“Thenhow? How did she manage to be like that? How was she that for you?”
She looked at him, utterly baffled. Able to see it all now, and feel it, but still struggling with how to fully grasp it. How to step into it, with such ease. It felt impossible, despite the look all over his face.
He seemed to find the question completely inexplicable.
“There’s no great mystery,” he said. “It’s just the same thing you do, whenever something excites you. It shows on your face, no matter how much you try to repress it, or hide it. The shock of how pleasurable it is to feel it, the need for more, the eagerness. It used to drive me out of my mind—just as me feeling the same drove you out of yours. We loved the desire we inspired in each other, Lil. We loved it almost as much as we loved everything else. It was the sweetest sort of bliss.”
“So you still feel that bliss now.”
“Of course I do.”
“In the stairwell. You wanted to.”
“I came so close to having you up against that wall, it horrified me.”
“And how does it feel now?”
She let the question hang in the air. And it did so easily, because said air seemed to have grown very heavy, suddenly. Much like his gaze had. It held onto hers, in a way she could hardly drag herself away from. She didn’twantto drag herself away from it.
It was him who finally broke the deadlock.
“Like we should really focus on the problem we have,” he said.
Only he didn’t return to the books, their notes. He didn’t completely look away. He dipped his eyes down, for just a second, atthe thing they were sat at. Then he let himself look up at her, from underneath his lashes.
And she knew what he was saying, with that look.
She knew it better than she knew her own self.
“True. But it’s hard to, when we’re sat at the exact table you fucked me over.”
“I didn’t fuck you over this table. I fucked you up against those shelves.”
“You did. And I loved every second of it.”
Those eyes drifted closed.
His lips parted.
Even as he tried to wrestle himself under control.
Be calm, be reasonable, just think about what this meant.
“We need to slow down,” he said.
And all she could think is:Oh god, we are about to go so fast.
“Honestly, I don’t think you want to. I don’t think you want to at all.”
“OfcourseI don’t. How can I, when even thinking that you might enjoy knowing what we did here makes my heart feel like it’s beating out of my body. All of this conversation does. I should have stopped you when you started talking about still finding me attractive, and suggesting that you might want to hear me say that I still find you attractive, too, but god after all those years of being without you and months of being so close and yet so far, of thinking I could never express to you how out of my mind a single hint of your pleasure made me... I don’t know how to say no. I don’t know how to say turn back,” he said, words stumbling over each other and fighting to get out, until everything was there.
All their cards on the table.
No need to ask anymore.
“Good. Because I don’t want to.”
“But we—but you—you haven’t had time to really—”
