"I'm sure," she whispered, and moved toward the bed.
I followed her and pushed the thin straps from her shoulders and she pulled her arms free and the negligee sagged against her body before I drew it down and let it fall. She reached up and worked my tie loose and then moved to my buttons, and I helped her with my shirt and my clothes joined hers on the floor and I backed her to the bed and laid her back against the pillows and her hair went wild around her head and she immediately covered her breasts with her hands.
"Don't." I moved her hands gently to her sides and held them there and looked at her. "I want to see you."
She let me look, which I understood cost her something, and I looked at her properly in the warm lamplight and thought that I had no words for what I was seeing so I stopped reaching for it.
"Slide back," I said, and she did, moving up against the pillows, and I followed her and claimed her mouth with mine and felt her hands come into my hair and thought that this was going to be the best night of my life.
I ran my hand across her breast and she inhaled sharply and arched into me. I kissed down her neck and ran my tongue over the curve of her breast before taking her nipple into my mouth and she moaned, low and unguarded, and her fingers tightenedin my hair, and I thought that sound was going to be the thing that ended me.
I let my hand move down her body slowly, learning the shape of her, and she moved under my touch in ways that told me she had given up managing her reactions, which felt like the greatest gift available. When I slid my fingers between her thighs she gasped and her hips lifted toward me and I held her steady and felt how ready she was and thought about what she'd told me in the hallway, that no one had ever touched her like this, and understood what it meant that she was here now.
I worked her slowly, learning what made her breath catch and what made her say my name and what made her grip the sheets and arch off the bed entirely, and when she finally fell apart under my hands she did it completely, with nothing held back, and the sound she made saying my name was something I intended to hear as many times as she'd give it to me.
I moved up her body while she was still trembling and she pulled me down to her and kissed me with a hunger that had been building for five days and I kissed her back with everything I had and felt her hands moving over me with increasing certainty and thought that there was the woman underneath the careful composure and she was extraordinary.
"I need to tell you something," she said against my mouth, her voice unsteady.
I pulled back and looked at her. Her eyes were dark and her face was flushed and she was looking at me with the expression she wore when she was about to say something that cost her.
"I haven't done this before," she said. She held my gaze when she said it, steady and direct, because that was who she was. "I wanted you to know."
I looked at her for a moment and felt the full weight of what she'd just given me settle somewhere permanent inside mychest. "Thank you for telling me," I said, because it was the right thing and because I meant it entirely.
I brought my hand to her face and kissed her slowly, with all the patience I had, and felt her relax into me by degrees, and I pulled back and looked at her and said, "We have all night. There is no hurry anywhere."
Something in her face loosened. "Okay," she said softly.
I kissed her again and took my time with her, building her back up carefully, learning every place that made her breath change and every sound she made and everything she was willing to give me, until she stopped thinking about what came next and existed only in what was happening right now.
When I finally pressed into her I watched her face the whole way, giving her every moment she needed, and she held my gaze without looking away even when her brow furrowed and a small broken sound came from somewhere deep in her chest. I went completely still and brought my mouth to her temple and her cheek and the corner of her jaw and told her she was perfect and that I had her and that we had all the time there was.
She breathed out slowly, a long deliberate exhale, and her body softened around me like a question being answered, and then she tilted her hips, unmistakably, and I moved.
She moved with me. And whatever I had expected from this night it wasn't this -- this particular feeling of rightness, of something finding its place, this woman who matched me in ways I was only beginning to have language for, who made sounds that were going to ruin me entirely, who dug her fingers into my shoulders and said my name like it was the only word she had left and meant it.
I took her apart slowly and thoroughly and she let me, which was its own kind of trust, and when she finally came it was with her whole body, long and shuddering, and I held her throughevery moment of it and felt something shift in my chest that I wasn't going to try to name tonight.
She pulled me back to her mouth afterward and kissed me with a tenderness that was different from the hunger of before, quieter and more deliberate, and I kissed her back that way and let myself feel it without managing it from a safe distance. She looked up at me with dark eyes and a smile I hadn't seen before, private and warm and entirely mine.
"Again," she said softly.
I laughed against her mouth. "Give me thirty seconds."
She laughed too, warm and real against my neck, and I held her and thought that I was going to hear that laugh for the rest of my life and that I was entirely at peace with that.
The second time was slower and deeper and she rose to meet every movement with the particular responsiveness of someone who had stopped thinking entirely, which was a gift from a woman who was always thinking. She wrapped herself around me and pulled me closer and said things I felt more than heard and I buried my face in her hair and let go of the last careful distance I'd been keeping between what I felt and what I showed.
When she came the second time she said my name once, clearly, like an anchor dropped, and I followed her over the edge with her name in my mouth and my arms holding her as close as I could get her and thought about my father telling me to be worthy of her and thought that I intended to spend a very long time trying.
Afterward we lay tangled in the warm dark and her head was on my chest and her breathing slowed into something easy and I ran my hand through her hair and looked at the ceiling and felt, for the first time in longer than I could remember, completely still.
"Con," she said quietly, the edge of sleep already in her voice.
"Yeah."
Her hand pressed flat against my chest, over my heart. "Thank you."
