Page 44 of The Dangerous Dance

"Come here," I say.

He comes.

He kneels between my knees on the worn carpet and pushes the skirt up to my waist with both hands, slow, his palms hot against the outside of my thighs. He looks at me there, between my legs, in only my underwear, with an attention that is not clinical and not performed and which I feel as heat across my chest and my throat and my face.

"Christ," he says, quietly. Almost to himself.

His mouth comes to the inside of my knee.

He kisses up the inside of my thigh, slow, his lips warm, his stubble scraping. He bites, once, near the top of my thigh, gentle, and the heat of it travels everywhere it travels. When he reaches the edge of the cotton he stops. Looks up at me from where he is kneeling. Waits.

"Yes," I say. The word comes out lower than my voice usually goes.

He hooks his thumbs into my underwear and slides it down my legs. I lift my hips to help him. He drops it on the floor beside us. Then his hands are back at my thighs, pushing them gently apart, opening me to him.

He looks.

I have been looked at by men. I have not been looked at this way. He looks at me like a man who has been allowed to look at the one thing he has been wanting to look at and is not going to rush through the looking.

"Liam—"

"I know," he says. "Give me a minute."

He gives himself a minute. His thumbs trace along the crease of my thigh, slow, and the not-touching of me where I most want to be touched is its own thing. When he finally puts his mouth on me I make a sound I have not made for anyone, half a gasp and half something more.

His mouth is warm and his tongue is careful and he learns me with the same focused attention I have watched him bring to every room he walks into. The first slow drag of his tongue along the length of me. Then a slower one. He finds my clit and circles it with the flat of his tongue and the response of my body to this is so immediate and so absolute that I hear myself say his name out loud and do not try to take it back.

He pulls back just enough to speak. "Tell me what you want."

"That. What you were doing. That."

He goes back to it.

He slides one finger inside me while his mouth is on my clit and the dual sensation does something to my vision, narrows it, the lamp light going close and warm and the rest of the room going elsewhere. He works the finger slow, curls it forward, finds something that makes my hips lift off the cushion without my permission.

"There," he says, into me. "That."

"Yes."

He adds a second finger. The angle is correct on the first try, which says something about him I do not have time to examine, and his mouth keeps its rhythm on my clit, and his free hand has come up and flattened against my lower stomach, holding me, steadying me, the warm weight of his palm against the skin under my navel.

I look down at him.

He looks up at me from between my legs with his mouth on me and his eyes on mine and the directness of it is the thing that pushes me up against the edge.

"Liam, I am going to⁠—"

"I know," he says, into me, and his mouth does not slow and his fingers do not slow.

I come with one hand fisted in his hair and the other gripping the edge of the couch and my back arched off the cushion and a sound coming out of me that I have not made for anyone. He keeps me there, his mouth gentling but not stopping, his fingers slowing inside me, working me through it until my body has finished and gone loose against the couch.

His mouth lifts. He kisses the inside of my thigh once. Then the other one. Then he comes up onto the couch beside me, his fingers sliding out of me slowly, and he kisses me with his mouth still wet from me, which is its own deliberate thing, and I taste myself on him and the taste does something I do not name.

"Hi," I say, when I can speak.

"Hi," he says.

Something at the corner of his mouth that is not quite a smile.