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 kiss him instead.
LATER.
The word later is doing a lot of work.
We’re on his couch—a deep, dark thing that swallowed me the moment I sat down—and dinner has been later for approximately forty minutes. My shoes are somewhere on the floor. His suit jacket is over the arm of the leather chair where his coat already lives. His tie, which I didn’t know he was wearing until I felt it against my collarbone, is loose, pulled sideways by my hands, which apparently have opinions about his neckwear that my brain wasn’t consulted on.
He’s kissing my throat.
His mouth is below my ear, on the place where my pulse is doing something reckless, and his hand is in my hair—fingers tangled, gripping—and my head is tipped back against the couch cushion and I’m making sounds that I’ll absolutely not think about later. Small sounds. The sounds of a girl whose entire body has become a single nerve ending and that nerve ending is located exactly where his mouth is.
My hands find his shoulders. His shirt is warm cotton under my palms, and through it I feel the muscle, the tension, the way his body holds itself even now, even with his mouth on my skin. I slide my hand to the back of his neck and his whole body goes rigid.
I freeze.
He pulls back. Looks at me. His eyes are dark and his lips are reddened and he looks wrecked in a way that makes me feel powerful and terrified in equal measure.
“Did I—”
“No.” His voice is rough. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But you—”
“The back of my neck.” He closes his eyes for a second. Opens them. “I’m not used to being touched there.”
The words make me swallow hard. A man who was raised by violence, who learned touch as a weapon, is telling me that the sensation of my hand on the back of his neck is something his body doesn’t know how to file.
I lift my hand. Place it there again. Gently, deliberately, my fingers against the warm skin above his collar.
He goes still. His eyes close. The muscle in his jaw works once, twice.
I wait.
His exhale is uneven. Then his forehead drops to mine, and we stay there, breathing, my hand on the back of his neck and his hands in my hair, and I feel the moment his body decides to trust it. A release, fractional, the way a fist uncurls—not all at once but finger by finger, the way I opened his hand on the garden bench.
“Elsa.” Against my forehead.
“I’m here.”
HIS SHIRT IS UNDONE, my dress is askew, and I’m not sure how much time has passed or how long we’ll be able to keep this up.
His mouth moves against my neck. Not a kiss. A word, Italian, barely a vibration against my skin. I don’t catch it. I don’t need to.
The room is quiet. His apartment is dark around us—the evening has deepened while we weren’t looking, while his hands learned the curve of my waist and my mouth learned the scar on his ribs and his body learned what it feels like to fall apart in someone’s arms and not be dropped.
“I need to go,” I say. Not because I want to. Because it’s late, and the line matters, and I’m Martha Lively’s daughter.
He doesn’t move. His arms stay around me. His face stays against my neck.
“So go.” Muffled. A challenge and a plea, wrapped in two syllables.
My finger lifts to his shoulder. Bare skin, warm, the muscle beneath it still carrying the aftershock of what just happened. I trace a circle. Small. Slow.
He makes a sound. Not the trapped one from before. Something quieter. Something that sounds like it came from very far inside him and traveled a long way to reach the surface.
I draw another circle. And another. My fingertip on his shoulder, on his skin, and he isn’t moving, and I’m not going.
“You’re not leaving,” he says against my neck. Not a question.
“You haven’t let go.”
“No.”
I trace my circles. He holds me. The apartment holds us both—the books and the dark wood and the leather chair and the evening outside the window turning from copper to indigo. We don’t talk about Agnes or the scholarship or the semester running out or what happens when a student is sitting in her professor’s lap on a Saturday night in his apartment with his shirt undone and her dress slipping off her shoulder.
We stay.
Not forever. An hour, maybe. Maybe more. Long enough for my circles to slow, to widen, to find the warm, unhurried rhythm that means peace. Long enough for his breathing to match mine, for his arms to go loose around me, for his thumb to start tracing its own circle on my lower back—his answer to mine, the call and the response, two people speaking the same language with their hands.