciding to, spent the evening laying the groundwork for a confession she had no date for.
She could not get past that, lying there with his arm across her. Not that she had lied. She had not lied; she had been scrupulous, and she could have produced a transcript. It was that the most honest hour of her adult life had turned out to be useful.
Corinne Lasker’s folder was nine feet down the hall in a bag by the door.
She got up at ten to two and turned off the lamp.