Page 36 of Slander
"It's not a problem."
"I didn't say it was a problem." Her jaw sets. "I said it so you'd know I don't have the first idea what I'm doing. So when I mess it up, you'll know why."
"You won't mess it up."
"You don't know that."
"I know you." I reach across the table and cover her hand with mine. Her fingers are cold. "I know you showed up at my door in a rainstorm with nothing but the clothes on your back and you still tried to apologize for dripping on my floor. I know you think you've got to earn every single thing you get. Including this." I press my palm flat to hers. "You don't."
Her breath goes uneven.
"Come here," I say.
She pushes back from the table and stands, and I stand too, and I don't close the distance. Not yet.
"Tell me what you want." I keep my voice low. "Not what you think I want. Not what you think you're supposed to want. Just you."
Her mouth opens. Closes. I watch her fight it—the years of being told what she was allowed to feel, what she was allowed to ask for, lined up behind her teeth.
"I want you to kiss me," she says finally. "And I want to know what it feels like to want something and not be ashamed of it."
I close the distance.
I do it slowly, so she sees it coming, so she's got room to step back. She doesn't step back.
Her chin lifts, and her breath catches when my hand comes up to cup her jaw—same as that first night on the porch, except that night I was stopping us, and tonight I'm not.
"Eyes on me," I murmur.
She opens them.
I kiss her.
I kiss her the way I've wanted to since she stood on my porch with rain in her hair and ruin at her back—slow, thorough, every ounce of patience I've got in it.
Her lips part on a soft sound, and I take my time learning the shape of her mouth, the way she sighs into it like she's been holding that breath for years.
Her hands fist in my shirt. She's trembling, and it isn't fear.
It's the sheer newness of being touched like she's something a man would slow down for.
"Don't be careful with me like I'll break," she says against my mouth. "You promised."
"I'm not." I get a hand into her hair. "Bedroom. I'll show you the difference."
I take her hand and lead her, because she's never been past my kitchen and she doesn't know the way.
There's something in walking her back through my own dark house that settles me—her hand in mine, her bare feet quiet on the floorboards behind me, trusting me to know where we're going when she doesn't.
The bedroom's plain. A bed, a lamp, the window cracked to the pines.
She stops in the doorway and takes it in, and I give her the moment to change her mind.
She doesn't.
She steps in.
I take my time with her, because time is the one thing every person in her life has refused her.
