"My dad is your best friend of thirty years."
"Yes." The word carrying everything it means. Choosing to carry it anyway.
"Are those objections," I say. "Or are you just making sure I know what I'm doing?"
"The second one," he says.
"I know what I'm doing."
He crosses the threshold in the biggest “fuck it moment” known to history. He cups my face in both hands and kisses me and I was wrong about everything.
I want to be clear about this: I have been doing this work for a while. I know the sounds and the shapes of desire. I know every escalation, every register. I have been genuinely, professionally confident about all of this.
His mouth is on mine and none of that applies.
He kisses me slowly. It’s the kind of slowness of a man who has been waiting a very long time and is not rushing the first sixty seconds of finally having what he's waited for. Both hands warm on my jaw. His thumbs tilting my face up. He tastes like outdoor air and something underneath it that I'm going to spend a lot of time thinking about later and I make a sound I didn't plan and grip the front of his shirt in both fists.
My knees do something unreliable. Briefly and without my permission. I am choosing not to examine this because I've had functioning knees for twenty-one years and I refuse to believe that Declan Maguire's mouth is where they decide to retire.
"Hi," I say, against his mouth.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. The edges of a smile. The rare one. I've seen it maybe twice in my entire life and it hits somewhere the kissing hadn't reached yet.
"Hi," he says.
Then he walks me backward through my apartment.
I'm not keeping track of the geography very well. His mouth is on my throat and then my jaw and then my mouth again.His hands are in my hair. I am recording everything with the attention of a woman who has been waiting for this and is not going to miss a single second of it: the warmth of his chest against mine, the size of his hands when they move to my waist, how it feels to be wanted by someone who wanted you for months before they'd admit it.
There's my bed behind my knees.
He pulls back and looks at me.
I look up at him. The silver at his temples catching the light, the gray in his stubble, the dark eyes that have been holding mine across dinner tables for years and are holding them now from about eighteen inches away and I’m suddenly forgetting how to breathe.
This is Declan Maguire,says the part of my brain that is still technically functional.In your bedroom. Looking at you like that. Your dad is going to love this development.
The rest of my brain has stopped listening to that part entirely.
"Billie." His voice low.
"I'm good," I say. "I'm really good. Please don't stop."
"I just want to look at you."
Nobody has ever said that to me and meant all of me. Not the performance version, not the constructed version, not BrattyBaby or my dad's good daughter. He means the lamp on my face and my hair wrecked and whatever's happening in my expression right now that I cannot control.
He takes the hem of my shirt and pulls it over my head in one smooth motion, and I reach for his shirt, and my elbow catches him somewhere between his ribs and his jaw, and I say "shit, sorry" and then I laugh. Can't help it. One short surprised sound because I have fantasized about this moment in considerable detail and in none of those fantasies did I elbow him in the neck.
He kisses the laugh right off me and I stop caring about graceful entirely.
He is unhurried in a way I was not prepared for.
I want to be clear about what "not prepared for" means in this context. I have thought about this. In detail. With the imagination of someone who has been performing sex on camera for eighteen months and owns a frankly impressive collection of battery-operated research equipment. I thought I had a thorough mental model of what Declan Maguire in my bed would be like.
I did not have a thorough mental model. I had a rough sketch and the real thing is oil painting.
He takes his shirt off and I run my hands across his shoulders and his chest and the planes of his stomach, the dusting of silver hair on his chest, and the reality of him is different from any version I'd built. Solid in a way that registers in my hands before it registers in my brain. Warm in a way that makes me want to press against him just to get more of it. His hands on me are careful and purposeful and they know exactly where they're going in the way that only comes from decades of paying attention to what someone else needs. Not guessing.
