Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
I make a sound. The same helpless sound from last time, or a cousin of it, and his grip tightens on my jaw, just a fraction, and his mouth opens against mine, and the kiss changes.
Deeper. His hand slides from my face into my hair, and the other drops to my waist, pulling me against him, and I’m pressed against his chest and I can feel his heart hammering through his shirt and his body is warm and solid and everywhere and my hands find his shoulders because I need something to hold onto and the fabric of his suit under my fingers is real, is here, is happening.
My second kiss. Four weeks after the first. And this one is nothing like that one, and the difference is intention. He’s choosing this. Choosing me. With everything he just told me still hanging in the air between us.
He lifts me.
I don’t know how. One moment my feet are on the floor and the next they’re not, and I’m sitting on the edge of his desk with his body between my knees and his mouth still on mine and papers scattering beneath me and the lamp wobbling and I should care about the mess and I don’t. I don’t care about anything except the pressure of his hands and the heat of his mouth and the low sound he makes against my lips when I curl my fingers into the hair at the back of his neck.
His hand slides from my waist to my thigh. Under my dress. His palm against bare skin, fingers spread, and the contact is so sudden, so warm, that my whole body goes taut and a sound comes out of me that I’ll think about in the dark for weeks. His hand is large and his skin is rough and I’ve never been touched like this, not by anyone, not once in twenty years of life, and every nerve ending in my thigh is firing signals my brain can’t keep up with.
He stops.
His hand stays on my thigh, not moving, his fingers curved against my skin, and his forehead drops to my shoulder and his breathing is ragged against my collarbone and he isn’t moving, not speaking, just breathing, and I feel the effort of it through his entire body. The restraint. The wall he’s building in real time between what he wants and what he’ll let himself take.
“I need to stop.” Against my shoulder. Barely a voice.
“I know.”
Neither of us moves.
His forehead stays on my shoulder. My fingers stay in his hair. His hand stays on my thigh, warm and still, and the clock ticks and my heartbeat fills the room and I’m sitting on his desk with my dress pushed up and his face pressed into my skin and it’s the most intimate moment of my life, not because of where his hand is but because of the war I can feel him fighting and the fact that he came to me, tonight, and opened doors he’s spent his whole life keeping shut.
I feel his mouth move against my collarbone. A word, or the ghost of one, Italian, too soft to catch.
Then he steps back.
The cold where his body was is a physical thing. He retreats behind his chair, both hands on the back of it, and he looks at me sitting on his desk with my dress still askew and my face still wet and my hair where his fingers pulled it loose. His expression isn’t regret. Not shame. Awe, edged with a terror that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with how much I’ve just seen.
“Go home, Elsa.”
It’s not get out. It’s not the cracked, desperate dismissal from the first time. This is tender. This is a man who’s asking me to leave because if I stay he won’t be able to stop, and the stopping matters to him because I matter to him, and the distinction between those two dismissals is everything.
Off the desk. I straighten my dress, pick up my bag. My notebook is inside it, holding his notes, his napkin, the paper trail of his unraveling.
I walk to the door. I don’t look back, because if I look back I’ll climb into his arms and he’ll let me and neither of us is ready for what comes after that.
My hand turns the lock. The click is very loud.
“Elsa.”
I stop. My hand on the door.
“Tomorrow.” One word. A promise disguised as a schedule.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
I open the door and step into the hallway.
THE CORRIDOR IS DIM. Emergency lighting, that greenish institutional glow that makes everything look like the inside of an aquarium. My footsteps are loud on the tile, louder than they should be, and my face is still wet from crying, and my skin is still warm where his hand was, and I’m walking through a university building at nine PM with the taste of a man on my lips and the weight of his history on my shoulders and I’ve never felt more alive or more terrified.