Her mouth opened under mine and I tasted the wine on her tongue, the sweetness underneath, and my brain went silent. The compulsions, the counting, the constant low-frequency static of anxiety that I’d lived with, all of it stopped. Like someone had found the switch, flipped it, and the only thing left was her.
I kissed her deeper and she pulled me closer, her hands fisting in my shirt, and I backed her against the counter. My hands went from her face into her hair and the curls were silk between my fingers. I pulled gently, and her head tipped back, and the sound she made was small, involuntary, and it detonated something in my chest that I didn’t know existed.
I kissed her neck. Open-mouthed and hungry. I wanted to consume her. I wanted to put my mouth on every inch of her and learn the geography of her body the way I learned code and music and everything else I cared about enough to master.
She gasped when my teeth grazed her throat. The gasp went straight through me and I was hard, so achingly hard I couldfeel myself straining against my pants and I didn’t try to hide it or shift away. I pressed against her and let her feel it, and her breath hitched, her hips rocking forward into mine.
I lifted her onto the counter. She wrapped her legs around my waist and pulled me between her thighs. The robe fell open to her hips. I could feel the bare skin of her inner thighs around my waist, the warmth of her pressed into me through the denim. My hands gripped her hips. Held her there. The sound I made was raw, guttural, completely beyond my control.
I pressed my forehead against hers. Both of us were breathing hard. Her legs locked around me, her fingers in my hair, her body warm and open. The heat of her against the front of my jeans was making coherent thought impossible.
"Are you sure?" I needed to hear it. Because consent wasn’t a formality, it was a foundation, and I didn’t build anything without one.
"I have been sure since the fitting room." She kissed the corner of my mouth. "Take me to bed, Jace."
I picked her up off the counter. She stayed wrapped around me, her face buried in my neck, her breath warm against my throat. I carried her down the hallway past the piano room, the paintings, the studio where her portrait watched us pass, into my bedroom.
I laid her on the bed and stood over her. She was lying in my sheets, her hair spread across my pillow, her chest rising and falling, her lips swollen from my mouth.
I reached for the robe. Pulled the belt loose. The fabric fell open and I let it, let the white cotton part across her body, and the sight of her underneath it, all warm skin and curves, made my mouth go dry.
She was beautiful. I’d known that since the market. But knowing it clothed and knowing it bare were different categoriesof knowledge entirely. She was soft where I was hard and warm where the cabin was cold.
I kissed her throat. Then her collarbone, and I stayed there, because I'd been staring at this exact line of bone for weeks, memorizing it across conference tables and in corridors and through car windows, and now my mouth was on it and she was breathing my name and I couldn't move on until I'd learned it properly.
I kissed the space between her breasts where her heart was pounding, felt the rhythm of it against my lips, and worked my way lower, slow, mapping every inch of skin I'd spent months imagining. When my mouth found her breast, she arched off the bed and the sound she made rewired something in my brain permanently.
I stayed there. Tasted her. Traced slow circles with my tongue that made her fingers twist in my hair, her breathing fragment into pieces. I moved to the other side, gave it the same attention. Symmetry mattered. Thoroughness mattered. The sounds she made mattered more than anything I’d heard in thirty-two years.
My mouth moved lower. Her stomach, where the muscles jumped under my lips. Her hip bone, where I bit gently and her whole body jolted. The inside of her thigh, where her skin was impossibly soft, her breathing closer to whimpering now.
I looked up at her from between her thighs. She was looking down at me, eyes dark and glazed, chest heaving, lips parted around a breath she hadn't finished letting go of. I had spent years building worlds obsessed with getting light and shadow right, and nothing I'd ever rendered came close to the way she looked right now.
"Tell me what you want." I said it against her inner thigh and watched goosebumps spread across her skin.
"You know what I want."
"I want to hear you say it."
"Jace. Please."
"Say it, Anna."
"I want your mouth on me." The sound of those words in her voice made me groan against her thigh. I gave her what she asked for.
I was thorough. Paid attention to every response, every shift of her hips, every change in her breathing. Data mattered, and it told me exactly what she liked. Slow circles. Pressure. My tongue flat and steady. The place that made her legs shake. I gave her all of it, relentless, my hands gripping her thighs, holding her open, holding her still.
She came with my name on her lips. Her back bowed off the bed, her thighs clamped around my head. The sound she made was raw, beautiful. I felt it in my entire body, the vibration of her pleasure moving through me like music through piano strings.
I kissed my way back up. Her stomach. Her ribs. The valley between her breasts. Her throat. Her jaw. Her mouth. She kissed me back. She could taste herself on my lips. The intimacy of it, the closeness, the complete absence of disgust, was staggering.
She reached for my shirt. I let her take it. Her fingers worked the buttons, her knuckles brushing my chest with each one. Every point of contact was clean fire. She pushed the shirt off my shoulders, put her hands on my bare chest. The feeling of her palms against my skin was overwhelming and perfect. Nothing in my body flagged it as contamination. Nothing. Not a whisper.
Her hand trailed lower. Down my stomach. Across the waistband of my jeans. I stopped breathing. She looked at me, asking permission with her eyes. I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice. Her hand found me through the denim. The pressure of her palm against me made my forehead drop to her shoulder. A sound came out of me that was barely human.
She unbuttoned my jeans and slid her hand inside. When her fingers wrapped around me, bare skin against bare skin, I groaned her name into her neck. My hips rocked forward into her grip. I was leaking against her fingers, wet and hot, the physical evidence of what she did to me.
My brain did what it always did. Classified. Assessed. Every bodily fluid I'd ever encountered had been filed under threat, every natural human response cataloged as something to manage, to clean, to control. But this was her. This was my body responding to her, and for the first time in my life, the alarm didn't sound. No revulsion. No flinch. No desperate inventory of what needed to be sanitized. Just warmth, and want, and the stunning, disorienting silence of a mind that had been screaming for twenty-four years finally going quiet.
