"Astrid."
"What?"
"Have you been in just my shirt all day?"
"All day."
"All day?"
"All day, Easton."
She laughed.
She put her hands flat on my chest, the same hands flat on my chest a hundred times in the last two months, only this time she was looking down at me from somewhere I hadn't had her before. The lamp was on the nightstand on the side toward the door. The light was warm on the side of her body.
I let myself look.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you back."
"Don't move."
"I wasn't gonna."
She bent down over me.
Her hair fell forward on either side of my face. She kissed me, slow at first, her mouth warm and open, but the kiss did not stay slow for long. She tugged the shirt I was still wearing up, and I lifted to help her. It landed somewhere on the floor.
She put her mouth on my throat.
She put her hands on my ribs.
Her hands knew the places they had patched up the night of the cat at her kitchen counter. They'd been careful then. They weren't careful now. They moved down my body with the certainty of a woman who had decided she was allowed to know every part of the man under her, and was going to.
I got my hands on her hips.
I let them stay there a beat.
Then I let one of them move up her spine to the back of her neck and bring her mouth back to mine.
She made the sound against my mouth that she had made on the couch.
I rolled my hips up under hers.
She made a different sound.
"Easton."
"Yeah."
"The rest of it."
"Mhm."
She came up on her knees on either side of me and undid the button of my jeans without looking. I undid hers at the back. She lifted off me long enough for me to work them down her legs, and she got mine off with the efficiency of a woman who had decided a thing was happening.
She came back down.
