“Yes, to bed. That’s where I want to go.”
He leans back to look at me, and this time when he swoonshes I lift my hand to his face and set my thumb to that curving line on his cheek, the one I know, I know I’ll be able to draw later.
“I’m trying it your way,” I breathe, moving my thumb so I can lean in and press my mouth to that curve, so I can mimic it with my body, shaping myself to him. “Direct.”
“I like it.” He moves to pull me away from the wall; then he wraps his arms around my waist, lifts me off my feet, and carries me into his bedroom, never taking his mouth from mine.
And at first—oh, at first, I like it, too. I like it so much that I’m half-frantic with it. I don’t take in any details of the space he’s brought me to, because my eyes are busy on the parts of his body I reveal as I strip off his clothes—his stomach flat and ridged with muscle, a ladder of gorgeous, organized strength leading up to the heaven of his broad, smooth chest, broader even still by the way the muscles of his swimmer’s back fan out. I spread my hands over his shoulders, feel the textures of his skin with a sort of buzzing electricity in my fingertips; I hear the way Reid’s breath catches and quickens when I lean in to taste the clean-smelling skin of his neck. I’m so direct I can hardly wait, pulling him toward me as I back my way to the bed, barely pausing to let him get his hands on the hem of my dress, annoyed when getting it over my head means we have to stop kissing, the only solace the way Reid’s hands feel on new parts of my bare skin—my waist, my rib cage, my shoulder blades. I reach behind me and unclasp my bra, delighting in the noise of pleasure Reid makes, the reverent, desperate way he whispers, “Jesus,” when I lie back on his bed.
But then—with our clothes mostly off and him on top of me, with my hips moving up in small, rhythmic pulses against the hard length between his legs—I suddenly feel a rolling, unwelcome crest of nervousness, a hiccup in my newfound directness that makes the rhythm break awkwardly, a stutter-stop I hope he doesn’t notice. It’s so good with him already, nothing I’ve ever felt with anyone else, his heat and the way he kisses me soft but holds me strong.
But it’s started good before, and then I—
“Meg,” Reid whispers softly, right against the shell of my ear. “Do you want to stop?”
“No!” It’s too loud in the quiet room, my hands gripping at his hips involuntarily, my eyes squeezing closed at the threat of impending confrontation over this.
“I want to keep going,” I say, more softly now, nuzzling at his jaw, and he makes a low, humming noise against my skin, the sound a metronome for that beat I skipped, and I pulse my hips again.
But he presses up on his arms, moving his hard length away and looking down at me. “We can slow down.”
I want to whimper without his heat, but before I can get the sound out he picks up one hand from where he’s had it pressed against the mattress beside my head. He strokes his fingers slowly, carefully, right down the center line between my breasts, where my heart flutters beneath the skin.
“You seem nervous.”
I blink up at him, then close my eyes again and shake my head, feel those fingers stroke, patient and soothing, against me. Of course he’d know. Of course he can read every code, every sign my body leaves for him.
“I’m not.”
“Don’t hide from me,” he says, and I open my eyes, look up at his triple-take face, set in patient determination.
He’ll protect you, I remind myself. This is practice. This is staying.
“I’m not easy,” I tell him, wrapping my arms around his waist, my fingers trailing up those fanned-out muscles, a big, blank canvas for the nervous, directionless loops I draw there. “I mean that it’s . . . not always easy for me to finish. To come.”
I’ve worked up the courage to tell exactly two men this before. The first was after the third time I had sex with my high school boyfriend, an excruciating conversation that mostly included him asking me impatient questions I didn’t know the answers to, all of them some version of “What should I do different?” as though I could produce an annotated diagram about my anatomy when I’d barely had enough sexual experiences to know the basics. Eventually, frustrated with my own limited vocabulary and his sullen, perfunctory responses, I’d simply stopped expecting to finish—with him or with the handful of guys I dated after him.
