Page 62 of Give In to Me
Nopleasethis time. But the asking was in the invitation itself—he’s asking me into the one room where his containers don’t exist.
I typedyesbefore I could overthink it.
SATURDAY. HERE. STANDINGin his apartment that looks like his office but bigger and warmer and full of books, and he’s leaning against his own door looking at me in my blue dress, and neither of us has moved.
“Are you going to keep standing by the door?” I ask.
“Are you going to keep standing by the bookshelf?”
“You’ve a first edition.” I’ve spotted it—spine cracked, leather faded, Italian text. “On the third shelf. Is that—”
“Elsa.”
My name. His voice. The Italian in the vowels.
I stop talking about books.
He crosses the room, and I forget about first editions and bookshelves and warm apartments, because his hand finds my jaw—fingertips, light—and he tilts my face up and his thumb traces my cheekbone and he’s looking at me with those dark eyes, and I’ve missed this face from six inches away with an ache that turned my hands to stone.
“You wore the blue dress.”
“Yes.”
“You stopped wearing it.”
“Yes.”
His thumb moves. Along my cheekbone. Down to the corner of my mouth. He traces the edge of my lower lip and my whole body goes taut and my hands find his shirt and grip, because the sensation of his thumb on my mouth is doing things to my central nervous system that would concern a medical professional.
“You’re wearing it now.”
“I am.”
He kisses me.
Not any of the kisses that came before. This is something new. His mouth is warm and unhurried and his hand cradles my jaw and his other hand finds the small of my back, pulling me against him, and there’s no desk between us, no podium, no institutional furniture, no campus, no office door that someone might be standing outside of. There’s just his mouth and mine in a room full of books, and his hand on my back.
I pull back. Not far. An inch. My lips still feel him.
“Dinner?” I manage.
His hand tightens on my back. “Later.”
I should insist. I should be the sensible Nebraska girl who eats at proper hours and keeps her hands on appropriate surfaces and doesn’t let a thirty-six-year-old man with a jaw like carved marble pull her against his body in an apartment she’s never been to before.
I kiss him instead.
LATER.
The wordlateris doing a lot of work.
We’re on his couch—a deep, dark thing that swallowed me the moment I sat down—anddinnerhas beenlaterfor approximately forty minutes. My shoes are somewhere on the floor. His suit jacket is over the arm of the leather chair where his coat already lives. His tie, which I didn’t know he was wearing until I felt it against my collarbone, is loose, pulled sideways by my hands, which apparently have opinions about his neckwear that my brain wasn’t consulted on.
He’s kissing my throat.
His mouth is below my ear, on the place where my pulse is doing something reckless, and his hand is in my hair—fingers tangled, gripping—and my head is tipped back against the couch cushion and I’m making sounds that I’ll absolutely not think about later. Small sounds. The sounds of a girl whose entire body has become a single nerve ending and that nerve ending is located exactly where his mouth is.
My hands find his shoulders. His shirt is warm cotton under my palms, and through it I feel the muscle, the tension, the way his body holds itself even now, even with his mouth on my skin. I slide my hand to the back of his neck and his whole body goes rigid.
