I kept going.
Slow to start, getting the measure of it, watching her face for what she needed and finding it there because she wasn't managing any of that either—her face giving me everything in real time.
‘Still think I’m the groundskeeper?’ I said.
She laughed. Punched me on the shoulder. I laughed too, and then I found the angle and she stopped laughing.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Exactly there.’
I stayed exactly there.
She was warm around me and every time I pushed in she made a sound at the back of her throat. I pressed my mouth to her hair.
‘I’ve wanted you since the first minute I saw you,’ I said.
She went still. Then her hands tightened and she pulled me in closer, and she turned her face into my shoulder.
"Can I—" she started.
"Yes," I said.
We worked out the logistics together. She ended up above me with her hands flat on my chest, and I had my hands on her hips, and I had my eyes on her, her hair completely Texas by now, her face open and unheld and fully hers, and said: "Take what you need."
She did.
I kept my hands at her hips, not directing, just there, and she found her rhythm and ran it. She started slow, working out what felt right, and I let her work. When she changed the angle my hands tightened on her hips. She did it again. “What you’re doing to me, baby,” I began, and then she moved and I stopped talking. She shifted. I felt that too and said yeah. She did it again. “You feel so fucking good I can’t think straight,” I said. She did it again.
I watched her face. This was the part I was going to keep: Jules Tully above me in the lamplight with nothing managed, completely present, her own. Her eyes found mine and we held that for a moment, the eye contact in the middle of it, nowhere else to look, and I knew exactly what this was. I wasn't going to say it tonight. But I knew.
I got a hand between us and found her clit, worked it in time with her movement. She said something that wasn't a complete sentence. Her rhythm got urgent and I stayed with it. “That’s it,” I said. “I’ve got you.” She said my name and then she came—above me, head going back, one hand braced on my chest—and I held her through it, and when she was done she had her eyes on mine, completely there, nothing between us.
"Dutch," she said.
"Yeah," I said.
She started to move.
I put my hands on her hips and let the last of my patience go and then I was done holding anything back, and that was that. Twenty seconds, maybe a few more. Not my most measured performance on record and I was entirely at peace with it.
WE LAY THERE NOT TALKINGfor a while. She was against my side—her face against my collarbone, her hand flat on my chest, some combination of the two—and it didn’t matter which.
The curtain moved in the east window. The property was quiet out there. The band had finished. The cicadas were in full voice. The night was doing what May nights do in Texas when the day is finally done.
"Twenty-four," she said eventually.
"I know. I said I'd verify."
"You were very thorough."
"I appreciate the feedback," I said.
She made a sound that might have been a laugh and turned her face into my shoulder. I put my arm around her and she settled in closer and we stayed there in the lamplight.
HER BREATHING WENTslow and steady and then settled into the rhythm that means sleep has taken over for good.
The lamp was still on.
"I am not casual about this," I said, quiet, into her hair. "I want you to know that."
