“What are you feeling?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Your touch is…it’s all so foreign to me,” she says, voice hushed. “Like…I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Me either,” I admit, honest in a way I don’t recognize from my old life. “But I’m not going anywhere right now.”
Her eyes shine and her lips curve upward.
I kiss her—slow, patient, a steady cadence instead of a scramble. She leans up into it, and I feel her hand slide around the back of my neck, her thumb finding a rhythm at my pulse like she’s calming herself bycounting me.
I whisper against her mouth and she shivers. “I love the way your breath hitches when I kiss you.”
She says, “I like it when you kiss me… but I keep waiting to mess it up.”
“You can’t mess this up.” I drag my nose along her cheek, the curve of her jaw. “It’s all about staying in the moment.”
I explore in inches—her jawline, the dip beneath her ear, the slope where her neck meets her shoulder. Each time I pause and ask; each time she answers in a sound that makes my chest go tight.
“Here?” I murmur, brushing my mouth down the line of her throat.
“Yes,” she says, the word a sigh that slides through me like a heatwave. She tilts, offering more, and my self-control hits a wall I have to breathe through. I keep it slow. Not because I’m a saint. Because she deservesslow. She deserves to feel chosen at every single step.
“Matt,” she whispers, one hand fisting in the duvet, the other tugging at me until I settle half on my side, half braced above her, so she has weight and space. Safe, not pinned. Present, not crowding.
I thread our fingers and press them back to the pillow, just like she liked before. “You’re still in control.”
She nods. “I like… when you hold my hand like that.”
“Copy that.” I lace them tighter. “What else?”
“I like when you… talk,” she says, embarrassed by how earnest that sounds. “When you tell me what you’re doing. I don’t feel lost then.”
I could kiss her for that alone. “I can talk.” My mouth curves. “I can coach.”
She snorts a laugh that turns into a gasp when I glide mypalm down her side again, slower, letting the heel of my hand warm her through her shirt.
“Breathe,” I say, matching her inhale with mine. “In through your nose, out through your mouth. Don’t chase it. Let it come to you.”
She mirrors me, pupils wide, her chest rising in time with mine. “Like this?”
“Perfect.” I mean it. Christ, I mean it.
The self-recriminations try to crowd back in—her brothers, the job, the age gap, the way my body has been running on reserves I don’t like admitting—but none of it holds in the same room as her trust. None of it is louder than the sound she makes when I trail a line of slow kisses down to her chest. I kiss the bouncy mounds of flesh, careful not to get close to the nipple. I want her desperate for my touch. She arches and shimmies on the bed, attempting to move where she wants my mouth.
“Tell me more,” I ask, my voice rough with need.
“I like… when you slow down right at the spot that makes me want to rush,” she says, discovering it as she speaks. “I never knew that part.”
“Slowing down is how you feel everything,” I say. “Rushing is how you miss it.”
She looks at me like I said a thing she needed to hear in places that have nothing to do with tonight. I feel it land. I catalog it for later, something to come back to and talk about. Does she feel she’s been rushed through life and hasn’t been able to stop and smell the roses?
I move carefully, sitting with my back against the headboard and bringing her up with me, settling her across my thighs so she has height, leverage, and my shoulders to hold on to. She blushes at the new angle, then relaxes when sherealizes I’m just… there. Breathing with her. Letting her look at me the way I’ve been looking at her.
“Better?” I ask.
She nods. “I don’t feel so… observed. I feel… with you.”
With you. The words knock around in my ribs like they’re searching for a home. I grip her hip and squeeze once, a promise.
