Page 55 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
We sat that way for a while. Her arm across my shoulders. My hand at my temple. The window light moving by degrees across the floor. The image of her at the foot of this bed in the swallowing t-shirt holding the bowl in both hands hung at the back of my head like a photograph someone had handed me of a man I had been before.
I lowered the hand from my temple. The pulse was gone.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Yes."
"Can you kiss me?"
She laughed.
Not a big laugh. A startled, low one. The kind of laugh a woman makes when she has been waiting for a sentence and a different version of it comes back at her, close enough to the one she expected to recognize, far enough to take her by surprise.
"What is funny?"
"I'm remembering the first time you asked me that."
"I asked you before?"
"You did."
"What did you say?"
"I said no."
A beat. The corner of her mouth was doing the small careful thing again.
"And now?"
She looked at me for a long moment. The color came up her cheekbones again the way it had at the door, slower this time, less startled, more chosen. She did not hide it. She let me see it move.
"Now I want to."
I lifted my hand to the side of her face.
I moved slow because I did not know what I used to do with my hands on her face and I did not want to do it badly. My palm went to her jaw. My thumb settled at the corner of her mouth. I gave her every inch of the approach. Slow enough for her to lift the hand and stop me. Slow enough for her to turn the head and refuse.
She did not refuse.
She came up to meet me by the smallest amount. The way a person tilts the chin up to a sun they have not been allowed to look at in a long time.
The first contact was closed-mouth. Careful. The dry warmth of her bottom lip against mine. I stayed there for half a breath. Then another. I let the small warm fact of her mouth on mine be the only thing in the room. I felt her exhale through her nose against the side of my face. I felt her not pull away.
Then her lips parted.
I answered. I opened my mouth against hers. The first slow slide of my tongue inside her mouth was a thing I had no shape for. Her taste was clean and a little sweet. Her tongue met mine in the middle of the kiss and the small sound that climbed the back of my throat was not anything I asked for. She made the same sound back into my mouth, low and a little wet at the edges, and the two sounds met somewhere between her teeth and mine and stayed there.
Her free hand went to my ribs through the soft black shirt. Her fingers spread flat. Splayed. The way a hand presses when the body it belongs to has reached for a thing to hold on to and found it. The heat of her palm came through the cloth like she had set a coal against me. I felt every finger. The bone underneath lifted on the inhale to meet her.
The kiss went from soft to long. From long to deeper. I caught her bottom lip between mine, slow, and the small noise she made against my mouth that time was not small. Her teeth caught the edge of my lip for half a second after, light, the way a person catches a thing she has been waiting to hold. I felt her mouth smile against mine. My mouth smiled back without permission.
I pulled her in closer with the hand at her jaw without thinking about it. She came. Her knees turned in against my thigh. Her hand slid up my chest under the open collar of the shirt for half a breath, the pads of her fingers tracing the side of my neck and the warmth of her palm spreading over my collarbone, then she set her hand back at my ribs as if she had caught herself. I did not want her to catch herself. The pendant on her chain was pressed between her chest and the cotton of my shirt, and I felt the small cold weight of it against my own chest through two layers, a small fixed point in the middle of all the moving warmth.
I went somewhere when I kissed her that was not a memory. It was the same place a memory used to live. The shape was right. The address was right. The door was the same door, only the room behind it was empty, and the kiss was the lamp I had carried in to find out the room was empty, and the empty room was warm. Warm because she had stayed in it.
I pulled back half an inch. My forehead went down to hers. My breath was not steady. I let her hear that it was not. If I kept kissing her, I was not going to be able to keep my hands wherethey were. She knew it too. She did not move toward me. She did not move away. She breathed against my mouth and let me hold the line.
Her hand on my ribs did not move. Her thumb at the side of my jaw, where her hand had ended up without my noticing, stroked once across the small fading bruise there and did not press.
