She’s here. She’s right here. And I’m done pretending this is just me being mildly interested in a regular.
Chapter Fifteen
Zoe
We walk to her apartment.
It’s six blocks from Anthem and we walk them fast, Teague’s hand on my wrist pulling me through the streets I’ve known my whole life, except they look different right now because everything looks different right now. The laundromat is closed. The streetlights are amber. Our shoes sound loud on the sidewalk and I can hear my own breathing and her breathing and neither of us is talking because we moved past talking somewhere between the second kiss and the moment she locked the bar door and said “come home with me.”
We pass the bodega where I used to buy popsicles with sticky quarters. We pass the bus stop where I waited every morning of high school. We pass the fire hydrant that’s been leaking since I was fourteen, the one the city never fixed, and the water catches the amber light and spreads across the pavement and I notice it the way I notice everything right now, too much and all at once, because my whole body is tuned to the frequency of Teague’s pulse under my fingers where they’ve slid from herwrist to her hand. Her grip is certain. Her stride is longer than mine and I’m half-jogging to match it and I don’t care. The air is warm and my lips are swollen and I can still taste the ginger beer and I am walking through my own neighborhood like I’ve never seen it, because I haven’t, not from inside this body, this version of me that kissed someone and got kissed back and is now going somewhere with her.
Her apartment is above the laundromat. Narrow stairs, a door with a deadbolt she works open one-handed because her other hand is still on my wrist. Inside is small and dark and she doesn’t turn on the lights, just closes the door and turns and puts her back against it and looks at me.
The streetlight through the window catches her face. The pink of her hair is muted in the dark, almost red. Her septum ring glints. Her eyes are steady and sure and she’s looking at me with an expression I’ve never seen on anyone, an expression that saysI know exactly what I want to do to you and I’m deciding where to start.
“Hey,” I say, because apparently when I’m about to have sex for the first time my brain defaults to greetings.
“Hey.” She pushes off the door. Takes a step toward me. Then another. She’s close enough that I can feel the heat coming off her skin and smell the bar on her, whiskey and lime and something underneath that’s just Teague.
She puts her hand on my jaw. Her rings are cold. I shiver and she feels it.
“Nervous?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Good nervous or bad nervous?”
“I don’t know the difference right now.”
She almost smiles. Then she kisses me, slow this time, not like the bar. At the bar it was a declaration. This is a question. Her mouth moves against mine and her thumb traces my jawline and I lean into it and my hands find her waist and I pull her closer because I’ve been wanting to pull her closer for weeks and now I can.
Her hip bones press into my palms. She makes a sound against my mouth, low and approving, and I feel it vibrate through my teeth. I pull again and she steps into me and our bodies meet full-length and the shock of it runs through me like a current, sternum to stomach to the backs of my knees. She’s shorter than me by two inches but she’s leading and I’m letting her and the letting is its own kind of feeling, warm and liquid, something I didn’t know I wanted until it was happening. Her tongue touches mine and my brain catalogues it: warm, deliberate, the faint taste of the lime from something she was drinking. Somewhere outside a car alarm starts and stops. The laundromat sign buzzes through the window. I know these sounds. I grew up inside these sounds. But they’re coming from far away now, like the neighborhood is on the other side of glass and I’m in here, in the dark, with her hands on my face and her mouth teaching mine what to do.
She walks me backward. Not far. Her apartment is small enough that three steps puts us in the living room. The back of my knees hit the couch and I sit and she follows, climbing onto my lap, one knee on either side of my thighs, and the weight of her settles against me and my whole body responds.
“This okay?” she asks.
“This is so okay.”
She kisses my neck. Open mouth, warm, her tongue tracing a line from my collarbone to my ear, and I grip her hips and my head falls back and I make a sound I’ve never heard from myself, low and rough, and it lands right because Teague’s mouth presses harder and her teeth graze the spot below my ear and I feel it everywhere.
Her hands go to the hem of my shirt. She pulls it up and I lift my arms and then it’s off and she leans back and looks at me in my bra and jeans, sitting on her couch in the dark.
“You’re gorgeous,” she says.
“You can’t even see me.”
“I can see enough.” Her fingers trace my collarbone, light, barely touching. Then down, between my breasts, over my stomach. My muscles contract under her touch and she watches them move with a focus that makes me feel like I’m being studied. Like she’s memorizing the map of my reactions.
I reach for her shirt. The band tee, faded, soft from a hundred washes. I pull it over her head and she’s in a black bralette and her tattoos catch the streetlight, colors shifting across her skin as she moves. The koi on her forearm. A moth on her shoulder. Geometric lines along her ribs. She’s covered in art and I want to trace every line with my fingers.
I do. I run my hands up her arms, over the scales of the koi, across the moth’s wings, and she holds still and lets me. Her skin is warm and the raised lines of newer ink feel different under my fingers, slightly textured.
“More,” I say, practically begging.
She doesn’t ask more of what. She reads my body better than I read my own and she moves with a confidence thattells me she’s done this before, many times, with women who weren’t shaking the way I’m shaking, and the difference between knowing that and caring about it is a gap I’ll close later because right now her mouth is on my breast and her hand is undoing my jeans and I lift my hips without being asked.
She pulls my jeans down my legs and drops them on the floor and I’m in my underwear on Teague Moran’s couch and her mouth is tracing a line down my stomach, slow, deliberate, her lips dragging across my skin, and every nerve in my body is lit.
