She's moved on from Nish to the new sculpture—the two yielding forms, the piece she's been building since the show. She's talking with her hands the way she does when the work excites her, and her sweater rides up when she gestures and I can see a strip of skin above her waistband and the sight of it—that inch of bare skin, nothing, a fraction of her body—sends heat through me so fast it nearly shows on my face.
This is what she does to me. Not the grand gestures—the small ones. An inch of skin. The way she tucks her hair behind her ear. The angle of her throat when she tilts her head back to laugh. I've spent twenty years maintaining control over my body, and this woman dismantles it with a strip of bare waist above her jeans.
She catches me looking. Stops mid-sentence.
"What?" she says.
I don't answer with words. I come around the island. She watches me move—her hands lowering to her lap, her body going still in the way it does when the air between us changes. She knows. She always knows. Her body reads the shift in mine before I've closed the distance, and I can see her responding—the slight parting of her lips, the quickening at her throat, the way her thighs press together on the stool.
I stop in front of her. Her knees are on either side of my hips, the stool putting her face level with my chest. She tilts her head back to look at me—that angle, that throat—and I put my hand on the back of her neck and feel the shiver run through her entire body.
"Come with me," I say.
I lift her off the stool. Her legs wrap around my waist, her arms around my neck, and I carry her down the hallway. Her mouth finds the side of my throat—not kissing, just pressing there, breathing me in, and the heat of her breath on my skin is almost enough to make me stop walking and press her against the wall right here.
I don't. The bedroom. I want her in my bed, spread out, where I can see all of her, where the late afternoon light comes through the windows and turns everything gold.
I set her on the edge of the bed. She sits, looking up at me, and the image of her—on my bed, in her sweater and jeans, her bare feet on my floor, her face tilted up with that expression that's half trust and half dare—something tightens in my chest that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with how dangerous this is, how breakable, how close I am to ruining the only thing that's ever mattered.
I push the thought down. Not now.
I open the drawer. The silk tie. She sees it and her breath catches—recognition, memory, the echo of the first night when she held out her wrists and I learned what her trust looked like.
"Hands," I say.
She holds them out. Palms up. The crooked finger. The wrong angle. Evidence of something done to her by hands that were not safe.
Mine are going to be safe. Every time. Without exception.
I wrap the silk around her wrists. Slowly. Two loops, a firm knot with room. I test it—watch her face, read the micro-expressions. Her eyes close. Her lips part. A breath escapes herthat carries the weight of surrender, and the sound of it goes straight through me.
I pull the sweater up and over her arms, working it past the restraint. She's wearing a black bra—simple, cotton—and I reach behind her and unhook it and slide it off and she's bare from the waist up, arms bound above her head, beautiful.
She is beautiful. Not the word I denied her—not the sanitized, distanced analysis I retreat into when the feelings get too large. She's beautiful. Her body is the body of a woman who works with fire and steel, marked and scarred and muscled, and every inch of it is gorgeous to me. The curve of her breasts. The ridge of her collarbone. The flat plane of her stomach. The scars on her arms that tell the story of a life spent making things. She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen, and the beauty is inseparable from the damage, and the damage is inseparable from the strength, and I want her with a ferocity that terrifies me.
I lower my mouth to her sternum. Her heart hammering underneath. I press my lips there and feel her body bow toward me—involuntary, desperate, the reaction of a woman whose skin is starving for contact.
I move down. Her ribs. Her stomach. The ridge of her hip. She's making sounds—soft, breathless, sounds that bypass the careful control she maintains in every other area of her life. These sounds are unguarded. Unperformable. Real, in a way that nothing else in my life is real.
I unbutton her jeans. Pull them down, her underwear with them. She lifts her hips, helping, and the collaboration is its own form of intimacy—a woman participating in her own unwrapping, choosing this, choosing me.
She's naked beneath me, wrists bound, body open, and the sight of her empties my lungs the way it did the first time. I'm not getting used to this. I don't think I'm capable of getting used to this—the trust, the exposure, the magnitude of what she's offering.
I strip. Shirt, trousers. Her eyes follow me—that artist's gaze, the one that records and assesses and catalogs. I feel her looking at the scar on my side, at my chest, and the vulnerability of being seen by those eyes is its own kind of exposure. She reads bodies the way she reads metal. She'll find every flaw.
I come back to her. Lower myself over her, and the contact—skin against skin, the full length of her body against mine—is a detonation. The heat. The softness underneath the muscle. Her legs wrapping around me, pulling me closer, her bound wrists straining upward.
My mouth finds her throat. Her collarbone. The hollow where her pulse beats fast and visible. I work my way down—slower than she wants, I can tell by the way her hips push toward me, by the frustrated sound in her throat—and the slowness is deliberate. Not cruelty. Worship. I want to know every inch of her body with my mouth before I give her what we both want, because the knowing is the point. The attention is the offering.
I reach her thighs. Press my mouth to the inside of one, feel the muscle tense and then release, her legs opening for me. I look up the length of her body—bound wrists, heaving chest, her face flushed and her eyes closed and her bottom lip caught between her teeth—and the desire in me is so enormous that it obliterates everything else. The guilt, the deception, the cameras, the files. Gone. There is only her. Only this.
I lower my mouth and she cries out.
The sound fills the room. I hold her hips and work her with everything I've learned—the rhythms, the pressures, the specific patterns that make her body sing. She's responsive in a way that wrecks me—every touch producing a reaction, every shift of pressure drawing a new sound, her body an instrument that I'm playing with my mouth and my hands and every ounce of attention I possess.
I bring her to the edge and hold her there. The tightening. The quickened breath. Her thighs trembling around my head, her wrists pulling at the silk, her voice breaking on a syllable that might be my name.
"Please," she says.
