He sits on the edge. Because sitting is easier, because the hip prefers to negotiate from a seated position, because this is his body now — capable but editorial, willing but with footnotes. I stand in front of him. His hands are on my waist.
"You're shaking," he says.
"I'm not shaking."
"Your hands—"
"That's adrenaline. Different category."
He looks up at me. From here — him sitting, me standing — the geometry is the reverse of everything else. I'm tall. He's looking up. And his face is doing the thing where all the mechanisms are gone and what's left is just him, looking at me without deciding what to show me first.
"We can stop," he says. "Whenever."
I put my hands on his face. Both hands. His jaw under my palms.
"I'm nervous," I say. "Actual nervous. Not performance nervous. I don't have a plan for this."
"Good," he says. "My plans haven't been working either."
I lean down. Kiss him. His hands come up and pull me closer and my shirt comes off because neither of us decided it should but both of us wanted it to, and his eyes on me — moving slowly, not rushing it.
He inhales. The caught breath of someone seeing what they've imagined.
"The scar," he says. His fingers find the small mark on my shoulder — childhood, a swing set, six years old.
"It's nothing."
"It's specific." His thumb traces it. "It's yours."
His shirt comes off next — I pull it, he helps, the motion catches his left side and he goes still for a beat, the kind of stillness that's not pain anymore but memory of pain, the body's way of bookmarking a place it doesn't fully trust yet. I slow down. We navigate it together. And his torso is here, close, the surgery scar on his left hip pink and raised against the rest of him.
I touch it.
He flinches — not pain, surprise. The surprise of someone else's fingers on the place that's been only his, the place that marks where the old body ended and the new one began.
"Does it—"
"No. Just — new."
I lean down. I kiss the scar. Light. The skin is different there — smoother, tighter. He makes a sound. Low. His hand comes into my hair.
We figure out the rest the way we've figured out everything — imperfect, negotiated, his hip requiring certain angles and my body learning which ones. He pulls me down onto the bed and we rearrange — him on the right, me on the left, careful, the choreography of two bodies mapping each other's limits and finding the spaces between them.
His mouth on my neck. My hand on the flat of his stomach. The catch in his voice when I touch somewhere new — not a gasp, just a hitch, the small sound of someone recalibrating. The warmth of him — he's always warm, but this close, skin to skin, it's specific warmth, localized, his chest against mine and I can feel his heartbeat and it's faster than his calm voice suggested.
I laugh. Not a big one — a small, uncontrollable sound that escapes from somewhere I wasn't guarding.
"You're ruining the moment," he says. Low. Against my collarbone.
"Your heartbeat is really fast."
"I'm lying next to a woman I've been thinking about for weeks. Heart rates respond to stimuli."
"That's very clinical."
"I'm being clinical to avoid saying the non-clinical thing."
"Say the non-clinical thing."
