I lift my head and meet her eyes. “Then be.”
She swallows. “Touch me like you’ve been thinking about it since Halloween.”
“Since before,” I say, because we’re telling truths, and her face changes in a way that makes the roof of my mouth ache. Not surprise. Recognition.
I sit back enough to see the zipper. “Can I?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, and the yes is clean.
I draw the zipper down with the care of a man disarming a trap he built for himself. Velvet yields; skin appears—warm, alive, imperfect in ways my hands memorize because I want to know her in exact, human terms, not as asilhouette I made into a myth. The dress loosens over her shoulders. I don’t strip it away. I let it slouch and I touch the new country revealed like a cartographer with good intentions.
My fingers find the ribbon’s phantom on her wrist; I bring it to my mouth and kiss the pale indentation that isn’t there anymore and always will be. She trembles. I do it again, slower, and say without words:I see the marks you carry. I will not carve where I cannot heal.
She sits up and pulls my shirt from my waistband with a stubborn, careful efficiency that makes me laugh against her shoulder. “Impatient?” I ask.
“Equal,” she says, and it’s the most arousing thing she’s said tonight. I get up long enough to strip the shirt and jacket cleanly—no rush, no show—and she watches like she wants to memorize the parts of me that aren’t perfect. She finds a scar on my left rib—old, shallow, puckered—and touches it with two fingers like she’s reading Braille. “From what?” she asks.
“Fifteen,” I say. “Board went wrong; I went through it. Andrew told me girls dig scars.”
She smiles into her lower lip and it feels like being blessed by a church I didn’t know I’d been attending. “He wasn’t wrong.”
We’re past conversational now. We’re inside the language of skin and breath and the small sounds people make when they let themselves be witnessed. I don’t narrate every move; I check in with cues we’ve already agreed upon. When she saysslower, I do. When she says my name, I listen for the note underneath it and follow that instead of the syllables.
There’s a point where care and hunger meet and shake hands. We arrive there together—me with my mouth at her collarbone, herwith her palms framing my face—and we both stop and smile, stupid and wrecked and sane.
“Still okay?” I ask.
“Better than that,” she says, voice rough with use. “Don’t be perfect. Just be mine.”
“Yes,” I tell her, grateful for orders I want to obey.
I lay her back and take my time. I don’t perform tenderness; I practice it. I count her breaths against my wrist. I match the pace to the way her eyes go unfocused and then snap back to me, like she’s making sure I didn’t disappear when she stopped holding the reins. I don’t. I stay.
When the room gets quieter—the city, the elevators, the HVAC, all of it—what’s left is the rhythm we built between two songs at a party and carried here under our coats. It’s steady. It’s ours. It’s the sound a body makes when it stops being a locked door.
She closes her eyes; I say her name and they open again. “With me?” I ask.
“With you.” She answers.
“When I touch you.” I say, voice low, even. “You stay right here. You let me lead. Clear?”
She nods, but that isn’t enough. “Say it.”
“Clear.” She breathes.
I don’t smile. Iapprove.
I move closer, stopping just inside her reach. The shiver running through her skin tells me she feels me before I even touch her—the heat between us a halo.
“Hands where I can see them.” Her hands settle. “Good. Now breathe.”
I start at her wrist, my thumb tracing along a vein until her breath stumbles. I’m not exploring yet; I’m claiming territory.
“You feel that?” I ask, glancing up to meet the weight of her gaze. She hums, low and wrecked. “That’s what waiting tastes like.”
I take my time. Always one move shorter than she expects. Every pullback is both punishment and promise. Slowly, I claim my way down, settling between her legs.
Her hand reaches for my shoulder, trying to ground herself as a tremor moves through her, thighs pressing together in reflex.
