I kissed his throat. I kissed his collarbone. I kissed the long flat of his sternum. I returned the favor in the same order he had given it, slow, careful, full of the way a woman moves over a man she has been remembering in the dark for three months. I felt the breath he was not letting out, the steady tight catch under his ribs.
I went lower.
I set my mouth on him. He made a sound that he had not asked his body for, low and through his teeth, the heels of his hands going flat to the mattress on either side of his hips. I went slow. I took my time the way he had taken his. I felt every breath in him catch at the back of his throat and not come out clean. His hand came down to my hair and his fingers threaded into it and they did not push, they only rested there for the small permission of touch.
He made another sound. This one was more of his older voice in it.
"Chloe..." he said.
He said it the way a man says a name he has only just been given back. He said it like the shape of it tasted right in his mouth even though he did not know yet why.
I pulled my mouth off him before we went all the way that way.
I came back up over him. I kissed his mouth. He tasted of me on my own mouth on his and I felt the small low sound he made into the kiss when he tasted it too.
He looked up at me. The older eyes were the ones doing the looking now.
His hands set themselves at my hips.
"I want you," he said. The contraction had gone out of him. "Now."
I lifted up over him. I took him in my hand, the velvet heat of him heavy in my palm, harder than the last time I had held him here. I held his eyes while I guided him to me. I lowered myself the first slow inch. His jaw locked. The sound he made through his teeth was not anything English-shaped. His hands went tight at my hips and then deliberately loosened, like a man reminding himself.
The first slow seat carried longing on both sides of it. I closed my eyes. The stretch of him in me was the one I had been remembering for three months in a body that had not been allowed any of it, and the heat under it was the heat I had not been able to give myself with my own hand in the dark of my own bed, and my breath caught at the small lit place where he met the end of me, and I held there.
He said my name again.
"Chloe."
I opened my eyes. I gave him my face. He needed it. I needed it too.
I moved.
His hands at my hips fell into the rhythm I was setting. He did not push. He only held. The pace built the way pace builds between two people who have been each other before, the small careful first half dozen, the slow lengthening, the place at which it stops being two bodies remembering separately and becomes one rhythm working together. His thumbs at the underside of my ribs. His eyes on my face.
My hand found his where it lay against my hip. I drew it up. I set it over my own breast and held it there. He breathed out through his teeth at the small weight in his palm. He did not move his hand. He let me decide what we did with it.
I came again. Harder this time. The build was longer and the white shape at the back of my eyes was wider and the heat that had been low in me spread up under my ribs and along the inside of my arms. I made a small sound I had not made in three months, low at the back of my throat, his name in the middle of it like a word in a sentence I had not finished. My back arched. My nails dragged down the small flat at the center of his chest without my asking them to. He let me leave the marks.
He followed me after a moment.
"Fuck," he said low, his voice gone wrecked at the edge. "Chloe." His hand at my hip went tight and then steady. His hips lifted up into mine once, hard, then again, and then the long held breath he had been carrying through everything came out of him in a single low sound against my throat. He stayed inside me. He held me there with both hands at my hips while the last of it went through him.
He did not pull me off him after.
He kept me where I was until both of us had come back down. He kept his hand on my hip, his thumb moving slow over the bone. His other hand stayed where I had set it, low over the soft slope of my breast, the pad of his thumb at the underside, the weight of him still in me.
I slid off him when I was ready.
I lay down to his side on the pillow.
He pulled me against his chest with my back to his front. His arm came across me heavy and warm and settled flat under my breasts. His face went into the back of my hair and he breathed out the long breath of a man who had been holding something across days without knowing he was holding it. I put my hand over his where it lay flat on my stomach.
I held my own over his a long minute.
"You were my first," I said, soft. "There hasn't been anyone since. No one ever touched me the way you did, even after you were gone."
He held the word first inside him for a beat. I felt him hold it. His arm at my ribs did not tighten and did not loosen and the small held second was him sitting with what I had given him.
