“You’re beautiful,” he tells me.
I’ve been called beautiful before. By men in clubs who were looking at the eyeliner and my tight jeans, saying beautiful the way you’d compliment a car you wanted to drive. By my mother, who means a different thing by it — beautiful like be careful, beautiful like the world might punish you for this. I’ve heard the word so many times it stopped having meaning.
Mickey says four unnecessary words a week. So, when he uses a word like beautiful, I know he chose it carefully before saying it out loud.
Beautiful, from his mouth, means I see all of you and I’m not looking away.
“Fair’s fair.” I’m barely functioning as I tug the hem of his shirt. “Your turn.”
He grips the fabric and pulls it over his head in one motion. The shirt lands on the tile and his chest is bare. I stare openly and without apology, needing him to see that he’s wanted.
I reach forward and put my palm flat on his chest. His skin is scorching. His heartbeat slams against my hand hard enough that I feel it in my own palm.
His jaw flexes. Then something shifts behind his eyes. Not hunger exactly. More like a decision being made.
“Hop down,” he says.
I blink. “What?”
“Hop off the counter and turn around. Put your back to me.”
I slide off the counter. My bare feet hit the cool tile and I turn, giving him my back.
“Now sit down,” he says. “On my lap.”
I turn my head and look at him over my shoulder. “Sit on your lap? Are you sure about that?”
“Yeah. Come here.”
“Mickey, will I—I don’t want to hurt you. I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
“You’re a hundred and fifty pounds. I bench-pressed more than that. Sit down.”
“Mickey, what if I squash something important? Like your dick? And you don’t even know it? And then it’s flat forever?”
He chuckles. “You won’t.”
“You don’t know that. I might be only a hundred and fifty pounds, but those pounds are made of reckless decision-making and you’re inviting me to sit on your dick.”
“Benji. Sit. The. Fuck. Down.”
“Okay, if you insist.”
I lower myself carefully. His hands find my hips and guide me down. I settle onto his thighs, my back against his bare chest. His skin is against my skin from my shoulder blades to the base of my spine. The coarse hair on his chest grazes the smooth plane of my back. The solidity of him behind me, wide and immovable, is a wall of hard muscle that I sink into.
His arms come around me. Both of them. Wrapping across my chest and pulling me tighter against him until there is no gap between his body and mine. His forearms cross below my collarbones and his hands settle on my ribs, and neither of us moves.
“Finally,” he says into my hair. “This is where I’ve been wanting you forever. Wrapped up in my arms where I can touch you. Kiss you.”
I reach up and grip his forearms, one hand on each, because I need to hold onto something or I’m going todissolve. His arms are thick under my palms. These arms carry him everywhere his legs can’t. They lift him out of bed every morning. They lower him into the chair. They are the strongest part of him because they have to be.
Right now, they’re wrapped around me. Tight. Inside Mickey’s arms I feel held in a way that rewrites the word. Enclosed and protected. Like he drew a circle around me with his body and nothing on the outside can get in.
I learned early that safety was my own job. That nobody was going to step between me and whatever was coming for me. I built a life around that belief. I got so good at it that I forgot what it felt like to let someone else hold the weight.
Mickey’s arms remember for me.
His mouth finds the back of my neck. The first press of his lips against my nape sends a shiver straight down my spine. He kisses the spot where my hair ends and my skin begins, soft and barely there, just the brush of his lower lip against the sensitive skin. His breath fans across the dampness he leaves behind. Every tiny hair on the back of my neck stands up and a ripple of goosebumps cascades down both my arms.