The second was a guy I’d gone out with two years ago, so sweet and kind and attentive on all of our dates until that one, when I’d told him and he’d said, with an undeserved, confident smirk on his face, “It’s only because you haven’t been with me yet, baby.”
I’d texted Sibby with our this-is-a-bad-date signal and three minutes later, she’d called to pretend she had an emergency that I absolutely had to leave to help her with.
I never saw him again.
But Reid, he doesn’t say anything at all at first. He only plants his hand back on the mattress and bends his head to kiss me again, his hair falling over his brow to tickle pleasantly across my forehead—another soothing, delicate touch.
“Okay,” he says simply, between the kisses he presses against my mouth. For a while we get lost all over again, and I come back to my body. I don’t think of anything except how good his warm skin feels on mine, how his shoulders make me feel as if I’m under the sturdiest shelter.
“Do you like what we’re doing now?” he murmurs eventually, moving to kiss at the corner of my mouth, the line of my jaw, the skin beneath my ear.
I make a noise, something I hope comes out close to Mmmm-hmmm.
“Tell me what you like about it.” Direct, direct, direct.
“I like you above me. And I like the way you kiss me. The way you work up to it, same as you did in the park.” He does it again, now, that one, two, three pattern over my face, and I shudder out a breath, whispering to him again when he pulls his mouth away.
“I like the way you make me wait. That’s how I am—everywhere on my body, I guess. I like the anticipation.”
“Good,” he says against my skin.
And oh, the way he says that Good. The sound says it’s pleasure for himself and praise for me, all at once.
“More,” he demands, pulling his mouth away, looking down at me with heat in his eyes, and I somehow know what he’s asking me to do with that look, and I can hardly believe I want to. It’s so intimate, so close, so honest.
It’s what you’d do with someone you really, really trust.
And I realize, with certainty, that I trust Reid.
I take my hands from his body, and I put them on my own.
It takes me a minute, long seconds where my palms rest somewhere safe, on the soft skin of my stomach, feeling myself inhale and exhale, gathering my courage, thinking of all the hidden parts of me I want to show Reid. It’s broad daylight in here, Reid’s window covered with a sleek, pale-gray shade that offers privacy but not darkness, and he’ll be able to see everything.
But maybe that’s right. Maybe that’s exactly right, for me and Reid.
“I’m sensitive here,” I whisper finally, letting one hand trace up, my fingertips lingering on the full underside of my breast, a curve of skin that always makes my nipples harden in response when I’m touched there. My face is hot, the skin on my chest dewing with sweat. I feel shy, exposed, but still unbelievably aroused. All I want is for him to tell me Good again; I want him to give me that Good with his hands and lips and teeth and tongue, so I’ll show him everything.
I draw a single finger across my nipple, flicking it the way I’d want him to. He watches, his tongue darting out to lick at the corner of his mouth, his eyes hot and focused, and I know he’s seeing me, reading me, cracking this code I’m leaving, letters on this page for him alone, and suddenly I have a new, powerful rush of feeling, a different sort of passion: I hate every man who ever made me feel I shouldn’t say what felt right. I hate the way they didn’t try to understand. I hate the way they made me feel demanding and difficult for asking them to do something
they hadn’t figured out on their own; I hate the way they got frustrated and impatient and wounded.
My hands grow rougher, more grasping, and Reid says “Good” again, and I forget about every other guy, ever.
“Where else,” he says, the muscles in his arms straining tighter now, and I don’t think it’s fatigue.
I want to reward him for the way he’s enjoying this, and for the way he holds himself back from it. For the way he doesn’t say, I’ll take it from here.
I raise my hips from the bed. “Take these off for me?”
He doesn’t hesitate. He leans away from me and pulls my underwear down, and as soon as he’s exposed the triangle of hair between my legs his jaw clenches, his body a study in restraint. Smooth, hard lines, fully upright. W-A-I-T, those lines spell.
“Show me,” he says, and if it’s impatience, it’s exactly the right kind. It doesn’t promise me anything but his desire, his enjoyment of this, wherever it goes from here.
