She makes a startled, delighted noise as I pick her up, both hands around her waist, her feet leaving the floor entirely.
She wraps her legs around my hips, which is ambitious given the geometry involved, and laughs into my shoulder, and the laugh is warm and entirely unafraid and I carry her through to the bedroom with her glasses pushed sideways against my collar.
My bed is reinforced. Every piece of furniture I own is reinforced, which has always been a point of mild embarrassment when humans visit.
I reach over and take her glasses off, very carefully, and set them on the bedside table. She squints up at me with the expression of someone recalibrating her visual data.
"I can still see you," she says. "You're very large. Hard to miss."
"Yes," I say.
I pull my shirt over my head and watch her face go through several rapid expressions in sequence, which I find I am nolonger inclined to interpret anxiously. She is not alarmed. She is the opposite of alarmed. She reaches up and puts her hands flat against my chest, against the scars, and her palms are warm and very small and she presses them in like she is taking a measurement, and I stay completely still and let her do it because her touching my scars is something I have never been able to receive without enormous internal commotion and I am working through it.
"You stopped hunching," she observes quietly, her fingertips still resting against the raised ridge of an old scar that runs diagonally across my sternum.
"I stopped hunching," I confirm. Her hands are still on me and I am acutely aware of every point of contact between her skin and mine.
She tilts her head back to look up at me properly, and her eyes track upward, cataloguing the difference in our heights now that I am not folding myself into a smaller, safer shape. "You're much taller like this," she says, and there is no anxiety in her tone, only a kind of fascinated observation, as though she has just discovered a particularly interesting variable in an equation she thought she had already solved.
"Seven centimetres, approximately," I say, because I have measured it, because I measure everything, because knowing the exact dimensions of my own body when I allow it to exist at its full height versus the compromised posture I maintain in public spaces is the sort of data I cannot help but collect.
She looks up at me and something in her expression goes very soft and very fierce simultaneously in the specific combination she has when she is feeling something large and has decided to act on it rather than file it away. She sits up on her knees on the mattress, which brings her to approximately my chest height, and begins to work the buttons of her blouse.
She drops the blouse. She reaches back and removes the rest of it, all of it, with the calm practicality of someone who has made a decision and is executing the plan, and I look at her in the full, unguarded way I have been prohibiting myself from looking at her because I was always terrified of what the looking communicated about the depth of my interest. I am done prohibiting things. I look at her completely.
"There," she says, and there is a slight flush across her chest and her chin is lifted and she is trying very hard to look composed, "that's the primary data. Run your numbers."
I put my hands on her hips, properly, without the fraction of restraint I have been building into every touch since the first night, and feel her breathe. I pull her forward to the mattress and the physics of the size difference mean she tips immediately into my chest, her hands catching against my ribs, and I close my arms around her and hold her there for a moment, just that, just the reality of her against me at my actual size without any apology built into the angle.
She turns her face up. I bend and find her mouth and the kiss goes deep immediately, none of the careful graduated progression I have been managing, just depth and weight and want, and she makes a sound that is specifically the sound she makes when something exceeds her expectations and she is revising her forecast upward in real time. I have memorised this sound. I plan to continue collecting instances of it.
I lower her back onto the mattress and the frame absorbs the weight without incident, as it was designed to do, and I follow her down and brace over her and for a moment I am just looking at her, the full visual reality of the size differential that I spent months trying to mitigate and minimise, her slight frame under the architecture of mine, my forearms bracketing her head. The old anxiety moves through me briefly, reflexive, the calculationof how easily I could accidentally, how much care is required, how the margin for error is essentially zero.
"Stop calculating," she says.
I look down at her.
"I can see you doing it," she says. "Your expression goes very precise when you're calculating. Stop."
"There is a legitimate?—"
"Narod." She puts her hand flat against my jaw, her thumb against my cheekbone, and looks at me with complete seriousness. "I am not breakable. I am not a teacup. I am a woman who audits corporate fraud for a living and once chased a bus for four blocks in heeled boots and won. I can handle you."
The specific accuracy of this assessment, and the confidence with which she delivers it, does significant structural damage to my remaining hesitation.
I lower myself and let her take my weight, carefully still, always carefully, but not the apologetic careful, not the performing-smallness careful, the real kind, the kind that is about her specifically rather than about my own terror of myself. She exhales under me and her hands press against my back and the contact is vast from her perspective, I know this, the sheer surface area of what she is touching, but she does not treat it like a problem to manage. She treats it like something she wants. Her fingers trace the line of each scar with attention, cataloguing me the way I catalogue everything, and it undoes me in a way I have no professional framework for.
The sounds she makes as we move together are very specifically hers, particular and real, and I listen to all of them with the full attention I give to data that matters, which is the only category of data I have any genuine interest in. She is precise about what she wants, which I appreciate deeply, she does not require me to estimate, she tells me, with her hands and occasionally in words, with the calm specificity of someonewho has done a full needs assessment and is presenting her requirements clearly.
At one point she says, directly into my ear, "you are extremely good at this for someone who spent three hours practicing small talk in a mirror," and the laugh that comes out of me is real and unguarded and she grins against my shoulder and the intimacy of it, the specific warmth of being laughed with rather than at, adds an additional layer to something that is already operating well above my projected parameters.
I am thorough. I am an actuary. Thoroughness is not a professional trait that ceases to apply in personal contexts.
She is also thorough, which I respect enormously.
Afterward, she lies in the curve of my arm, which is the only practical position available given the scale, and my arm is essentially the width of her torso, and she has pulled the blanket up and is doing the soft, settling breathing of someone who has moved rapidly through satisfaction into the early stages of sleep, and I stay very still so as not to disturb the process. Outside, the rain has quieted to a steady low percussion against the windows. The city makes its nighttime sounds, muffled and distant.
I look at the ceiling of my own apartment, which is at the correct height, which has never required me to duck, and the familiarity of it is different with her here. The room is different with her in it. Every room I have ever occupied has been organised around the project of making myself fit, of reducing my footprint, of calculating the minimum space I need to take up to avoid alarming anyone. This room, at least, has always been correctly sized. I built it that way precisely so I could have one room where the calculation didn't apply.
