"I want to be very clear about something before I take you upstairs." His thumb traces the line of my jaw. "We stop the moment anything is wrong. The good kind of intensity, I want all of it. The other kind, you tell me, and I stop. I won't bedisappointed, and you won't apologize. Those are the terms. Do you accept them?"
I think about every man who ever made me feel like my body was an inconvenience. Every doctor who told me the pain was in my head. Every time I learned to swallow a wince so I wouldn't be a burden.
And I think about this man, who has spent six weeks memorizing the difference between my flinch of pain and my shiver of want so precisely that I trust him to know my body better than I do.
"I accept your terms," I say. "Now stop talking and take me upstairs before I change my mind about how romantic you are."
He doesn't carry me this time. He takes my hand and he leads me, and there's something about the walk up the stairs, the deliberate unhurried pace of it, that's almost worse than being carried. Every step is a promise. By the time we reach the bedroom door I can barely breathe.
Inside, the light is low and warm. He turns me to face him and just looks at me, the way he always does.
"Stop assessing me," I say.
"I'm not assessing. I'm appreciating. There's a difference. You taught me the difference."
He reaches for the hem of my T-shirt and lifts it, and the fabric stretches and slides, and he eases it over my head and lets it fall. Then the leggings which he slides over my hips and thighs in a way that allows the palms of his hands to stroke over my skin. I stand in front of him and I don't reach to cover anything, because the way he's looking at me makes covering up feel like an insult to us both.
"Six weeks ago I told you I was going to be thorough," he says, walking me backward toward the bed with slow, certain steps. "Repeatedly. For a very long time."
"I remember. I wrote it down."
"You did not write it down."
"I committed it to memory. Same thing. I have an excellent memory for promises I intend to collect on."
The backs of my knees hit the mattress and I sit. He follows me down, easing me back against the pillows with a care that hasn't left him even now, even with whatever is burning behind his eyes. He braces over me, his weight on his forearms, and he kisses me, and this time there's nothing careful in it at all.
This is the kiss he's been holding back for six weeks. It's deep and consuming and it has intent behind it, and I feel it everywhere, in my chest, in my hands, in the place low in my body that has waited so long to mean something good. I fist my hands in his shirt and pull, and buttons give way, and I get my hands on the warm bare plane of his chest and feel his heart going hard and fast beneath my palm.
"You're wearing too much," I say against his mouth.
"You're impatient."
"I've waited too long to feel good in my own body and six weeks for you specifically. I think I've earned impatience."
Something shifts in his expression at that, goes darker and softer at once, and he sits back on his knees and strips the ruined shirt off and the rest follows until there's nothing between us. He settles over me again and the first full press of his skin against mine pulls a sound out of me I didn't plan to make.
He takes his time, using his hands and his mouth, slow and reverent. He pays attention the way only he pays attention, total and unhurried, reading every breath and every shift, and eachtime I make a sound he files it away and comes back to whatever caused it.
When his mouth finds the soft skin below my navel near the still-pink surgery scars, he pauses. He presses a gentle kiss there, to the place that used to be a battlefield.
"This body," he says quietly against my skin, "carried you through everything. I'm going to spend the rest of my life making sure it only ever knows this from now on."
I press the heel of my hand against my eyes because I will not cry during sex, I will not, and he feels it, and he moves back up to kiss the corner of my eye where the tear escaped anyway.
"Good kind or bad kind," he murmurs.
"Good kind. The best kind. Don't you dare stop."
He doesn't.
When he finally moves over me, when there's no more space left between us and he's watching my face for the exact thing he's spent six weeks learning to read, I expect the old fear. The bracing. The part of me that has always associated this with something that would cost me.
It doesn't come.
There's only him, and the slow careful press of him. The moment my body opens to it without a single note of the old pain, just fullness and heat and the overwhelming rightness of it, I understand what he meant about replacing the association.
"Okay?" His voice is wrecked, his control hanging by something thin.