My hand smooths down my stomach, lingers in the soft, curved space between my belly button and my pubic bone. I stroke my fingers there lightly, a tiny, gentle cursive, the same way I would at home, in my own bed, late at night.
“I like this to start.” I already know I don’t like it as much as I would if it were Reid’s hand, Reid’s fingertips.
He makes a noise, puts one knee back on the bed, but keeps his distance. My fingers skate down, and I know I’m more sensitive than I would be usually—one glancing touch from the soft pad of my index finger and my lower back arches from the bed. Reid sets a big, warm hand on the top of my raised knee, watching me with a hot concentration. God, that stitched-up brow, that bruise. I feel warm and liquid and desperate.
“Do you like being kissed there, too?” he says, after a few seconds.
“Sometimes.” When it’s hungry and unreserved, when it feels less about a technique for me than it is about some urgent, desperate need for him. “When I think . . . when I think the guy is into it.”
“I’m into it,” he says quickly, and I can’t help but smile. I hope it’s a smile of the sultry variety, but it’s probably more the irrepressible joy variety. I close my eyes, picture Reid’s head between my legs, those broad shoulders spreading me apart as he licks and sucks, and my fingers circle that firm nub with a faster, more insistent rhythm. Reid squeezes my knee, and I open my eyes again, stilling my fingers.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so worked up.”
“Don’t be sorry. Don’t—if this is all you want, you showing me what feels good—”
His saying it makes me realize how completely this is not all I want. Doing this—telling him, showing him—all of it has released me from the preoccupation with finishing. I want Reid to touch me; I want Reid inside of me, and I’m past caring if it gets me there. If it doesn’t I’ll happily take this same look in his eyes again as he watches me do it myself; I’ll happily let him practice again and again and again.
“This isn’t all I want.” I remove my hands from my body, prop myself on my elbows to get closer to him. Beneath his gray boxer briefs I can see him, long and hard, stretching the material tight, and I get an entirely new face-pressing instinct when it comes to Reid, but that’s going to have to wait until later, because I feel aching and empty between my legs, wet and worked up and ready.
“I want you. You and me, together.”
He leans down to kiss me, his tongue sliding against mine, his arm coming to band around my lower back as he shifts me, moves me farther up the bed. When he’s on top of me again, my hips rise to meet his immediately, and without the material of my underwear covering me, without that trace of anxiety, the contact between us makes me gasp in pleasure. He bends his head, his tongue tracing that curve I showed him on my breast with his tongue, the exact right pressure before he licks up to my nipple, his teeth grazing me, and when, a few delicious minutes later, he moves his hand between us, I can tell from his first touch he paid such good attention, such close, close attention, and I practically jolt off the bed in pleasure.
“Can you—” I gasp. “Can we practice that later? It feels so good, but I need . . .” I trail off, pressing against him.
“Say it, Meg.”
My God, the way he does this, when we’re this way together. The way he’s the right kind of direct. The way he makes it safe for me to be the same.
“I want you inside me.”
He rewards me again, because we both know now the wait, the anticipation is over. He reaches his arm out, yanks the drawer of his small nightstand open for a condom, and within seconds he’s shucked his underwear and sheathed himself, movements I watch with the same hungry intensity that he gave to me.
And when he settles between my legs and pushes forward—so slow, so perfect, so focused—it feels so good, right from the very first second, and I see what’s happening inside of me. In my mind there’s a gorgeous, dangerous taking shape, swooping across my thudding, happy heart, looping behind and around it, catching it unaware, holding it fast and tight.
In a sort of desperate, surprised panic, I clutch at Reid’s sides, pulling him closer to me, relieved when the bolt of pleasure I get from feeling the full length of him inside of me scatters the rest of those too-soon letters from my mind as if they’re pencil shavings I’ve blown from the page. Then all I can think about is the next thrust of his hips, the next roll of mine, the way we find such an easy, perfect rhythm together, like walking in sync, like reading the signs we share with each other—a touch here, a suck there, a gasp, a groan, a sigh.
