Thursday night, after dinner, he comes to my suite.
This is not accidental. I've known it was coming the way you know a storm is coming. I might not have known the exact moment, but the whole shape of it, the air pressure change, the quality of the light. He texted at eight and asked if he could come up, and I said yes, and I spent the next twenty minutes in a state of extremely dignified anticipation. I freshened up my makeup, ran a brush through my hair and teeth and applied some softly scented lotion.
Dignified might be a stretch.
He knocks once. I open the door.
He looks at me for a moment in the doorway, taking me in and then he comes in, and the door closes behind him, and the suite which is very beautiful and very private suddenly feels like the most important room I've ever been in.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi." He cups my face in both hands and kisses me, this kiss is less a statement and more a slow, thorough conversation, his hands moving from my jaw to the back of my neck and I step closer.
When he pulls back, his forehead against mine, he says: "I need you to be sure."
"I'm sure."
"Tell me."
"I'm sure," I say again, holding his gaze. "I've been sure since the ornament station, if I'm honest. Longer than that."
"Yeah," he says softly. "Me too."
He kisses me again, and this time he walks me back toward the bed, steady and unhurried, hands learning the shape of me through my clothes.
He undresses me slowly. Deliberately. Like he's paying attention to every inch of my body, because he probably is, because that's how he does everything, and I am not used to being the subject of this kind of attention and I discover that I'm going to have to get used to it immediately.
"Look at me," he says, when I glance away, half out of some old habit of not quite letting myself be seen.
His voice. That register. Low and quiet and not asking.
I look at him.
"Good girl."
There it is. The words that land in my chest and lower all the way to my core. I've stopped having complicated feelings about how much I like hearing them. I just like hearing them.
His hands are warm and his mouth is warmer and he takes his time with removing my clothes, not drawing it out for its own sake but because he's paying attention, which is different. He asks with his hands and his eyes and I answer and he listens.
"Tell me what you need," he says, against my throat.
"I need —" I have to think, which is difficult at present. "I need you to keep going and not stop."
"I can do that."
He can and he does.
He lifts me off my feet and settles me in the middle of the bed so I’m looking up at him, not sure what I’m supposed to do with my hands. He takes my wrists and arranges them above my head, braced against the carved wood of the headboard. He kisses the inside of my wrists, both of them, and then lets go.
“Stay right here, just like this,” he commands.
He shrugs out of his own clothes with less ceremony, folding them carefully and setting them on the chair by the window. His body is different than I imagined; broader, more lived-in, with stretch and muscle, some scars. He sees me looking, and a smile tilts the corner of his mouth, unguarded enough to gut me.
He kneels on the bed, and his hands are on my ankles first, then up my calves, parting my knees gently. “You still okay?” he says, and I am, a little more than okay.
He fits himself between my legs, his mouth finding my thigh, trailing up. I am made of sensation, so much of it, everything focused in on the drag of his mouth on my skin, the scrape of his teeth, the way his hand cups my knee and pulls me open wider.
He’s so slow.
