“Riley, I’m being serious.”
“So am I.” She pauses. “B, you’re describing a man who let you be quiet, didn’t ask you to perform, and treated the hardest thing about your past like a fact instead of a tragedy. And you can’t sleep.”
I say nothing.
“Honey,” she says, and her voice is so gentle my throat aches. “That’s exactly what it’s like.”
I press my lips together. My eyes sting and I don’t want to cry on the phone at midnight over a man I’ve spoken to twice.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I whisper.
“You don’t have to know how. You just have to not run away from it.”
We talk for another ten minutes. She asks his name, and I tell her, and she says Rhett Hawthorne with the slow, savoring appreciation of someone tasting an expensive wine. She asks what he looks like, and I tell her tall and broad and scarred, and she makes a sound that I choose not to interpret. Then she tells me to breathe and to stop overthinking, and to call her tomorrow.
“Riley?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“Go to sleep, B.”
She hangs up. The apartment is quiet again. The ceiling is still there. The clock says 12:23.
I’m not going to sleep.
It starts with his hands.
I’m not trying to think about them. I’m trying to think about nothing, to empty my mind the way the meditation apps always say to, let the thoughts float past without attaching to them. But his hands keep floating past and I keep attaching.
The size of them. The scars across his knuckles, with the calluses I noticed when he stacked the firewood, thick and rough in the places that come from years of gripping an axe handle, a saw, a steering wheel. The way he held the split wood. Firm. Sure.
I think about what those hands would feel like on skin.
My skin.
The thought lands in my belly and spreads. A slow, liquid heat that has nothing to do with the blanket or the room temperatureand everything to do with the image behind my closed eyes: Rhett’s hand on my hip. The rough drag of calluses against the curve of my waist. The span of his palm, wide enough to cover the places I’ve spent years learning to hate.
I should stop, but I don’t.
His voice invades my thoughts. That low, rough sound that seems to start somewhere deep in his chest before it reaches the air. Me neither. Two words. That’s all he said when I told him I wasn’t good at loud, and those two words did more to my nervous system than any full sentence has done in years. What would that voice sound like closer? Against my ear. Against my neck. Saying things quieter and rougher than anything he’d say on a porch with the door open.
My hand moves beneath the blanket. Slowly. Not deciding. Just drifting. Fingertips trailing down my stomach over the cotton of my shirt, and the touch feels different because it’s not mine anymore. In my head, the hand is larger. Rougher. The fingers are scarred and sure, and they know where they’re going.
I think about his size. The way he filled the doorway at the clinic. The breadth of his shoulders, the solid weight of him, the way the air in the room seemed to reorganize itself around his body. I think about that weight above me. Beside me. The press of his chest against mine, his legs between my legs, and my breath catches.
My fingers slip beneath the hem of my shirt and flatten against my bare stomach, and the heat there is startling, shocking me enough not to worry about the roundness I carry. Real. I trace upward, and when my hand finds my breast, the touch pulls a sound out of me that I press into the pillow. Soft. Involuntary. No one has touched me in so long that touching myself feels like a confession.
I think about Rhett’s mouth. The set of his jaw. The way he looked at me on the porch, guarded and careful, and how hisguard slipped, just for a second, when I asked about the quiet. What would it take to make it slip further? To crack him open the way he’s cracking me open, without even trying?
My hand slides down. Over my stomach. Past the waistband of my underwear. And when I touch myself, the relief is so sharp my back arches off the mattress.
I’m wet. Embarrassingly, achingly wet from nothing but thoughts of a man I’ve spoken to twice, and the realization should make me stop, but it doesn’t. It makes me press harder. Circle slowly. My fingers know what I need better than my brain does right now, and what I need is Rhett Hawthorne’s hands on my body, his rough voice in my ear, the weight of him holding me down in a way that doesn’t feel like being trapped but like being found.
I think about his fingers instead of my own. Thick. Calloused. Sliding through the wetness with a patience that has nothing to do with hesitation. He wouldn’t rush. He would take his time the way he took his time stacking firewood, reading the grain before he placed each piece, and the thought of that deliberate attention makes my thighs tighten and my hips press up into my hand.
I think about the scar on his face. The tattoos on his arms. All the damage he carries and doesn’t hide. I think about pressing my mouth to the scar and I think about his hands in my hair and I think about what it would sound like if he said my name.
