27. Lily #2
I had to sit down on the edge of the bed for the jeans, because my legs had stopped volunteering. He crouched in front of me and got the button and the zip, and then he put both hands flat on my thighs and simply left them there for a second, warm through the denim, and looked up at me.
"You are going to have to lift," he said.
"I know how it works."
"Then lift."
I lifted, and he drew them down and off, and he did it without any performance in it at all, which is somehow more than any performance would have been.
He knelt to get my socks off, which no man has ever done for me before or since, and he took my foot in one hand and looked up at me from the floor, and I nearly said it right then.
Kneeling is a terrible thing to do to a woman who is trying to keep a secret.
Then he stood up and looked at me for a while with the lamp on and nothing left in the way, and I made myself sit there and be looked at, with my hands open on the blanket, not covering one single thing.
"You are shaking again."
"I know."
"It is not the cold this time either."
"No, it isn't."
Then I did something I had not planned. I put his palm over my breast, and then I flinched.
It was not a large flinch. It was nothing. It was one small intake of air, the kind nobody notices.
He stopped completely.
"That hurt you."
"It didn't."
"Lily." He had gone very still, and his hand had come away, and I understood that I had just handed him a fact and that he was turning it over. "You are tender."
"I'm freezing and you've got hands like a bricklayer's. Come back."
It took two seconds, perhaps three. Somewhere behind those brown eyes a man who reads people for a living put a small piece of information in a drawer, and then he chose me over the drawer, and he came back.
I have been through that moment more times than I can count.
He had it. He had it in his hand. If I had let one more second go by he would have got there on his own, and I would not have had to say it at all, and the rest of it went differently in my head every time.
I took his mouth instead, and I did it on purpose, to stop him thinking.
He came back gentler than before. That was worse, and I had earned it.
He put his mouth where his hand had been and did it so carefully that it made my eyes sting, barely any pressure at all, just heat and the flat of his tongue and his beard against the underside of my breast, and the tenderness in me turned into something else entirely under that kind of attention.
I got a fistful of his hair and held on and heard myself make a noise I did not authorize.
"There," he said, against my skin. "That is not pain."
"No, it isn't."
"Say it if it turns."
"It won't turn. Don't stop doing that."
He was slow with me, and gentle in a way that had nothing careful about it, which is a distinction I did not know existed until him.
He worked down the length of me the way you might read a letter twice, over the ribs and along the crease under them and across my hipbone, and he stopped at every place that made my breath change and stayed there until I was making a fool of myself about it.
He put his mouth on the inside of my knee.
He put it on the soft skin high up on the inside of my thigh and let me feel him breathe there for a while without touching me anywhere it counted, and I have never in my life been so close to begging a man for anything.
"You're doing this on purpose."
"I am."
"Why?"
"Because you have been holding something all day," he said, "and I would like ten minutes where you cannot."
That is what he thought he was doing. He was trying to empty my head out for me as a kindness, and it very nearly worked, and there is no possible way to explain what it did to me to hear him say it.
Then he put his mouth on me properly and I stopped being able to think about anything at all.
He took as long as he wanted. That is the thing about him.
There is no hurry anywhere in that man once he has decided on a task, and he laid one heavy hand flat across my hip to keep me where he had decided to keep me and used the other underneath, two fingers curled up into me, slow and deep and utterly relentless while his tongue did something patient and unbearable higher up.
I got both hands into his hair. I said things I do not remember.
The whole afternoon went out of me, the calendar and the strip and the paper towel and the six days on his clock, and for a while there was nothing in the world but a warm room and a lamp and the back of his head between my knees.
When it broke it went through me in long slow waves rather than all at once, and it went on and on, and he stayed with me through every part of it and only stopped when I put a hand flat on his forehead and pushed, because I could not take one more second of being that seen.
I lay there with my heart going and the ceiling swimming and I thought, quite clearly, in words: remember this one. That is not a thing a person should ever have to think in the middle of it.
Then I made him lie down, and I took my turn, and I was not gentle about the asking.
"Move up. On your back."
"You are giving orders now."
"I've got a list and you're on it. Move."
He went, and he put both arms up behind his head like a man submitting to a search, which I did not expect and which very nearly finished me.
I straddled his thigh and started at the top and went down him with my mouth in no particular hurry, over the scar under his ribs on the left because that one is mine now, over the old silvered furrow along the top of his shoulder, over the line of hair below his navel.
He has a way of going absolutely rigid and silent when something is working, and after three weeks I had learned to read the silences the way I read a monitor.
Then I took him in my hand, and then in my mouth, and I watched his face the entire time.
I want to be accurate about this because it is the part I go back to.
There was no power in it, not really, or there was, but that was not what it was for.
I was learning him. The weight of him on my tongue and the sound he makes low in his chest when he has stopped being able to help it and the way one of his hands came down out from behind his head and settled on the back of my neck without any pressure in it at all, just resting there, warm, trusting me completely, which is a thing he does not do and had no idea he was doing.
His whole chest went rigid and his head went back. I have never felt more powerful or more terrified in my life, because every single thing I was doing was also a goodbye, and I was the only one in the room who knew it.
"Lily, stop, or this is over."
"That's the general idea."
"Not like this." His voice had gone to gravel. "Come up here."
So I came up here.