Page 54 of Rage
He is still for half a second, but then he kisses me back, and it is nothing like I expected and everything I should have known it would be. It’s not like the first time. This time it’s slow. Devastatingly slow. The way he does everything. Deliberate, unhurried, like he has all the time in the world and has decided to use every second of it and no one can stop him.
His hand comes to my face. The back of his knuckles against my cheekbone, then his palm cupping my jaw, tilting my face the way he wants it.
I let him.
I feel the warmth of letting him, the choice of it, the profound difference between being moved by someone who is asking and being moved by someone who is taking.
He is asking. Every slow, precise movement is a question.
I keep answering yes.
When he pulls back, I am breathing harder than I should be from a kiss.
He looks at me. His thumb traces the line of my jaw.
“Amy,” he says.
“Saint.”
His eyes are very dark in the low light.
“You want it,” he says. It is not a question, but he waits for the answer anyway, because that is who he is.
“Yes. I want it.”
He moves.
He rolls me onto my back with a care that makes something in my chest ache, the care of a man who understands that there is a history attached to the body beneath his hands and is treating that history as information rather than inconvenience.
He braces above me, his forearms on either side of my head, and he looks at me for a moment in the morning light with an expression I don’t have a name for.
Then he dips his head and puts his mouth to my throat.
I close my eyes.
He works his way down with that same devastating patience, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder, the hem of my shirt pushed up by hands that are warm and certain and careful at the edges of my sleeves, careful in a way that tells me he knows, he sees, and has chosen to say nothing about it except with the deliberateness of where he puts his mouth and his hands.
He settles between my thighs.
He looks up at me from there, which is something I was not prepared for.
The weight of his gaze from that position, dark and fixed and entirely focused, the same quality of attention he gives everything, concentrated now into a single point.
I nod.
My throat is tight.
He presses his mouth to the inside of my thigh.
I swear I stop breathing.
He takes his time.
He takes an extraordinary, unhurried, meticulous amount of time, working his way toward the center of me with the patience of someone who has decided that the destination matters less than the getting there, who treats every small sound I make as instruction, who adjusts without being asked, and who reads me the way he reads everything, completely, without flinching or missing anything.
When he makes me come, I say his name the way he says mine. Like a coordinate. Like the only fixed point.
He doesn’t stop.
