I kissed him. He'd looked over at me with his hand on his thigh, and that face he had, watching, waiting, careful for once in his life—and I leaned across the seat and put my mouth on his. I felt him register what was happening, the half-second pause before he caught up, and then his hand came up to the side of my face. He kissed me back. The air inside the car went narrow, and that was the end of the night I'd planned and the start of whatever this was instead.
The rest of it was getting clearer by the second.
He pulled back to look at me. His hand was still at the small of my back, my back against the door. He was waiting for something. Not consent—we'd cleared that line three blocks ago. Permission to keep going past the point where either of us could pretend in the morning.
I took his face in my hands and kissed him again.
He made a sound against my mouth, low and surprised, like I'd just changed the terms of the contract on him. He pushed off the door, got an arm under my knees, and lifted me. I made a noise I would not have predicted from myself. My arms went around his neck. The dress rode up against the line of his forearm.
"Bedroom?" he said.
"Down the hall."
He took me down the hall. He knew where it was because there was only one place a hall this size could go, and because he had read every room he walked into for as long as I'd known him. He set me down at the foot of the bed. He kept his hands on my waist.
For one second, neither of us moved.
I'd not had a man in this apartment in nearly two years. I had a list in my head of the reasons, and tonight, every line of it was sitting outside the bedroom door because I'd decided to leave it there. I was tired of holding the door.
He pulled the zipper of the sage dress down with one hand. The other stayed at my waist. The dress slid off my shoulders, and his hands came up to my arms to slow it down, like he was making sure I understood that he wasn't in a hurry.
I was the one in a hurry. I worked at the buttons of his shirt, got two of them open, gave up, and pulled it over his head. He laughed against my mouth, low and a little stunned. Then he wasn't laughing.
It was warm. That was the first thing.
The whole length of him against me was warm in a way I'd forgotten about—not the temperature, the fact of him, another person's heat against my skin after years of being the only warm thing in my own bed. His hand spread flat between my shoulder blades. His mouth moved down my throat. I closed my eyes and let him.
The bed took my weight. He came down over me, on his elbows above me for one second with the dimple gone, no joke in his face anywhere. I felt my chest do something I wasn’t going to name.
"Callahan."
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Don't talk."
He bent his head and put his mouth on me, and I was through the door.
He took his time. That was what I would remember, later, when I would try not to remember any of it. He took his time, and he kept his hands where I needed them. He learned me. He found the place at the side of my neck under my ear that I'd not let anyone find in long enough that I'd forgotten about it, and he stayed there. He moved when I made the noise that meant move. He stopped when I made the noise that meant stay.
For three months, I'd thought I knew what he was like. I'd catalogued the dimple, the rolled sleeves, the hands he used like punctuation. I was wrong about the part of him that was under all of that. The part under all of that was attentive. Patient in a way that broke something open in me, because I'd not let anyone be patient with me in years, and I'd not known I missed it.
When he came up to look at me, I reached up and put my hand against his jaw. He turned his face into my palm. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
When we came together, it was slow.
It was slow. Quiet. His face close enough that I could feel him breathing, and I was the one who broke first. I said his name. He answered me. He answered me like he'd been waiting for me to ask, and I felt the whole length of him go still against me for one second before he started to move again. After that, I wasn’t thinking in sentences.
The wave built. He had his face against the side of my neck. I had my hand at the back of his head. The room was warm. The sheets were a wreck under us. He said my name once, against my temple, and the name was different in his mouth than it had ever been in three months of him calling meCallahan. I was gone.
Afterwards, neither of us spoke.
He rolled off me but stayed close. His arm came across my waist. He was breathing hard against the pillow. I was breathing hard at the ceiling. The streetlight outside the window threw a line of yellow across the foot of the bed.
I thought about saying something. I thought about it for a long time. Whatever sentence I built kept coming apart before I could get it to my mouth, and at some point, I stopped trying.
I went to sleep before I could decide what I was going to do in the morning.
