Page 57 of Take the Fall
“Out,” he said. “Breathe out, slow. There. It’s just me. Let it be just me.” His finger worked in to the first knuckle, the second, slow, slick, and it burned and then it didn’t, and then there was just the strangeness of it, the fullness, the intimacy of being touched somewhere no one had ever touched me. He read it all off my breath the way he read everything, easing when I caught, pressing on when I let go. One finger, then two, a deeper stretch, his thumb stroking the inside of my thigh while he did it, patient past anything I deserved.
And then he crooked his fingers and dragged them over something inside me and the strange turned to a white pull of heat that arched my whole spine off the bed and tore a sound out of me I’d never made.
“There,” he said, rough, watching my face like it was the only thing in the room. “Found you.”
“What...” I couldn’t finish it, he did it again, “what is, oh, fuck, do that, do that again.”
He worked me open on it, three fingers now, that slow merciless drag against the spot inside me until I was rocking down onto his hand without deciding to, my cock leaking against my stomach, swearing in pieces, past anything like shame. “Look at you. All that wise mouth and charm, and you come apart like this. I’m going to think about this every time you give me that face now. You know that.”
“Luke. I’m ready. I want you. I want” the want was bigger than the words “I want all of it. Please.”
He reached back into the drawer and I heard the foil tear, and watched him roll the condom down over himself with one quick hand. Then he came up over me, careful, settling between my thighs, slicking himself again over it with a fist, and I feltthe blunt heat of him press where his fingers had been and the nerves flared one last time.
“Eyes on me.” His forearms braced either side of my head, the bruised one trembling with his weight and held there anyway. “All you have to do is breathe and keep your eyes on me. We go as slow as you need. If it’s too much we stop and that’s still a good night. There’s no version of this where I’m disappointed in you.”
I got a hand into his wet hair. “I love you. I’ve got weeks of it saved up. I’m going to say it the whole way through.”
“Then say it while I” and he pushed.
The stretch of him was nothing my body had a name for, far more than his fingers, a burn and a pressure and the slow impossible give of being opened by the man I’d have walked into traffic for, and I said it broken in half,I love you,and he sank in by degrees, watching every inch land on my face, stopping when I gripped, easing on when I breathed, until he was seated all the way in me with his jaw clenched white against the want of holding still.
“You’re all right,” he breathed. “You feel” his control cracked on it “you have no idea what you feel like. Tell me when.”
I shifted under him, testing it, the fullness turning over into something deep and good, and I tilted my hips and felt him move against that place inside me and gasped.
“Now,” I said. “Move. I want you to move.”
And he moved.
It was nothing I had words for. I’d had sex I thought I understood. This rewrote it. The slow drag of him out and the push back in, the angle he hunted and found that lit me up from the inside and had me clawing at his shoulders before I remembered the bruises, and he grunted and I gaspedsorryand he laughed, breathless, ragged, “don’t you dare stop touching me,” and we found a rhythm that was clumsy and then wasn’t,my hips learning his, his good hand sliding under the small of my back to tilt me up into every stroke so it dragged over that spot each time and turned my spine.
The sounds of it filled the room. The slick catch of him moving in me. His breath gone harsh, mine gone to pieces. The wet slap where our bodies met. The bed. My own voice saying his name and the three words tangled up senseless. He was sweating now despite the shower, the salt smell of him, the heat, a drop of it falling off his jaw onto my chest, and I had never been so far inside a moment in my life, so completely unable to hide in it, his eyes on mine the whole time, refusing to let me look away.
“Stay with me,” he got out. “Right here. I want your eyes when you go.”
“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
He got his slick hand around my cock, finally, stroking me in time with the drive of his hips, and it was too much and exactly enough, the two sensations braiding into one unbearable pull, and I felt it gather low and tight and inevitable.
“That’s it.” His voice had gone to gravel. “Let me feel it. Come for me. I’ve got you.”
I went. It wrenched up through me and locked my whole body around him and I spilled hot over his fist and my own stomach in pulses that emptied me out, his name andI love youbreaking apart in my mouth. He fucked me through it, the clench of me dragging at him, and three, four strokes later he buried himself deep and shuddered and came with my name low and wrecked against my ear, his arms finally giving out so the full warm weight of him came down on me, both of us slick and spent and breathing like we’d run somewhere far.
For a while neither of us said anything. His heart slammed against my chest and slowed. The city hummed in the window. He softened and eased out of me slow, and I felt the loss of it and the strange new tenderness left behind. He stripped the condomoff and knotted it and dropped it in the bin by the bed, and reached down without a word and cleaned us both with the towel he’d left there, the practical small mercy of it, before he settled back down and pulled me in.
“Your ribs,” I said eventually, into his hair.
“Worth it.”
“That’s not a medical opinion.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got tonight.” He lifted his head and kissed my brow. The split lip, the dark eyebrow, the whole battered face, and under it something I’d never seen on him, something young, unguarded all the way down. “You said it first,” he said. “I want that on the record. The great closed-off detective, and you’re the one who said it first. In a shout. Soaking wet. With your shoes on.”
“I’ll deny it under oath.”
“You won’t.” He tucked me in against his good side, the way a man does a thing he means to do for years, like the body that had spent so long measuring the distance between us had simply stopped. “You’re a terrible liar. It’s my favorite thing about you. I’ll know every time.”
I lay there in the lamplight with a battered man going heavy against me, his breath slowing toward sleep, and I stared at the ceiling of a room whose door used to close on me, and I thought about the seam in the night I still couldn’t see the shape of. The fog Murphy had handed me. The thing past the edge of my sight.
