Page 16 of Protected By Razor

Her eyes are red. She wrapped her arms around herself as if she were holding herself together with them.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she says. “I’m so tired, and I’m so scared. I don’t know how to keep doing this.”

She’s looking at me like she’s bracing for me to push her back. To tell her she’s overreacting, or to say something professional and distant, or to do what I did yesterday — touch her and then take it back.

I’m done.

I’m so fucking done.

“Come here.”

She doesn’t move. She just looks at me.

I cross to her. Slowly, this time. Deliberate.

I stop in front of her and I lift my hand and cup her face, and her breath catches and I feel her whole body still under that one small touch.

“I’ve been telling myself no for ten years,” I say. “I’m done.”

Her eyes go wide.

“I’m not stopping now. You want me to, I will — say the word and I’ll sleep on the couch and we never talk about it again. But if you don’t say it??—”

“I’m not saying it.”

I lean down and I kiss her.

It’s not like yesterday.

Yesterday was ten years cracking open. This is what happens after the crack. This is slow. This is me deciding, with every motion, that I am going to do this properly, that I have one chance to show this woman that the wait was worth something.

I kiss her like I’ve got all night. I kiss her until she sags against me and her hands are in my hair and her mouth is open under mine and she’s making the small sounds I’ve been hearing in my head since yesterday afternoon.

I lift her.

She gasps against my mouth. Her legs come around my waist on instinct — and then she goes still, like she’s surprised at herself.

“Okay?” I ask.

She nods against my throat.

I carry her to her bedroom because the couch is wrong for this. Her bedroom is small and tidy and it smells like her, and I lay her down on the bed and brace myself over her and look at her face for a long second before I do anything else.

“Tell me what you like.”

“I?—” She swallows. “I don’t really know.”

I file that. I don’t say anything about it. I lean down and I kiss the corner of her mouth, then the line of her jaw, then the soft place under her ear, and I feel her shiver against me.

I take my time with her jumper.

I push it up slowly, watching her face. She lifts her arms when I get there and I pull it off and drop it on the floor, and then I’m looking at her — bare from the waist up except for a plain bra she clearly didn’t pick out for this, and she’s flushing pink because of it, like she’s apologizing for not being prepared.

“Don’t,” I say.

“Don’t what?”

“You know what. There’s nothing about you I’m not glad to be looking at.”