“It’s two in the morning. Why are you up?”
“You left the bed, and I want you back in it.”
My sigh is heavier than I’d like it. She doesn’t need to know I don’t sleep much these days. “I’m not sure I will sleep.”
She smiles again. It starts slow and changes the temperature of the room. “Who said anything about sleep?”
I know that tone. I like that tone. But I haven’t heard it in over a month out of her. Odd to hear it now.
When I cross the room, she does not step back. I set my hand on the small of her back as we travel the hall together. She leans into my touch, and it feels like unearned trust.
I don’t deserve the life I am building. But I will cling to it all the same.
In our room she draws the curtain a little and lets the moon take a step inside. The lamp is off. We do not need it. I set the monitor on the nightstand and turn the volume up a notch. The green light answers. There’s a stillness to the early morning hours that settles something deep inside my chest.
Or maybe that’s her doing.
She faces me and lifts her hands to my shirt. I do the same with hers. We undo the barriers the way you work a knot in a necklace you want to wear. Patient. Interested. No rush. Bodies remember what the brain tried to file away under “Future good times.”
We have not touched like this since the night at the club. It was not a rule. It was how grief and relief argue without words. Welived in the same bed and learned how to breathe there again. Companionable, but platonic healing.
Now her palms travel my chest and the last month steps back to let this minute through. The first contact lights a fuse that was waiting, not hiding. I kiss her and the taste is home.
I take my time. I let my mouth map the line of her jaw and the thin healed scar that is part of our history. I trace the hollow at the base of her throat with a slow kiss. She breathes in and I feel the breath as if it were mine. Her hands slide to my shoulders and anchor there. When she rises on her toes to meet my mouth again, I do not make her reach far. I bend down to her.
I’d fall to my knees for her, if she’d let me. But she’s too close for that now, and I like the press of her body against mine too much to stop. She is soft and deliberate, all yes with no rush in it.
I taste every part of her in a slow dance of mouths and skin. A shoulder. A breast. The inside of a wrist. I plant wet kisses down the length of her, then back up again, until my hips are nestled between her thighs. I drag my thumb over her bottom lip as I stare into her eyes. “Are you sure?”
Her lips slide into a faint smile as she wraps her legs around me and pulls me in. “Yes.”
We do not rush. We let it arrive. When it does, we stop talking. The rest is ours.
The wet glide of our bodies is the thing dreams are made of. Unhurried, languid. Her body stretches to take my length, and all I can think of is how fucking lucky I am to be here, now, with her. How loved I feel by her. How she is a miracle.
My body aches with less poetry and more urgency, and I speed up by a breath. When she arches beneath me in ecstasy, I drive harder, longer strokes into her body. I need to feel her come on me the way I need oxygen. Her pleasure is required for me to exist.
When she breaks, I join her, too enamored of her to even think of holding out. We lie quiet while our heartbeats climb down. The window breathes a thin wind. The monitor hums, steady and small. Her hair spreads across my shoulder and tickles the skin there until I want to laugh and do. She draws a lazy line over my arm and stops when she finds the scar on my forearm. The pads of her fingers are gentle where the tissue still pulls if I move too fast.
Her voice is still breathless from our fun. “Does it bother you?”
“It reminds me?—”
“Of him?”
“Of you. Of the knife you didn’t have to use. Of your willingness to use it, and save our family, even if that meant losing me. Of how much I love you for that.”
She pushes up on an elbow and studies me. “You have been watching the boys at night.”
“It is a comfort I allow myself. To see with my own eyes that they are safe.”
“You guaranteed that a month ago.”
“It’s not only their physical safety I worry about, Mina. I worry about what I can’t see.” A breath saws out of me as I lie back and stare at the ceiling. “What if…what if my father is in them? His malice?—”
“Your father is dead. He doesn’t live in them. Those boys are yours?—”
“Vitaly was mine too.”
