After everything. After the proposition and the rejection and the forehead kiss and the walk home in the dark. She still wants me and she can’t hide it, not tonight, not with her defences stripped and her hair loose and her eyes swollen, and I cross the apartment and I take her face in my hands and I kiss her.
She kisses me back.
Not immediately. There is a breath where her mouth is still under mine and her hands are at her sides and I think she is going to push me away and I deserve to be pushed away and then her hands come up and they find my hair and she pulls me closer and the sound she makes against my mouth isn’t performance. I have heard performance. Performance is calibrated. This sound is broken and raw and comes from somewhere she doesn’t have words for, and my hands tighten on her face and I’m lost.
I tell myself this is proof. I tell myself that a woman playing a game would kiss like this, would grab my hair and pull me down and press her body against mine with this kind of urgency, because the game requires it. I tell myself this as I back her against the door and her spine hits the wood and her hands are in my hair and my mouth is on her throat and her pulse is hammering beneath my lips.
I tell myself a lot of things. None of them survive the way she trembles.
Not strategic trembling. Not the calculated vulnerability of a woman who knows what her body does to a man. This is full-body, involuntary, the trembling of someone who is terrified and wanting and has never been touched like this and doesn’t knowwhat to do with her hands except hold on, and she holds on to me like I am the only solid thing in a room that has lost its floor.
We move. I don’t remember crossing the apartment or her hands in my hair. Don’t remember the dark of her room or the smell of her shampoo and the sheets pulled back. There’s nothing left of the thesis. Nothing left of the proof. Only her.
Her body tells me something her words already tried to tell me, and it’s something I’ve never encountered.
She gives me something she can’t take back. Her innocence, her first time, mine to keep whether I’ve earned it or not. And I know I haven’t. But I take it anyway because I’ve lost every fight I’ve ever had with wanting her.
We move together. Her hands find my shoulders and hold on. Her voice breaks on my name and mine breaks on hers, and the pleasure takes us both at once, and I stay very still afterward with my face against her neck.
The aftermath.
She is soft. Open. Flushed. Her hair is spread across the pillow and her hand is on my chest, resting over my heart, and her pulse is slowing and her body is warm against mine and she tilts her face up and she smiles at me.
The smile.
Uncertain. Hopeful. Shy. The smile of a girl who has just given someone everything for the first time and is waiting to see if they will keep it or throw it away. It isn’t the smile of a woman who won a negotiation. It is not the smile of a professional who has completed a transaction. It is the smile of someone who has never done this before, and the evidence is not in her body,though I felt it, felt the resistance and the giving and the sharp intake and how she gripped my shoulders not from passion alone but from newness, the evidence is in this smile.
The room collapses. Not physically. The walls remain. The ceiling stays where it is. But everything I’ve built, every reading, every assessment, every year of never being wrong, collapses inward, and what’s left is a man lying in the bed of a girl from Idaho who told him the truth and he kissed her forehead and called her remarkable and then came to her apartment and used her body as evidence and she let him because she loved him and she is smiling at him now because she thinks this means he finally believes her.
DAISY
I see it happen.
His face changes. Not gradually, not in stages. In one instant, like a window shattering from the inside, something behind his eyes collapses, and the man who was holding me, whose body was warm against mine, whose mouth tasted like wanting and whose hands were gentle for the first time since I’ve known him, becomes someone I’ve never seen.
He pulls back. Not his body, his body is still there, still touching mine, still warm, but everything behind his eyes retreats, and what’s left is horror.
“I’m sorry.” His voice is a sound I don’t recognise. Scraped. Hollow. “I thought you were lying to me.”
I don’t understand at first. The words arrive and they sit in the air above the bed and I am still smiling, I can feel thesmile on my face, the hopeful, stupid, Idaho-girl smile, and then the words arrange themselves into meaning and the meaning reaches me and the smile dies.
Every dinner. Every touch. Every kiss. The coffee on my desk. The car in the rain. The restaurant and the proposition and the balcony and the file room and his hand on my face in his penthouse, his mouth on my forehead, I know you believe that. All of it. Every second of every moment between us was not a man falling in love with a woman. It was an investigation. I was evidence. The body beneath him was a test, and the test was: will she perform innocence to the very end, or will she break character?
He came here tonight to prove I was lying.
He touched me to prove I was lying.
He brought me to the most vulnerable moment of my life and the whole time, the whole time, he was gathering data.
I sit up. His hand reaches for me and I move away from it and the movement isn’t fast. Isn’t dramatic. It’s the movement of a woman who has understood something she cannot un-understand and whose body is responding before her mind has finished processing.
I gather myself. Not with anger. Not with tears. With something I don’t have a name for, something that lives below both of those, in the place where the very young keep the things they were not supposed to learn yet. I gather myself like broken glass: carefully, because every piece is sharp.
“Please let me go.”
His hand is still reaching. His face is still that shattered window. His eyes are wet and I have never seen Anton Almazov’s eyes wet and I can’t afford to care because if I care I will stay and if I stay he will hold me and if he holds me I will forgive him and I am not ready to forgive a man who used my body as a closing argument.
“Daisy—”
