Page 58 of Breaking the Ice Queen
"And I'm still in love with you, and the love is winning, and I'm letting it."
Adriana's breath broke. Not into tears — into relief so complete it was almost indistinguishable from grief, the feeling of a thing you had given up on arriving exactly when you had stopped expecting it.
The sounds of the reception filtered through the walls — glasses, music, three hundred people who did not know that the most important thing that had happened tonight had nothing to do with the documentary. Adriana's forehead rested against Sienna's. Their breathing steadied together in the dim corridor, and the city waited outside, and neither of them was in any hurry to move.
23
SIENNA
Sienna drove them to Echo Park. Her hands were steady on the wheel. Adriana sat in the passenger seat with her dark hair loose and her eyes still bright from tears and her hand resting on the console between them, palm up, open. Sienna covered it with her own and held it for the entire drive, steering one-handed through the Friday night traffic, and neither of them spoke because the silence between them was no longer the loaded silence of things unsaid but the clean, open silence of two people who had said everything and were now sitting with how it felt.
The city moved past. Silver Lake. The reservoir. The familiar turn onto Sienna’s street where the jacaranda trees made a canopy overhead that in daylight was purple and at night was dark green and silver.
Sienna parked. They walked up the stairs to her apartment, still holding hands. Sienna unlocked the door with her free hand. They stepped inside.
The apartment was dark. The lamp was off. The city’s light came through the windows in the same amber and blue-white patterns that had been there the first night, when Adriana had stood in this hallway and Sienna had pulled her inside by the lapels and everything had been urgency and release.
Tonight was different. Tonight they stood in the hallway with the door closed behind them and looked at each other, and the stillness between them was its own answer. Adriana’s hands hung at her sides, open, not reaching yet, just waiting.
There was only this—two women who loved each other, standing in a dark apartment, choosing.
“No pretending this is something it isn’t,” Sienna said.
“No.” Adriana’s voice was low, rough from an hour of crying and being more honest than she had been in fifteen years. She stepped forward. The distance between them closed. Her eyes were clear in the dim light, and her expression was open, more open than Sienna had seen except twice before: in the car the first night, and in the corridor twenty minutes ago. Both times it had been a crack in the Ice Queen’s armor. This time it was not a crack. It was a demolition. The armor was gone, and what stood in its place was a woman who had chosen vulnerability and was wearing it with the same commitment she had once applied to that armor. “Just us.”
“Just us,” Sienna confirmed. She reached up and touched Adriana’s face. Traced the line of her jaw. Brushed her thumb across Adriana’s lower lip. Adriana’s eyes closed. Sienna read it as surrender, not retreat, and kissed her.
They moved to the bedroom slowly. No collision with the hallway wall. No fumbling with doorframes. They walked together, mouths finding each other between steps, hands mapping the territory of each other’s bodies with the unhurried confidence of two people who had been here before and intended to be here again.
Adriana reached for her first. Her hands found the hem of Sienna’s dress and gathered it slowly, with the deliberation that Sienna had learned was Adriana’s way of saying what she could not yet say easily,you matter, you are worth this. The fabric came off over Sienna’s head.
Then Sienna reached for Adriana’s blouse. She unbuttoned it one button at a time, pressing her mouth to each new inch of exposed skin, and the slowness was worshipful. This was the body of someone who had chosen her, who had burned her career and her reputation and her fifteen-year fortress to the ground and then walked into a cinema with her hair down and her walls down and saidI’m in love with youwith her voice shaking. Sienna intended to honor every inch of what that courage had exposed.
Adriana’s blouse fell. Her bra followed. Sienna’s mouth found the hollow of Adriana’s throat, where her pulse was rapid and steady, and she pressed her lips there and breathed and Adriana’s hands came up to cradle the back of Sienna’s head and held her there.
Adriana’s slacks and Sienna’s underwear came off between them, each layer removed with the intimacy of undressing someone you know rather than someone you’re discovering.
They lay down together. Skin to skin. The cotton was cool against their warm bodies.
“I missed you,” Adriana said against Sienna’s skin. The words were quiet, rough, spoken into the curve of Sienna’s shoulder as she kissed her way down. “Every part of you. The way you argue and the way you laugh and the way your body feels against mine.” Her mouth traced Sienna’s collarbone. She pressed her lips to each inch of skin she traveled, learning her again by touch.
This time was different from the times before.
This time was certainty.
Adriana moved lower unhurried, taking her time. She kissed Sienna’s stomach, nipped the sensitive skin beside her hip bone with a bite that was gentle and sharp enough to make Sienna gasp. When she settled between Sienna’s legs and looked up, eyes dark and intent, Sienna had a single coherent thought: she would spend the rest of her life being looked at exactly like that.
Then Adriana’s mouth found her swollen clitoris, and conscious thought dissolved.
She moved in slow, deliberate patterns, circling, reading Sienna’s responses with the focused attention that Sienna had learned to recognize as Adriana’s way of caring completely. Her fingers entered Sienna deeply, and curled with the certainty that Sienna had catalogued in her body’s memory and that no amount of absence could erase. The pleasure built in layers, wave on wave, each one higher than the last. She fucked her lovingly. She pushed in a third finger, stretching her as her body was so open to the offer.
Sienna gasped as Adriana fucked her harder. Her tongue still circling around her clit. She found the exact motion that spun Sienna into complete pleasure.
When Sienna came it was with Adriana’s name in her mouth and Adriana’s hands steady on her hips, and the bone-deep certainty that this was where she belonged.
Adriana kissed her way back up Sienna’s body and lay beside her. Sienna pressed her face into Adriana’s hair and breathed in the warm scent of her shampoo. Weeks of trying not to miss exactly this, and here she was.
Then Sienna rolled them with the unhurried confidence of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted. She straddled Adriana’s hips and leaned down and kissed her, deep and slow. Her hand found Adriana soaking wet, and the arousal confirmed everything the kisses had been saying—that Adriana had wanted this as much as Sienna did, that the time apart had been as empty for her.
