We're both breathing harder than the conversation warrants. The kitchen feels smaller than it is. He's looking at me with those dark eyes and his jaw is tight and I'm looking back and we're both somewhere past the words now, in the place underneath them where the real thing lives.
One of us moves first.I don't know which one.
What matters is that his hands find me and I don't step back and suddenly we're not fighting anymore, or we are but it's turned into something else, the argument burning down to whatever's underneath it. He pulls me in hard and I go. The counter catches me in the lower back and his mouth is at my throat and I grab his collar and drag him closer and he makes a sound low in his chest that I feel more than hear.
We've been so careful with each other. Weeks of careful. This is nothing like that.
His hands push my shirt up and I pull at his. The dishes are right there and neither of us cares. He gets his hands under my thighs and lifts me onto the counter and I wrap my legs around him and the fight is still in the room. The frustration and the wanting and the weeks of distance all collapsed into the same thing.
I pull his face up to mine and kiss him and he kisses back just as hard. I taste all of it. Phoenix’s hands move like he'sbeen waiting for this. Like he's been holding back and now he's done. I pull him closer and he obliges and I stop thinking about anything else.
He says my name once. Quietly. Like it's the only word he has left.
We end up on the kitchen floor, the two of us on the cold tile because we couldn't be bothered to move anywhere else.
The floor is hard, but it doesn’t matter. The cold is seeping through my shirt, the cabinet handle digging into the back of my calf, the faint hum of the refrigerator three feet away. None of it matters because his mouth is on my throat and his hands are pulling me closer.
He moves down my neck to my collarbone and I tip my head back against the tile and stare at the kitchen ceiling, the shadows up there, the edge of the light above the stove. His hands find the hem of my shirt and slide underneath and his palms are warm against my ribs and I arch up into him and he responds immediately, shifting his weight.
This is the version of him I've been missing for weeks. Not calibrated. Just here, with his hands on my skin and his mouth finding every place that makes me press harder against him. I drag his shirt over his head and run my palms flat across his chest and feel his heart going fast under my fingers and that undoes something in me.
His hand slides down my stomach and I stop thinking entirely.
There is just this—the tile cold at my shoulders and warm at my lower back from his weight, his breath against my skin, his mouth moving down my body.
He says my name again. Lower this time.
I pull him back up to me and kiss him and wrap my leg around his hip and he shifts and then he's where I want him.
When I come it hits me like a wave breaking—my whole body pulling tight around him, a sound tearing out of me that bounces off the kitchen walls and I don't care, I don't care about anything except the sharp bright peak of it and his hands gripping my hips hard enough to leave marks. I ride it out with my fingers locked in his hair and my face pressed to his shoulder and my whole body shaking.
Phoenix doesn't stop. He works me through it, every stroke deliberate now, watching my face in the low light above the stove with that dark focused look he gets when he's completely present. It’s just this, just the two of us on a kitchen floor at ten o'clock on a Tuesday like the rest of the world doesn't exist.
When he follows it's hard and urgent, his hips driving into mine one last time as he buries himself deep and goes still. Both hands grip me like I'm the only solid thing in the room. His face drops to my neck and he says my name against my skin, broken at the edges, and I feel the shudder move through him and hold him through it with my arms wrapped around his shoulders and my cheek pressed to his hair.
The clockin the hallway ticks. The refrigerator hums. Somewhere outside a car passes.
"I don't think you're your father," I say into his shoulder.
He's quiet. I can feel him thinking.
"But?" he says finally.
"But I need you to stay with me."
Another silence. His hand moves slowly through my hair, the same way he does when I can't sleep—automatic and present.
"I'm trying," he says.
"I know." I turn my face up toward him. "I see you trying. That's why I'm still here."
He looks at me. The lamp above the stove is the only light on and it's casting everything warm and slightly gold and his face in that light is open in a way it hasn't been for weeks. Nothing is fixed, the crisis is still happening, but he’s here now.
He reaches over and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear.
"I don't want to be him," he says. He’s not defensive this time. Just true.
"I know you don't."
