"Can I—" I stop. "I want to touch you. I just don't know where to start."
"Anywhere." She takes my hand and puts it on her waist. "Everywhere. You can't get this wrong."
So I learn her. The dip above her hip. The long muscle of her back. The soft place at the base of her spine that makes her breath hitch and her fingers close hard on my arm. When I find it a second time, on purpose, she says my name in a voice I've never heard her use.
She reaches behind herself and unhooks her bra and lets it fall, and I stare, because I'm not capable of doing anything else.
"You're allowed to touch," she says, amused and not entirely steady.
So I do. She stops being amused very quickly.
The rest goes in pieces—kisses that get less careful, my jeans that refuse to cooperate, Cat laughing into my mouth as she kneels to work them off me and then not laughing at all, her hands sliding up the backs of my thighs, her lips at my hipbone, her breaththrough the last thin layer between us and my knees actually failing.
She catches me. Of course she does. She walks me back to the bed and lays me down and settles over me, skin to skin, and the shock of that—all of her, warm and bare against all of me—punches a sound out of my throat I've never made before.
"Hi," she whispers.
"Hi."
"Still okay?"
"If you ask me that again I'm going to lose my mind."
"Good." She kisses me, and there's nothing tentative left in it. "Then tell me what you want."
"I don't know what I want. I don't know thewords—"
"Then show me." She catches my wrist and guides my hand to her, and her eyes fall shut. "And I'll show you."
After that, it stops being anything I have to think about.
She works down my body slowly, her mouth at my throat, my sternum, the underside of my breast, until my hands are fisted in her hair and I'm arching up off the mattress to meet her. When her fingers finally slide where I've been aching for them, I make a noise that would mortify me if I had any capacity left for shame.
"God, you're—" Her forehead drops to my hip. "Iris. You're soaked."
"Whose fault do you think that is," I gasp, and she laughs, and then her mouth replaces her hand and I lose the argument entirely.
I've read about this. I've watched it in films, sanitized and soft-focused. Nothing prepared me. She is patient and precise and completely unhurried, learning me by degrees—slower when I go tense, harder when I saythere,there,don't stop—and I do tell her, exactly like she asked, in words I didn't know I had. She adds a second finger and curls it and I hear myself beg.
The pressure builds until it's unbearable, until my whole body has narrowed to one white-hot point, until I'm shaking apart and clutching at the sheets and her free hand comes up to lace through mine and hold on—
And I break.
I break with her name in my mouth and her hand in mine and my back off the bed and the absolute, unarguable certainty that nothing in my thirty-two carefully managed years has ever felt this true.
She works me down gently, kisses the inside of my thigh, my stomach, my sternum, and comes back up to gather me in while I shudder through the last of it.
"Okay?" she asks, and I can hear the smugness she's trying to hide.
"Shut up."
"That's not a no."
"That was—" I press my face into her neck. "I don't have the vocabulary."
"You had plenty of vocabulary two minutes ago."
I bite her shoulder. She laughs, delighted, and the sound does something to my chest that has nothing to do with sex at all.
