She tenses. Barely. A micro-contraction in her thighs.
"Sorry. I didn't—"
"Don't apologize." Her hands tighten in my hair. "Don't stop."
I take her off the counter and carry her to the living room couch. I could take her upstairs. My room is fifteen feet away. But my room has Dante in the sheets, the headboard dent, the walls that held the sounds Maya heard through plaster. I will not take her upstairs. The blanket is on the arm of the couch, folded by her hands, the thank-you note long since pocketed. I want her here, beside the place where he covered her feet and closed her laptop, and that hunger is fucked up enough that I stop trying to understand it.
I lay her down and leave the gray wool blanket folded on the arm.
I pull my sweatshirt over her head. Her body is bare in the lamplight, and the sight of her hits me the way it hit me at seventeen, the physical reality of a body I have been imagining through plaster and years. Her breath catches when the air touches her skin. She reaches for my waistband, but I catch her hand, bring it to my mouth, and press my lips to her knuckles.
"Let me," I say.
"Cole, I want to—"
"Let me. This is mine to give."
She holds my eyes. The argument forms behind them before her fingers twitch against mine, already reaching for the reciprocal, the exchange. They stay tense against mine, searching for a way to give something back, but my mouth is on her knuckles and my eyes are on hers. After a beat that lasts too long, she lets her hand relax in mine.
I start at her throat, my lips on the pulse point, the same measurement she takes with her fingers when she is cataloging someone. Her heart rate beats under me, elevated and climbing.
I move down to her collarbone, her sternum, the soft skin between her breasts. She arches into it, and I hold her hip with one hand, steady. I knew how to do this at seventeen. I take my time because rushing would waste five years of wanting.
"Please," she says.
I reach her waist, the ridge of her hip, the soft skin below her navel. She is wearing my basketball shorts, the ones she stole from the laundry, and I slide them down while she lifts her hips to help.
I put my mouth on her. The taste of her floods my tongue, salt and heat and the slick that tells me her body has been ready since the counter. Her thighs tense against my shoulders. Her warmth is against my lips, her scent filling my lungs with every breath.
The sound she makes is the sound from the locked bedroom. Exactly. The same break in it, the same involuntary surrender that has lived under my skin for five years. Her hand finds my hair. Her fingers grip. When her hips lift against my mouth, I hold them down with both hands, firm, the same pressure I used at seventeen when her body was new to me and I learned in real time what made her shake.
She shakes now the same way. Five years, and the arch is the same, the grip, the breath that stutters and catches and holds before it breaks. I slow when her thighs start to tremble, then press harder when her fingers tighten in my hair. I was seventeen when I put my mouth on her and learned the order of her coming undone, and the pride of that burns through me hot enough to make my hands tighten on her hips.
The thought hits while my tongue is on her, while her hand is in my hair and her thighs are shaking against my shoulders.
Dante's mouth was here.
The hate sex. Her body over his mouth. A different set of sounds.
She did not make these sounds for him. She made different ones, sounds I can piece together from the evidence on Dante's jaw, from Maya's broken eye contact, from what I know his piercings do to a body from the inside. Whatever she sounded like underneath him, those are sounds the boy at seventeen never could have reached.
But this is mine.
This is slow and deliberate and given freely, the mouth that was here first returning to the place it mapped at seventeen and memorized through five years of distance. I am hard against the couch, the ache pressed into the cushion while my hands stay locked on her hips.
I drag my attention back to the tremor in her thighs, the heat of her against my mouth, the sound breaking in her throat.
She comes hard, her back arching off the couch, her hand pulling my hair, the sound raw and open. I hold her through it with my mouth on her and my hands on her hips, the weight of her against my palms.
After, she is breathing hard, eyes closed, her hand still in my hair but loose now, the fingers uncurling.
I press my forehead to her hip and breathe against her skin.
"Cole." Quiet. Almost gone.
"Yeah."
"Five years."
