He pauses at the bedroom door.
He looks at me.
He says, "Are you sure?"
And I understand that I have been asked a question all evening. I have been asked at the door when Eleni left. I have been asked at the kitchen island when he answered me about ‘take your time.’ I have been asked at the dining table when he set the warmed plate in front of me. I have been asked when he kissed me with his hands on my face. The asking is not happening at the bedroom door. The asking has been happening since 4:47 PM, and the bedroom door is just where he’s offering me the last chance to say no.
I say, "I'm sure."
He opens the door.
The bed is the bed we have been sleeping in for fifty-five days. The duvet is the white one. The lamp on his side is on, low. The lamp on my side is on, low. He’s prepared this room. I didn’t see him prepare this room. The candle from the dining table is somewhere. I will see it later on the bedside table on his side, the small, clear glass holder, the steady flame. Right now, I am being undressed, and I am undressing him, and we are not speaking.
He undresses me, and I undress him, and neither of us speaks. My sweater. His sweater. My jeans. His. The undressing is not careful, not theatrical, just two people who have waited all evening to get to skin.
He pulls me flush against him, and there is nothing left between us, and the heat of him knocks the breath out of me. He is already hard against my belly. My mouth finds the healed ridge of the scar on his arm, and I kiss it, the way I have for fifty-five nights. He exhales roughly into my hair, his hand fisting slowly in it.
He lays me back on the warm bed, and he does not climb over me. He kneels. He starts at the gold chain at my throat, kisses it once, the necklace I have not taken off since the day he gave it to me, and then he goes down. His mouth is at my sternum. The flat of my belly. The jut of my hip, where he lingers, where his teeth graze, and his breath goes uneven. And then he settles between my thighs and puts his mouth on me.
I come up off the bed. His hand splays flat across my stomach and holds me down, and he does not stop. His tongue is unhurried and exact, learning the rhythm that makes my thighs shake around his head, and when he slides a finger into me and curls it I make a sound I have never made, and he groans against me like that sound is the thing he came here for. He keeps me there, at the edge and just under it, until I am fisting the sheets and saying his name like a question of my own.
Then he comes up my body. Slow. He braces over me and his eyes find mine, and he is in no hurry at all, and I understand what he is asking. He has been asking it all evening — in the candle, the warmed plate, the way he kissed me without words. He is asking it now with his weight over me and his eyes on my face, and I am answering with my hands at his jaw and my hips lifting for him.
He reaches between us and notches himself against me and pushes in, slow, one thick inch at a time, my body opening around the stretch of him until he is seated to the root and we are both still.
We do not move. He is buried in me, and his hand is on my face, and he is looking at me the way a man looks at the woman he is asking to spend his life with, and I am looking back like a woman who has already decided.
Then he moves.
Slow. Slower than slow. He drags almost out and slides back to the hilt, and on every stroke, the base of him drags the place still swollen and aching from his mouth. I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper. His breath brushes against my ear. My nails are in his back. He builds me, patient and certain and relentless, until the whole of me has narrowed to where we are joined.
I am close. Close to release and close to the answer, and they have become the same thing.
His hand grips my hip, angles me up, and drives deeper, and the coil snaps. I come around him in long waves with his name in my mouth, and I say the other word too, quiet, into his hair.
"Yes."
His hand stills on my hip. His whole body goes taut, and then he follows me over, spilling hot and deep, his face pressed to my throat, holding the question and the answer in the same second.
He's heard me. He knows what he asked. He knows what I just answered.
The world is the exact dark of a bedroom on a Saturday night in January, and it has reduced to the two of us and the one word and the warmth of him still inside me, and I am alive, I am alive, I am alive.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
'Lex.'
Chapter 29
Lex
After Words
She’s just said ‘yes.’
