"Slow," I get out, wrecked. "Wait — Maeve, I'm going to?—"
"Then come."
"You first. I want to feel it."
"I am, Lex. I am. With you. Now."
She breaks under me.
It isn't loud. Her spine lifts off the bed, her teeth sink into my shoulder, and her body clamps down around me in long,rippling pulls — and that is the end of every shred of control I have. I drive in to the hilt and let go. I come harder than I have in my adult life, buried as deep as she'll take me, spilling into her in pulses that go on and on while she shakes apart around me and pulls everything there is to give straight out of me.
I follow her into a place I have not been with another person in eleven years and have never been with anyone in this lifetime — the place a man goes when he is making love to the woman he has carried in his chest for years without permission to want her. I am saying her name. I say it again. I say it a third time, and the third time is not her name.
I say it into her hair. Low. Three syllables.
"Eísai dikí mou."
Greek. Untranslated. The only form of the claim my body can make that my mouth cannot make in English.
You are mine.
I have meant it since she crossed the room at the consulate and asked me about the music. I am not yet the man who can give it to her in her own language. The Greek is the version she can carry in her ear without yet knowing what she is carrying.
She doesn't ask. Not yet.
She kisses the side of my throat instead. Once. Slow. The kiss of a woman who heard a sentence in a language she does not speak and decided, in the moment, to trust it.
? ? ?
I stay inside her.
It is something I have never done with another person. The staying — the heart slowing, the warmth of her skin against minein the aftermath. I never let myself stay, because staying is the part you cannot turn into a transaction, and staying makes the silence in which a person decides whether they are going to keep being yours.
I stay because Maeve has not let go of me.
Her hand is in my hair. Her other hand is at the nape of my neck. Her legs are still wrapped around me. Her breathing is slowing. So is mine. We are both wrecked in exactly the way. Eventually, I move — carefully, the way you move when you are carrying something made of glass.
I slip out of her, and she makes a small sound at the loss of me that I feel in my own chest. I lie down and pull her against me, and her head finds the place over my heart that it has been waiting to go. She lays her hand flat on my sternum, and I put my hand in her hair, and for a long time neither of us says anything.
The lake is on the other side of the windows. The wood stove down the hall has gone quiet. Nora is asleep behind a closed door.
And I am, for the first time in a long time in a bed with a woman on my chest, and I am not counting the minutes until she goes.
? ? ?
She speaks first.
Her voice is rough. The voice has just made the sounds it made, and the voice has not yet returned to the voice she uses for the daylight world, and the version of her voice that comes now is the version no one else has heard.
"You said something in Greek."
"I know."
"What was it."
"I will tell you when I know if it is true."
She’s quiet for a long second. Her hand on my sternum has not moved. Her breath against the side of my throat has not changed. She’s doing what Maeve does, which is to let a sentence sit in the room until she’s decided what it is.
