"Is what?" I ask.
"You."
She crosses the four feet. Her hands are on my chest again, flat, pressing into the fabric of my shirt, and she's looking up at me, her gray-blue eyes are bloodshot and exhausted and completely certain.
"When you're at the restaurant, when you're at your table, when I can feel you in the room, everything is quieter. The tapping slows down. The flashes don't come. It's just you and the pork shoulder and the thirty percent tip and the way you say my name, and all the noise just… stops."
Her hands slide up my chest to my neck. Her fingers curl into the fabric of my collar. She's pulling herself up and I'm letting her. My hands find her hips and lift her and she wraps her legs around my waist and the height difference disappears. Her face is level with mine. Her forehead touches my forehead. Her breathing is fast and shallow, and I can feel her heartbeat through her ribs against my chest.
"I need you to make it quiet," she says. "Please."
I carry her to the bed.
The apartment is twelve steps from the kitchen to the bedroom. Twelve steps with her legs around my waist and her hands in my collar and her mouth finding mine in the dark. The kiss is desperate, not the exploratory heat from the doorstep, it’s sloppyand messy and wet, every time she pulls back, I want more of her need.
This is a woman who hasn't slept in three days asking a man she barely knows to give her body something besides fear.
I put her down on the bed. She pulls me down with her. My weight settles over her, and I brace on my forearms because I'm twice her size and I could crush her if I'm not careful. Her body is small underneath mine, narrow shoulders, thin wrists, the bones in her hips pressing against my stomach. She pulls at my shirt, and I sit back and pull it over my head, her hands are on my chest immediately, fingers spread across the tattoos, tracing the saints, tracing the ink.
"Off," she says, pulling at her own shirt. I help her and it comes over her head. She's in a plain black bra and her skin is olive-warm in the streetlight. Her collarbone is pronounced and her ribs show when she breathes and she's the most devastating thing I've ever seen.
Fucking deadly and beautiful and broken.
I kiss her neck. The freckle below her ear. The hollow of her throat. She arches into me and her hands find the back of my head and her fingers scrape across my buzz cut and the friction of her nails on my scalp makes me groan against her collarbone.
Her bra comes off. My mouth goes lower. She gasps when my lips close around her nipple, her back lifting off the mattress, her hands gripping my shoulders. I take my time. I learn her bodywith my mouth. She’s a fucking work of art and I’ll be damned if I fuck up one moment of having her undone for me like this.
Her work pants come off. Her underwear is plain cotton, white and practical, I pull them down her legs and she kicks them off. Now she's naked under me and her body is trembling. Her finger is tapping the mattress beside her hip, fast, rapid, and I stop.
I put my hand over hers. My palm covers her entire hand. The tapping stops under my weight.
"Look at me," I say.
She looks at me.
"If you want to stop, we stop."
"I don't want to stop."
"At any point. For any reason."
"Carmelo. I don't want to stop."
I kiss her. Slow this time. Her mouth opens under mine, and her hands go to my belt, and she unfastens it with fingers that are shaking but committed and she pushes my jeans down my hips. Her hand finds me through my boxers and her grip tightens and she makes a sound against my mouth that I feel in my balls.
I work my way down her body. Mouth on her ribs. Her stomach. The inside of her hip bone. She's breathing in short, shallow bursts and her hands are in the sheets, and her tapping has moved to the headboard, finger against the wood, fast, and when my mouth reaches between her legs she stops tapping entirely.
She stops everything.
Her whole body goes quiet the way it went quiet when I put my hand on her jaw at the door. Total stillness. I run my tongue along her, slow, and the sound she makes is something I've never heard from another person. Not a moan. Not a gasp. It's a sound from somewhere deep and involuntary, the sound of a body receiving pleasure it didn't know it was allowed to have.
I stay there. Patient. Thorough. She comes apart under me in pieces. Her hands find my head. Her hips move against my mouth. She says my name, once, twice, and the third time it breaks in the middle and her body bows off the mattress. Her thighs clamp around my ears and she comes with a cry that fills the apartment. All I can think is how I want to do that again, but next time with her sitting on my face, watching her writhe and gasp above me.
I move back up her body. She's boneless, breathing hard, her eyes half-closed. I push inside her slowly. She's tight and wet and hot and the feeling of her body around mine makes my vision narrow to a point. Her hands grip my biceps. Her nails dig in. She wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me deeper and my groan is raw and hoarse and comes from somewhere I didn't know I had.
I move. Slow. She meets me. Her body rolls against mine, finding the rhythm, matching it. The bed creaks under us. The apartment is dark and the streetlight puts stripes across the sheets. Her face is below mine and her eyes are open and she's watching me while I fuck her and nobody has ever watched me during sex. Nobody has ever wanted to see what's on my face when the walls come down.
For the first time in my life, I let someone see what's behind the dead gray eyes while my body is inside theirs, and what's behind is everything I've never said and never shown and never let out. I hold her gaze. I don't hide.
