Page 86 of Cut Off
The knock is a whisper.
For a second, I think I’m imagining it. Then it comes again. Three soft taps.
“Come in,” I say, my heart rate skyrocketing.
He opens the door and slips through, closing it behind him. The hallway light bleeds in under the door, just enough to see that he stands with his hand still on the knob, like he hasn’t fully committed yet.
He’s not wearing socks. I don’t know why I notice that.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
He crosses the room in three steps. Maybe four. He stops in front of me, and I tip myhead back to look at him. Then he reaches down with both hands and cups my face he’s been thinking of doing this all night, and he kisses me.
Slow. Slow, slow, slow. The kind of kiss that’s been lining up behind every other kiss, the patient one that says so much more. His thumb traces my cheekbone. His other hand slides into my hair. He bends, and I rise and the angle finds itself, and I taste him—mint and the faintest ghost of the beer he had with dinner—and I forget every single other thing that’s taking up rent in my head.
Then his shirt is on the floor and so is mine, and I pull him down. The bed dips, then he’s kneeling over me, and I’m sliding back against the pillows. Then it’s warm skin against warm skin and his mouth on my jaw.
He takes his time. That’s the thing I’ll keep coming back to, after.
He could rush. We’ve been a fuse since the countertop incident. But he doesn’t. He kisses my collarbone and the dip below it and the hollow of my throat where my pulse is going wild, and his hand moves down my side, slow, learning the shape of me with his palm.
I undo his belt. He helps. We get rid of the rest of it in a shuffle of fabric and limbs, and then once the condom’s on, we’re skin on skin and the room is all hall-light and shadows. His weight settles over me, and I make a sound I didn’t know I knew how to make.
He breathes against my throat, smiling, and presses his lips there to muffle the next one.
He kisses the curve of my shoulder. He learns me with his mouth in a way that isn’t rushed, that isn’t leading anywhere, but is the point itself. My hands are in his hair and on his back, and I can feel his long muscles shifting under my palms.
Hisfingers roam down my stomach, then inside me. Patient. Attentive. He watches my face when I gasp, like he’s taking notes, and adjusts what he’s doing in some small, devastating way that makes my breath catch and my eyes squeeze shut.
“Look at me,” he says, low.
I do.
Our eyes lock, and nothing about this is a joke or a deflection.
“Jonah,” I say.
It’s not a sentence. It’s not anything. It’s just his name.
“Yeah,” he says, like I asked him a question.
I want him inside me, so I pull him until he has nowhere else to go.
He hesitates before he slides into me with a slow steadiness that empties my lungs. He stops there, filling me, forehead to mine, both of us breathing each other in, and I can feel his heart against my chest and mine against his. “You’re perfect,” he whispers.
We move together. Quiet. Slow. Every roll of his hips says something. Every press of his mouth to my temple, my jaw, the corner of my mouth, says something else.
He whispers something into my hair I don’t catch. I don’t ask him to repeat it. I’m afraid of what it might be.
It builds and builds, slow, deliberate, until there’s nothing left but the edge—a thin, trembling line that breaks all at once, every nerve ending in my body lighting up, every thought erased or rewritten, my face buried in the warm skin of his neck. I don’t make a sound. Not really. Maybe a gasp, maybe a muffled curse, but mostly just say his name, over and over. His hands are everywhere and not nearly enough; his mouth still pressed to my jaw, his breathing gone ragged. I have the realization that I’m not at all in control of myself, that if heasked for anything in this moment I’d give it, and that is so fucking dangerous I almost laugh.
He moves then, just enough, and the angle changes as he slips deeper inside, and I lose the entire second half of my brain.
I’m not ready for it when it happens. After the slow-burn lead-up; it’s a supernova detonation, white-hot and full-body, so much bigger and more absolute than anything I’ve ever had before that I cannot, for the life of me, keep it together. It’s all I can do to hang on. My hands claw at his back, not out of aggression but out of raw need. I come so hard it’s like the room whites out for a second, sound goes fuzzy, my limbs light up and my breath stops. I feel every contraction, every ripple, and it doesn’t taper off so much as shatter me into smaller and smaller pieces, each one more sensitive than the last. The way he keeps moving through it, relentless and gentle, makes me clamp down on him even tighter.
He braces himself above me, body trembling, and I can feel that he’s trying so hard to hold it together, to not let go before I’ve wrung every last little bit of pleasure out of the moment. He bites out a curse, low and shaky, and the sound of it almost makes me come again. My legs are around his waist and I pull him closer, grinding up helplessly against him, greedy and uncoordinated with aftershock. The rhythm gets messy; neither of us has any finesse left, just this desperate desire and the need to finish.
