"You okay?" I ask.
"Yes." She's breathing hard. Her eyes are huge, her pupils blown. "Yes. Don't stop."
"Sadie. I need you to hear something."
She holds very still with her hands in my sweater and her mouth wet from mine.
"If at any point you want me to stop, you say stop. Not ‘maybe’ or ‘I don't know.’ Stop. And I will stop. I don't care where we are. I don't care what I'm doing. Stop means stop. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Say it back to me," I urge with my forehead pressed against hers.
"Stop means stop." Her voice is steadier than I expected. "I understand."
I kiss her again, walking her backward as I do it. Three small steps, my hand at the small of her back to hold her steady. I get her to the edge of the bed and I sit down on it with her standing between my knees, because I am not going to loom over her in her own home the first time I touch her.
She looks down at me.
Her hair is a mess around her shoulders. Her mouth is swollen. My hands are at her hips, over the sweater, and I can feel the warmth of her through the wool. I tilt my head back and I look up at her and wait.
“I don’t have a whole lot of experience." She says it quietly. Her hands are on my shoulders and her fingers are trembling a little. I understand what she's telling me in the plainest language she has. She's telling me that the map of her body has one man's handwriting on it and that same man made her question her sanity.
I take her hands off my shoulders. I bring them between us and I press my mouth to the knuckles of one, then the other.
"Then we go slow," I say. "As slow as you need. Every piece of this. You tell me when to move forward and you tell me when to stay where I am. That's the rule for tonight."
She nods, and begins to take her sweater off, lifting it from them hem and pulling it over her head before dropping it to the floor beside her feet. She is wearing a white cotton tank beneath it that hugs her curves tightly.
I don't move. I don't reach. I sit on her bed with my hands loose on my thighs, and I let her see me look at her, and I let her decide what comes next.
She reaches for the hem of the tank.
"Sadie."
"Let me," she says, and her voice is low and careful. "If you don’t, I'll lose my nerve."
She pulls the tank up and off. Her bra is plain cotton, beige, the kind a woman buys in a three-pack at a store where she is counting every dollar. There's a small, faded strawberry birthmark on her ribs. It suits her. A red bump in the shape of a rose petal.
Her arms wrap around her without thinking, covering the birthmark.
I reach up and take her wrists, moving them away slowly, and press my mouth to the mark.
Her breath catches.
"You don't ever have to hide anything from me," I say against her skin. "Do you understand?"
She blinks at me a few times, weighing my words before saying, "Yes."
I take my sweater off the way she took hers off, one pull, and I drop it beside hers. The bandage on my bicep is still there, clean white tape over gauze from this morning, and she looks at it the way she looked at it in the exam room, professional for one second, and then she looks at the rest of me.
Her mouth opens slightly as her eyes take in my tattoos, the smattering of dark hair my chest, the width of my shoulders.
She reaches behind her, and then her bra is sliding forward, landing on the floor between us.
I stand, lifting my hands to her arms, pressing against her when my lips come to hers. This time the kiss is hungrier, hotter, and still taking every ounce of control not to turn into something too big for her.
I turn us around and encourage her down to the bed, kneeling over her with my weight on my hands and my knees, not touching her anywhere yet, just looking.
