He kisses me again, and this time there's no careful in it at all. His hands slide from my jaw down to my waist and pull me in. I go up onto my toes and press into him. His breath comes out unsteady against my mouth, which I file away as a small victory.
He isn't rushing — just paying attention in a way that makes my pulse loud in my ears and my knees less reliable than I'd prefer. His mouth moves to my jaw, the curve of my neck, and I tip my head back and grip his shoulders. He finds a spot below my ear and I make a sound I didn't plan on making, and the low sound he makes in return does something significant to my nervous system.
He has my shirt untucked and I have his. He pulls back to look at me — actually look, the lamp catching his eyes, nothing guarded in them. The light throws warm gold across the quilt and his face, and everything feels very real and very present, which is not how this usually goes for me. Usually there's someversion of me that goes a little absent, manages from a slight distance. Right now there is no distance. I am completely here.
He reaches for the hem of my shirt. I reach for the buttons of his. His fingers find my zipper.
Which does not move.
He tries again. The zipper makes a small strangled noise and holds its ground with the conviction of something that has decided today is not the day.
Beck tries a third time, methodically, with full focus, because Beck Delano does not accept operational failures from inanimate objects.
The zipper does not care.
"Of all the —" he starts.
"It does this," I say.
He leans back and looks at it. "What do you mean it does this?"
"The track is a little bent. I have to pull it from the bottom first and then — here." I reach back and do the maneuver, the slightly embarrassing two-handed shimmy that fixes it. The zipper releases with a sound like it's conceding under protest.
Beck watches this entire process.
"You have a broken zipper," he says.
"I have a finicky zipper."
"On clothes you wear regularly."
"It's my favorite shirt."
He looks at me for a moment, and the corner of his mouth moves. "Only you."
"You have a stegosaurus on your nightstand."
The warmth moves through his eyes, fond and exasperated and wanting, the whole complicated stack of it. His hands find my hips. We are not arguing about the zipper anymore.
The shirt goes. His does too, and I get my hands on him properly for the first time and take a moment to appreciate that Beck Delano is, objectively, a lot to deal with — broad shoulders, the flat plane of his stomach, the kind of arms that come from actually doing physical work rather than performing it. He watches me looking and doesn't say anything, which is very him, but his hands tighten slightly on my hips.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi," he says, and there's something in his voice that wasn't there before.
He reaches behind me and unclips my bra with a competence that should be illegal. His hands are on my skin, his mouth follows, and somewhere in the middle of it my ability to track time — or anything else besides the weight of him and the sound of his breathing and the way he says my name — stops being something I bother with.
His mouth closes over my breast and I exhale sharply, my fingers sliding into his hair, holding on. He takes his time about it — of course he does — and by the time he works his way down my stomach I've stopped pretending to be composed about any of this. My jeans come off, his follow, and then there's nothing between us. He pulls back just enough to look at me in the lamplight.
I look back. I let him see me doing it.
He settles beside me, one hand tracing from my collarbone down to my hip like he's learning the geography of me. I turn toward him and get my hands on his chest, his stomach, lower. The sound he makes against my temple is low and rough and extremely satisfying.
"Okay?" he asks, his mouth at my throat.
"Very," I say.
His hand slides between my thighs and I stop being capable of further commentary. He is deliberate about this the way he isdeliberate about everything — unhurried, attentive, coming back to what makes me pull at his shoulders and say his name in a voice I don't entirely recognize. I tell him so and he does it again. At some point I am making sounds that would embarrass me under any other circumstances. I find I don't care at all.
