His mouth is what gets me, every time. It always has. Pouty in a way he doesn't know it is. Bitten raw at the lower lip from a habit he can’t kick. Right now slightly parted because he's been talking about how brave he thinks I am, and it's still doing the thing it does after a confession—shaped half like an apology, like he's pre-emptively sorry he said too much.
He weighs nothing in my arms. He never weighs anything. Slim and warm and curled up against my chest like he was meant for the space, and his hand is at my face, and his thumb is on my cheekbone, and—
I think about a thing I told myself once.
Not even told myself out loud. Just thought through it once. I was nineteen, I think, and I had just had the kind of day where I'd realized I would inherit my father's whole life if I was not careful—the houses, the money, the reach, all of it—and that none of it would mean anything if I did not have one person who looked at me and saw what I was instead of what I was attachedto. I had thought, that night, that all I wanted, eventually, was someone of my own. Someone to call mine. Someone to sit in a quiet room with at the end of a long day. Someone to see me. Just one person. That was the whole list.
I haven't thought about that list in so long.
I am thinking about it now. Thinking about the way Max talks about me, yearns for me, looks at me.
Tonight it is not just a look. It is a hand on my face. It is a body in my lap. It is a confession of envy delivered into the curve of my throat. It is a man twenty years old who has just told me, into my collarbone, that he is jealous of how I exist.
It is the entire list.
Max is everything–andmore–than I could ever fucking want.
My chest does a thing it has not done before. I am not going to put a word to it. There is no word for the specific physical event of a man's heart being too small for what he is currently feeling and trying to widen on the spot. It just happens. Itishappening. I am sitting on this couch in a quiet house with this person curled up against me and I am, for the first time in my adult life,full.
Max is still looking at me.
"You okay?" he asks. Quiet.
"Yeah, baby."
"You sure."
"I'm sure. Come here."
He closes the last small distance between us and presses his forehead to mine, and I let my eyes fall shut, and we breathe.
For a beat. Two.
"Bane."
"Mm."
"What were you thinking about just now?"
I don't answer right away. He waits. He has gotten better at waiting.
"You," I say. Eventually. "Just you."
His breath catches—small, almost not there, but I feel it.
He is the one who closes the last of the distance.
His mouth on mine is soft. Slow. Open already. He tastes like toothpaste and warmth, and his hand is still fisted in my shirt, and I kiss him back the way I have always kissed him.
Patient. Taking.Mine.
It builds.
Not fast. Not the way the kissing has built before, when one of us was about to lose the leash on it. This is slow. Deep. Settling in. His tongue against mine. My hand at his jaw, then his throat, then the back of his neck, where my fingers thread into the damp hair at his nape and stay.
He hums. Soft.
I pull him the rest of the way over me.
