“I want to.” Melissa’s voice came out certain, even if her hands weren’t quite steady. “I’ve been wanting to. I just needed—” She exhaled. “I needed tonight to stop pretending I was fine standing in that room, performing, while Michael smiled at me and you were here.”
June reached up and covered Melissa’s hand with her own, pressing it gently against her cheek. “Then stop pretending.”
Melissa kissed her. Slower than downstairs, more deliberate—a question and an answer at the same time. June kissed her back and walked her, step by step, toward the bed, and when the backs of Melissa’s knees hit the mattress she sat down and looked up at June standing over her and felt none of the things she’d expected to feel. No hesitation. No voice in her head tallying the reasons this was reckless.
Just want. Clean and uncomplicated and entirely hers.
“Come here,” she said.
June came.
What followed was slow and careful and then not careful at all.
Melissa had thought, in the abstract way she’d been thinking about this for weeks, that she would feel uncertain. That the unfamiliarity of it would be the loudest thing—a woman’s hands, a woman’s warmth, the geography of someone built differently than Michael had been. That she’d be in her head about it, cataloguing and second-guessing.
She wasn’t.
June kissed her until the thinking stopped, which didn’t take long.
She was warm everywhere, unhurried in the way she was unhurried about things she cared about—moving through this like she moved through a kitchen, with the confidence of someone who trusted her own instincts and didn’t feel the need to rush toward the end when the middle was worth staying in. She paid attention in a way that made Melissa understand, slowly and then all at once, that attention was the thing she’d been starved of for longer than she’d realized.
June’s mouth found her throat and Melissa’s head fell back against the pillow. She was aware of her own breathing, uneven now, and of June’s hands—one in her hair, one tracing the line of her ribs like she was mapping something—and of the heat of June’s body against hers. No space between them. No distance maintained.
Her own hands, which had been careful until this moment, found June’s waist and pulled, and June came willingly, settling against her with a soft exhale that Melissa felt against her collarbone.
“Hi,” June said, into her skin.
“Hi,” Melissa managed.
June lifted her head and looked at her—really looked, the way she did, thorough and unhurried—and then she smiled, private and warm, and kissed her again. Deeper this time. Her hand slid from Melissa’s ribs to her hip and stayed there, deliberate, and Melissa’s breath caught.
“Okay?” June asked, against her mouth.
“More than.”
June took her time after that. A brief flicker of the old instinct toward composure surfaced in Melissa and June dissolved it immediately by doing it again, watching Melissa’s face in the lowlight with an expression that made self-consciousness feel beside the point.
This is what it’s supposed to feel like, Melissa thought.
She was louder than she expected to be. That registered dimly, a brief flicker of embarrassment that June dissolved immediately by doing it again, without apology or commentary, just with intention—watching Melissa’s face in the low light of the hotel room with an expression that made the embarrassment irrelevant.
“Look at me,” June said, quiet and certain, and Melissa did, and that was what undid her.
Not the touch, though the touch was…
The looking. Being looked at. June’s eyes steady on her while everything else went unsteady, while Senator Brandt dissolved entirely and there was just Melissa, undone and present, with nowhere to hide and no instinct left to try.
She said June’s name. Just her name—rough, unpolished, nothing performed about it—and June’s expression shifted into something soft and fierce at once.
“I’ve got you,” she said.
And she did.
Afterward, Melissa lay in the not-quite-dark, June’s head on her shoulder, one lamp burning across the room. Her whole body felt rearranged. Not dramatically—more like something that had been slightly out of alignment for years had quietly, finally, settled into place.
June’s thumb moved against her ribs. Slow. Absent. The touch of someone who had stopped thinking about what their hands were doing because it had become simply where their hands wanted to be.
“Still scared?” June asked, later, tracing the line of Melissa’s collarbone with one finger.