I make a liar of myself, my release building fast and insistent.
“Reid,” I breathe. “I’m close.”
He ducks his head, presses his forehead into the now-tangled mass of my hair, gusting out a breath even as he—gorgeous, smart, always-paying-attention man—keeps the exact same pace, the one that’s rocking me to a pleasure so intense I’ve never felt anything like it before.
“Good,” he says again, and I’m so turned on by the way his breath comes short, the way it sounds as if he’s speaking tight, almost through his teeth, holding fast to his control.
“Come with me,” I beg. “Please, please, please.”
And I don’t know how he does it, Reid with his mysterious, magical numbers, but he does, every one of those pleas a count for him and his perfect, hard thrusts—
one
two
three
—and then I shatter, crying out my relief and release, feeling him tense and then shudder with his own, and when we both come down from it, our breathing heavy and our bodies sweaty and our limbs tangled together, I’m so sated and proud and exhausted; I’m so relieved to be back with him that I don’t think either of us notices the way I’m tracing my fingers on his back, writing and rewriting that heart-holding L, the beginning of something special and rare and beautiful.
Something it’s too soon to know if we can finish.
It’s still daylight when I wake up.
Alone.
In the cool quiet of Reid’s bedroom, I’m tangled in his crisp, soap-and-swimming-pool-smelling white sheets, his dark navy coverlet a light, pleasing weight over my still-naked body. It’d be better, I think, to have him beside me—to have that weight be his arm around my waist, to stretch my sore muscles against the lean strength of his long body.
But it’s okay to have this drowsy, waking-up moment alone, too. All alone, I don’t worry about the blush rising to my cheeks, remembering everything that passed between me and Reid, hot and hard and honest. All alone I can press my hands over my face, feel the giddy smile spread across my cheeks. All alone I can do a goofy, whole-body wiggle, a celebration of what we did that first time, and the two times after (Reid is definitely “into it,” one of those times proved), and an anticipation of all the things we still have yet to do.
I take a deep breath, quieting my body and taking in my surroundings for the first time. It’s spare in here, almost ruthlessly so, a reminder of what
Reid had told me about this place in those sated, soft-speaking moments before I must’ve drifted off. “I moved here after,” he’d said, leaving Avery’s name out of it.
“I’ve never much thought of it as a home.” Other than a narrow dresser in the corner, the bed and its lone nightstand take up most of the space. And besides my clothes—now folded neatly on top of that dresser—there’s not much out and around. On the nightstand—clean-lined and dark, almost black wood—there’s a sleek, brushed-steel light and a single hardback book, its cover shiny with a clear plastic sleeve, a label on the binding from the library. I lean up to see the title—The Island at the Center of the World—and peek inside the flap, and this, along with the slim gray bookmark (of course he uses a bookmark) sticking out from the top, tells me that Reid is halfway through a history of Dutch Manhattan during the seventeenth century. I close the cover and push my face into the pillow, wondering if I might have another orgasm from knowing this, from picturing Reid in this big bed at night, propped on this exact pillow, reading a library book, trying to understand something on his own about a city where nothing—nothing but me, maybe—makes sense to him.
But after a few seconds, the quiet in here—combined with the brutal plainness of it—starts to make me feel uneasy, as though I’m a temporary, unwelcome intrusion into the space. I look over at my clothes on the dresser, strain harder to listen for movement outside this room. Maybe he stepped out, maybe I should take this opportunity to leave before it gets post-sex awkward. I could write him a note, tell him to call if he wants....
No, I tell myself, refilling my head with images and sensations from the last few hours. I sit up quickly and roll from the bed inelegantly, smoothing my mass of surely frizzy hair and reaching for the stack of clothes, bypassing everything in favor of the T-shirt I lent Reid. I pull it on and make my way out to the living space, the skin on my legs tingling with goose bumps as the bare soles of my feet meet the cool smoothness of the glossy parquet floors.
Love Lettering Page 19
