“To your parents’ house?”
“To your apartment.” She says it steady.
I look at her. She’s sitting on her stool with her bruised knees and her frizzy hair and her mother’s empty Tupperware and she’s asking to come to my bed and she knows what she’s asking and she’s not nervous about it. She’s not doing the lip thing. She’s just looking at me with those dark eyes and waiting.
“Last time—” I start.
“Last time you didn’t know. Now you know. And I’m asking.”
“Zoe.”
“I’m not asking you to be my girlfriend. I’m not asking you to meet my parents. I’m asking you to take me upstairs to your apartment and make my day even better. Please?”
I close the bar. Lock the door. Turn off the neon.
We walk to my apartment, her hand in mine. The door opens. I turn on the lamp because this time I want to see her and I want her to see me and the dark was a place to hide and I’m done hiding from this particular girl.
She stands in my apartment in the lamplight and she looks different. Not nervous. Ready. She pulls her shirt over herhead and drops it on the floor and she’s in her sports bra and her bruised knees and her dark skin is practically glowing.
“Show me,” she says. “Show me what you like.”
Nobody has ever asked me that. The women I’ve been with didn’t need to ask because we weren’t showing each other anything. We were finishing. Getting there, getting off, getting dressed. Efficient. I liked it efficient. Efficient means nobody sees you.
“Here,” I say. I take her hand and put it on my waist. She puts her hand there and holds it, firm, not tentative. I move it to my hip. “Here.” She follows. I’m guiding her like a dance, positioning her hands, showing her where to press and where to be gentle, and she’s paying attention with the same focus she gives everything, that total Zoe attention that makes you feel like the only thing in the room.
I pull my shirt off. My bralette. She looks at my body, the tattoos and the skin between them, and her hands are shaking slightly but her eyes aren’t. She traces the moth on my shoulder. Down my arm, over the koi. Across my ribs, the geometric lines, and I hold still for her the way I hold still in Vanessa’s chair, except this doesn’t hurt. This is the opposite of hurt. This is someone reading me with their fingertips instead of a needle, and the precision is the same because Zoe doesn’t do anything without her whole self.
Her thumb finds the scar under my ribs. Old, faded, a kitchen accident from a life I don’t talk about. She doesn’t ask what it’s from. She just traces the edge of it and moves on, cataloguing, keeping it, and I feel my jaw loosen. I didn’t know it was clenched.
“Tell me,” she whispers.
“Your mouth,” I say. “Put your mouth where your hands are.”
She does. She presses her lips to my collarbone and down, across my breast, and her mouth is warm and tentative and then less tentative, learning the pressure I respond to, adjusting. She finds a spot on the underside of my breast where the geometric ink ends and bare skin begins and she drags her teeth across the line and I inhale and she hears it and goes back and does it again. Harder. She’s learning me in real time, feeding on my responses, and the attention is relentless in a way I have no defense for because I am not used to being studied by someone who wants to know.
I walk her backward to the bed. We fall into it together, less graceful than Saturday when I had her on my couch, more honest. I pull her sports bra off and she pulls my jeans down and we’re tangled together in the lamplight, her brown skin against my pale skin, her unmarked body against my illustrated one, and the contrast is beautiful in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
She puts her mouth on my breast and her hand between my legs and she’s clumsy but she’s listening. She's adjusting every time my breath shifts, finding the rhythm I need through trial and response. Her fingers are hesitant at first, circling without committing, and I put my hand over hers and show her the pressure and the pace. She presses where I press. Moves when I move. She follows my hand like she followed the music at Anthem, by feel, fully in it, and when I take my hand away she keeps going on her own and the rhythm holds.
It’s different. That’s the thing I can’t edit out. This is different from every other time because every other time I could watch from the outside. I could observe, catalogue, stay in the part of my brain that files and sorts and keeps the distance. WithZoe my hand is in her hair and my hips are moving against her fingers and my mouth is open and I’m making sounds I don’t curate and the editing is gone. I can’t find it. She took it when she put her hands on me.
She watches my face. She watches my face and her fingers are inside me and her thumb is on my clit working a slow circle that she found by listening to the sound I made when she first brushed it, and she’s biting her lip in concentration, and she looks like a person learning the most important thing she’s ever learned, and when I come it’s quiet and sharp and her name is in my throat and I say it.
She’s looking at me when it happens. She’s right there, face close to mine, hand still moving, eyes wide, watching me fall apart under her touch for the first time. I can see what it does to her. I can see the awe in it, the pride, the understanding that she just learned something about her own power that she didn’t know before.
“Hi,” she says softly.
“Fuck.” My voice is wrecked. I laugh.
“Was that okay?”
“That was more than okay.”
She smiles. Not the big grin. A small, private, stunned smile. Then she puts her head on my chest and I put my arm around her and we lie there in the lamplight, both breathing hard, and I don’t tell her to go home and I don’t say this is just a hookup and I don’t reach for the distance I’ve been keeping for five years.
I just lie there with her head on my chest and her hand over my heartbeat and I think: this is trouble. This is the biggest trouble I’ve ever been in. And I don’t want out.
“Stay,” I say.
