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Her lips curl up.Settle down, Fabian. One eye cracks open.
“Can’t speak,” she says.
“You just did,” I say, grinning at her, and a huge smile ricochets across her face. Her hair is in some crazy halo around her head like a rat’s nest on the pillow, and I feel stupidly, ridiculously proud.This. This I can give her.
“What are you doing to me?” she says, and I laugh at the wonder in her voice.
“Turning you on?” I say as I shift onto my elbows and cup her face in my hands.
“I’ve never had sex like that before,” she says, and the pride turns into an all-encompassing furnace that reaches every part of my body. How could anyone keep their distance from this woman?
“Good.”
“It certainly was. Again.”
I laugh. “Oh God, Kate.” I nuzzle her neck. “I think I’ll need some recovery time.”
She laughs and wraps her arms tight around me. I need to go and sort the condom, but I can’t bring myself to do anything to dissipate the after-ache in my pelvis. She sighs and shudders under me, soft kisses starting under my ear.
“So good.”
Her voice is sleepy, so I reach down, grab the base of the condom, and pull out, wincing and sitting back on my heels. Her eyes are closed against mottled, sweaty skin; traces of honey and oil all over her.What handiwork. Backing off the bed, I step into the bathroom and remove the rubber and dump it in the trash. I’d love a shower, but something in me doesn’t want to wash any of this night away, so I move back to the bed and climb in beside her. Kate curls into me, and I stare at the ceiling where the clock is projecting 3 a.m. For once my mind is a still pool, no ripples disturbing the calm, and I let the silence of the night sweep me down.
My eyes blink open to find 6 a.m. projected on the same crumbling plaster. The vague tendrils of some erotic dream dance around my head, and I jerk up: My dick is buried in something hot and wet. I squint down to a blonde head of hair between my legs. I let out a long groan. Waking up like this has probably only happened to me once or twice in my life.Fucking hell. She smiles up at me in the dim light and licks my tip, sending shivers right up my body.
“You’ve had your recovery time now,” she says.
16
Kate
If I thought my performance couldn’t get any worse in the ER, two weeks on from the wedding I know I’m mistaken. My mind is not on wounds and fractured bones; it’s in a bed in Brooklyn, in a haze of inky patterns and dark, tangled hair. The minute my shift finishes, I push through the bodies on the subway and spend hours in Fabian’s bed, lips and teeth on skin, gasping through the slow climb. I’ve never known anyone take time like Fabian takes time. He grabs me as soon as I enter the apartment, pins me down, pulls me back if I try to wander. I spent my day off giving him oral sex, bringing him to the brink time and time again: He was growling, tight and so angry, and came so hard at the end that I had the largest smile on my face that lasted the whole day.
Something is growing inside me, spreading through my veins. We have no time to go out, to do anything. We eat in bed, then start again. After the do-we-don’t-we and the half-starts, we are both all in and I can’t quite get my head around it. He’s the most amazing man, considerate, kind, crazy. I want to dance down the street, throw my head back and laugh out loud, pin his hands to the wall and climb all over him.
Fabian feels bare to his core to me, andnowI understand what was missing with David. The emotional honesty of this revealing all the fractures of the other. I didn’tknowDavid. The openness was all on my side. He never told me what he wanted. He held his secret life close, and as more conversations with him filter into my head, the more I think that he hid an awful lot more from me than I ever admitted. And not only me, other people too. Fabian doesn’t tell me everything about his work, but about everything else he’s clear and direct, emotions never far from the surface; and that is everything right now.
I get no reply when I buzz his door, so I hammer on it, looking down at the key in my hand that he gave me yesterday. I stand there for a minute. Two. A television plays somewhere downstairs, a crescendo of raised voices and then a door slams. I stare at the peeling gray paint as a spider crawls along the door jamb. He did say he’d be in. The key slots into the lock in a slow glide and I turn it, pushing the door open into silence.
“Fabian? Hello?”
I toe off my shoes and wander through the quiet apartment, sun filtering through closed blinds highlighting the dust curling through the air. His keys and wallet are on the counter in the kitchen as I pass. Darkness looms behind a crack in the door to the bedroom, and I hurry forward, pushing open the door into the dimly lit room. He’s curled up on the bed fully clothed, boots on like he collapsed there. My heart stops.
“Fabian?”
In two steps I’m beside him, instinctively reaching to check his pulse, and a cold sweat washes over me when I feel it thumping away under my fingers. I sink down with a shaking hand. I’m already so attached to him that in a sharp moment I realize I’d be devastated if I came here and the situation was different.
Then he mumbles something incoherent, and I collapse back onto the bed eyes closed, sucking in a deep breath, staring at the high ceiling and willing my pulse to calm down.Breathe in, breathe out.Seconds tick by, and I check my hands, steadying now, tremors receding and order returning like birds lining up on a wire. I rub my face, turning over and curling around him. I don’t know what to think about his drug-taking. I dispense enough drugs with strong side effects to know that this isn’t a black-and-white thing. What’s the difference between something that treats illness and something recreational? He likes to experiment, to live life on the edge. He’s not an addict; the emergency department is full of them, and the difference is obvious. But by God, it’s risky. And David tried to be someone else for me, and I don’t want Fabian to do that.
The peace and quiet of the apartment sinks into my bones, and warmth pushes up as I drift. There is no pressure here, no expectations. Fabian never does that thing that so many people do—which is to expect you to be or do something other than what you are. He’s here, being himself, doing his thing, and he’s warm and safe. And I think, with sudden clarity, that I can keep him that way.
Someone’s knocking on the door with a rhythmic tap-tap-tapping like the beat of a tune, and I’m trying to work out the rhythm, forcing my mind to concentrate. My eyes fly open to find Fabian dressed in a dark T-shirt in a black office chair in front of a bank of screens, long fingers flying over a keyboard. Tap, tap, tap. I grin, watching his hands:programmer hands. I blink the sleep out of my eyes, roll onto my back and stretch, and he wheels around.
My stomach sinks when I see his face. “What’s up?”
He scrubs his hands over his face, mouth a flat line, eyes fixed on the corner window next to the bed. “I’m so sorry, Kate. I’m sorry you had to come in and find me like that. I don’t want you to …”
He carries on staring into the distance, and I prop myself up on one arm, a blanket he must have put over me falling to my waist.
