Page 43 of The Dangerous Dance

I kiss him.

Not the performed version, not the calculated version from three days ago that he stopped with his hand on my wrist and his voice saying my name. This is the other kind. The direct kind, the kind that is just the true thing with no architecture around it.

He goes still for one second.

Then his hand comes to the side of my face, slow and deliberate, and he kisses me back in the way of someone who has been making an argument to himself for a long time and has just heard the verdict.

It is not brief.

When we separate, his hand is still at my jaw and we are still close.

"You're going to make this very complicated," he says.

"I know," I say.

"I need you to know that I know that."

"You've been remarkably clear about knowing it," I say. "For weeks."

Something moves in his expression that is the closest I've seen him come to being undone by something that isn't grief or exhaustion. He presses his forehead briefly against mine, which is so much more intimate than the kiss that I have to make a conscious decision not to step back from it.

I don't step back.

His thumb moves, slow, against the line of my jaw.

That is all. Just the thumb, the small deliberate drag of it across my skin, and the smallness of it is what undoes the first thing in me. He is close enough that I can see the grain of his stubble and the tiredness around his eyes and the place at his collarbone where his shirt is open a button, and I can smell him, which I have not let myself notice before now. Soap. Coffee. The wool of the jacket he wore yesterday. Under that, him.

I breathe in.

"Tell me," he says. Low. "Tell me if this is not what you want."

"This is what I want."

"Tell me again."

"This is what I want."

He kisses me again, and this kiss is different. The first was an answer. This is the question, asked properly, with the patience of a man who has been waiting to ask it.

I let him ask it.

His mouth is warm and unhurried. His hand at my jaw slides into my hair, finds the base of my skull, holds me there. Not restraint. The opposite of restraint. The weight of a hand choosing to be exactly where it is.

My hands find the front of his shirt.

I work the buttons one at a time. He lets me. Does not help, does not move, just stands there with his hand in my hair and his mouth still on mine and lets me do this thing at my own pace. The buttons are pearl, small, turning under my thumb. My fingers shake on the third button. I do not try to hide it.

When the shirt opens I push it aside and put my palms flat against his chest.

Both hands. Skin. He is warm, surprising even though it should not be surprising. Under the heat, his heartbeat. Slower than mine. I can feel the fine dark hair across his sternum and a small scar at the edge of his ribs that I have not asked about and will not ask about today.

His hand comes up and covers mine. Just that. Holds it there against his chest.

"Nadia," he says.

"I know."

He guides me back, his hands at my waist, careful, until the back of my legs finds the couch and I sit and he follows me down. The cushion gives under us. He stays standing for a moment between my knees, looking at me, and I look up at him, and the angle of him above me in a room we have been sitting at opposite ends of for five days does something to my breathing.