She wanted it, at first, so soft she could barely feel it. So soft that Henry’s fingertips were but a whisper on her skin. Slow, tentative. Hardly there. She liked the idea of him—the buildup. For years, she’d imagined him tugging things. Testing things. And in her mind, it always began with nothing.
Began with a brush.
A graze.
A single, stifled gasp.
And so Henry had started slow. Had started with little more than his words and his widening eyes. With little more than the mutter of her name, the thump of his heart, the rush of her breath. It had taken him hours just to kiss off her clothes, to drag his nose down every inch of her bare and arching body, to learn the scent of it, the slick of it, the way it tautened when he traced its curves with his tongue.
Henry, by now, was on his knees. They were in the outdoor shower, and I was hard and pressing up into the nothing hem of Katie’s tiny sundress, and Katie didn’t care, she just kept scribbling, kept moving herself against me, kept quietly finding ways to keep me centered between her legs, and Willa was bent over the bench, her fingers gripped onto the tile, water falling like hot rain, and Henry’s mouth was doing things to Willa’s body I did not know whether I’d survive. And with every nip and lick and bite, Willa was right there, looking back at him, talking to him, touching her own lips and her own breasts and her own skin so there were four hands instead of two. So that no part of her ever went unexplored. So that no inch of her ever grew dry.
And then, just as Katie shifted half an inch against me, just as Willa slid onto the shower floor and pulled Henry onto her damp, desperate body and muttered that every time she touched herself, she’d wished that it was him, I clenched my fists and closed my eyes.
“I need a minute,” I said.
Katie turned to me. My pen was still in her hand. “It’s going to be okay, you know.”
“The sex scene? Yeah, I can see that.”
“No. This. Us. You and me. It’s going to be okay.”
I spun the dial on my watch twice. My mouth was heavy. “I don’t want to fuck this up. I don’t want anything to change. What if this is just the way I’m built? What if...”
She lifted my chin. “You are not what you think you are, okay? You weren’t then, and you aren’t now.”
I frowned. She pushed the hair out of my eyes and took my hand.
“Do you trust me?” she said.
I nodded.
“Then come on. This ends now.”
The cottage door snicked shut. A few lazy beams of late morning spilled onto the tile floor. The ceiling fan whirred. Outside, a couple of birds chirped. But otherwise, everything was still. Everything was quiet.
Katie walked to the foot of my bed and dropped her dress to the floor. Her lips were trembling but her voice was steady.
“Come here,” she said.
I took a few steps toward her and tried to speak, tried to say something, but all that came out was a stutter. My heart was pounding, but my hand, somehow, was already floating forward, tracing the flimsy lavender lace that lined her hips. Her bra, just as soft and sheer, was slipping off her sun-kissed shoulder. She took off my glasses.
“Can you see me all right?” she said. “Without them?”
I nodded. My shoulders were hunched, and my neck was bent. She put my palms in hers and led us two steps toward the bed so the backs of her knees were flush against my mattress. She strained onto her toes and traced my jaw, then dropped her hands to my shirt and slowly worked it off. The muscles in my stomach tangled under her touch.
“In my mind,” she said, taking a seat on the edge of the bed so my legs were between her knees. Her every inhale, visible. She put her hand on the waistband of my shorts and inched them away. “There was everyone else, and then there was you.”
I nodded again. She drew my hips closer and began taking warm, wet sips of the sparking skin just beneath the elastic of my disappearing boxer briefs. She was kissing everything—muscle, ink, bone.
“Me too,” I said as she reached for me—as she ran a single finger up the length of me. My breath caught, and so did hers. “There was everyone else. And then there was you.”
Her eyes were fixed on mine when I said it, and I was throbbing in the palms of her hands. She pulled me to her lips. Her face blurred, and I groaned as my fists gripped her shoulders.
“Katie,” I said.
“Yeah?” she said, taking all of me. Using her mouth, her hands. Her hair was soft and wild, and landing in auburn waves just below the lacework that barely covered her swelling breasts. My fingers peeled back the hem, careful and hungry and curious. She stripped the rest of the gauze away and moaned as she filled my hands.
I cursed, then pulled myself back, fell to my knees, and kissed her. I kissed her neck, her collarbone, the hard, hot tips of her nipples. I kissed every valley and curve and stretch and plain. The slopes of her stomach, the pinch of her waist, the undersides of her smooth, damp wrists. She tasted like vanilla, and sweat, and a little bit like soap.
