He stood. Reflexively, I stood too, then immediately felt awkward as he started clearing the glasses and open bottles from his desk. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I twined my suddenly sweaty fingers together in front of me.
Fuck. This was a terrible idea, wasn’t it? It would be nice to have the last person to touch me not be Matt – but what was Idoing? I was about to make a complete laughing-stock of—
‘Come here,’ Satoshi extended a hand to me.
I had to work hard to unclench my fingers. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What are you sorry for?’
‘My hands. They’re all clammy –oh.’
He’d grabbed me by the waist, picking me up and sitting me on the edge of the desk in one swift movement. My knees fell apart and he stepped between them, body not quite touching mine but so close I could feel the warmth of him, radiating outwards.
I swallowed. ‘Are you sure? You – we – don’t have to.’
One of Satoshi’s hands came up to frame the side of my face. ‘I know.’ His thumb stroked along my cheekbone. ‘I want to.’
‘Why, though?’ His fingertips were nestling into my hair, drawing soft little circles, and the feeling was mesmerising. ‘Why would you…?’
He paused. The tip of his tongue was pink as he licked his lips, and time seemed to slow down, stretching, expanding.
‘Because I like you,’ he said at last.
He leaned in closer, his forehead coming to rest against mine, and I barely repressed the shiver that ran through me as his glasses pressed lightly into my eyebrows. ‘I’m going to kiss you now, okay?’
‘Okay,’ I only just managed to whisper.
The first brush of his lips against mine was featherlight, fleeting, the gentlest possible question, but it made me shiver again, irrepressibly this time, an almost-panicked high-pitched needy sound erupting from my throat. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know where that came from. I’m just – it’s just—’
‘A lot?’
I nodded.
Satoshi stroked his thumb along my cheekbone again. ‘We can stop whenever you want.’ He folded the fingers of his other hand through mine. ‘But it’s just me, Fiona. You’re safe. I’ve got you.’
I know, I wanted to say, but it felt too weighty, too fraught, too dangerous somehow, so I just squeezed his fingers.
That drew a smile from him. I touched the pad of my index finger lightly to the dimple in his right cheek, then the left one, then beneath his chin, drawing his face to mine again.
I had never been kissed like this before – so softly, so tenderly, so respectfully. The barest touch of my finger beneath his chin was enough to hold him to me. His hand against my cheek was a request, not a demand, his fingertips in my hair making me feel like I was turning to liquid.
The first nudge of his tongue against my lower lip drew another sound from me – less a squeak this time, more a sigh. ‘Okay?’ he asked, letting go of my hand and tracing his fingers up the length of my spine to curl around the nape of my neck.
‘Yes.’ My free hand came up to rest against his clavicle, fingers under his collar, thumb resting in the divot at the base of his throat. ‘Okay.’
It might have been a minute that Satoshi kissed me like that, tongue sliding gently against mine, or an hour. He was so leisurely and unhurried that I completely lost my sense of time.
With Matt, sex had always been about milestones. It had got more pronounced over time, but even in the early days, there had been a routine. We’d kiss for a while, more as a signal to the other that we wanted to have sex than something to be enjoyed in its own right. He’d work on me for a bit (real men make sure their partners are enjoying it as much as they are,he’d said to a much younger Fiona, head between her thighs, and she’d been foolish enough to find that romantic instead of smug), I’d work on him for a bit, relishing the sounds I could get him to make, and then he’d slip inside me. He’d always come, I usually would, and I’d thought that overall, I was pretty lucky. I’d heard how some of the other school mums talked about their sex lives. Mine might not be rip-your-clothes-off passionate, but it certainly wasn’t terrible.
… God, the things those mums would say if they could see me now.
Satoshi used the hand he had on the nape of my neck to tilt my head back so he could kiss his way down my throat. This time it wasn’t a squeak or a sigh but a moan he drew from me, and his laughter was a soft hum of approval against my skin, especially when he pressed his lips behind my ear and I jerked like I’d been electrocuted. ‘There?’ He licked the same spot. ‘That’s good?’
‘Yes,’ I breathed, curling my fist into his shirt, trying to pull him tighter to me. ‘That’s so good.’
He kissed me there again, laughing when it elicited the same shudder. ‘I’m going to have to hold you still if you keep doing that,’ he murmured, tracing the shell of my ear with his tongue and then gently teasing the lobe between his teeth.
‘I’m sorry.’
