Troy made a sound against my mouth and kissed me back with six weeks of accumulated wanting that I felt in my molars. His mouth was hot and tasted like blood from the split lip and underneath that something I'd been wondering about since the first night he'd walked back through my door. I walked him backward until his hips met the counter edge, not hard, just enough to anchor us both, and his hands moved from my hair to my face and cupped my jaw with a gentleness that was at war with everything else about him.
I pulled back a half inch. Just enough to look at him properly.
His eyes were dark and wet and he was breathing through his mouth and the bruising across his jaw made something in my chest do something complicated that had nothing to do with guilt.
My thumb found the cut above his eyebrow. Traced the shape of the bruising there with the same attention I'd been disguising as first aid for the better part of an hour. He went completely stillunder the touch, the way a wild thing goes still when it's deciding whether to trust the hand reaching for it.
I pressed my lips to his forehead. Held them there.
His exhale came out slow and shaking against my collarbone.
Both my hands moved to his ribs, careful of the worst of the bruising, just holding him, and I felt the moment his body stopped bracing for impact. The wire tension he'd been carrying since the alley releasing by degrees, muscle by muscle, until he was leaning into me instead of squared off against me.
His hands slid from my jaw to my neck, fingers spreading wide across my shoulders, and he turned his face into mine. Nose against my cheekbone. Mouth tracing the line of my jaw without quite kissing it, just breathing against the skin there, learning the topography of something he'd apparently been thinking about as long as I had.
I turned my head and found his mouth again.
Slower this time. Nothing frantic about it. His lips parted and I felt him exhale through his nose and my hands tightened fractionally against his ribs and he made that quiet sound again, the one that felt private, the one that didn't have an audience.
His fingers worked into my hair. Not pulling, just holding. The pads of his fingertips pressing against my scalp in a way that sent something warm all the way down my spine.
I kissed the corner of his mouth. His cheekbone. The unbruised side of his jaw, feeling the scratch of stubble against my lips. His head tipped back slightly, giving me the column of his throat, and I pressed my mouth to the pulse point there and felt it hammering against my lips.
His hands tightened in my hair.
I worked my way back up. Bit his jaw gently, nothing like the fighting earlier, just pressure, just presence. He turned his face into mine and his mouth caught my bottom lip and he sucked itslow and the sound I made against him wasn't something I could have stopped.
His forehead dropped to mine. Both of us breathing hard in the quiet kitchen. The only sounds the refrigerator's hum and the distant city and the ragged pull of air between two men standing in the wreckage of every wall they'd built.
My thumb traced his lower lip. Swollen from the fight and from me and warm under my touch. His eyes were closed, lashes wet, face open in a way I'd never seen it. Every year of careful armor stripped down to just him, just this, just the specific reality of his weight against my hands.
He turned his lips into my palm and pressed a kiss there that went through me like something breaking.
I pulled him back in. His mouth opened against mine and his whole body pressed closer and my arms wrapped around him properly, ribs and all, and he made a sound against my lips that tasted like relief.
Then his hands shifted. Moved from my hair to my shoulders, grip changing from pulling-close to something else entirely, and before I'd registered what was happening he'd turned us and walked me backward three steps and pressed me down onto the table's edge.
I sat. Not because he'd forced me. Because my legs made the decision before my brain caught up.
Troy stood between my knees looking down at me and the expression on his face was something I'd never seen on him before. Not the careful blankness he wore in public. Not the anger from earlier. Something rawer than both. Focused. Certain. Like he'd been waiting to look at me exactly like this for longer than either of us had admitted out loud.
His hands went to the hem of my shirt.
He lifted it slowly. Not tearing, not rushing, just drawing it up by inches while his eyes tracked every inch of skin that cameinto view. I raised my arms without being asked and he pulled it over my head and dropped it somewhere behind him and then just looked.
His hands spread flat across my chest. Palms warm, fingers following the lines of the tattoos across my shoulders, tracing the ink down my arms with the deliberate attention of a man reading something he'd been wanting to read for a long time.
“Fuck,” he said quietly. Not to me. Just to the room.
His thumbs pressed into the muscle of my chest, feeling the shape of it, and my jaw tightened. Being looked at like this, being touched like this, by him, by Troy, was something I didn't have a category for yet.
He leaned down and pressed his mouth to my collarbone.
“Hhh—”
Lips dragging slow across the bone, then lower, tracing the tattoo that spread across my left pec, following the lines of the ink with his tongue like he was memorizing the pattern. His hands slid down my ribs, counting them, careful of nothing on his own body but exquisitely careful of mine.
“You have no idea,” he said against my chest, low and rough, “how long I've been thinking about this.”
