Page 73 of Rooster's Remorse
I get it off over my head and let it drop, and her palms spread flat on my bare chest and my stomach, pressing, mapping, like she's making sure I'm real.
"Bed," she says against my mouth. "Now."
I walk her back to it and we go down together.
I catch my weight on my forearms so I'm over her and not on her, and she hooks a leg around me and pulls me down onto her anyway, because that's her call to make too.
Her hands go everywhere and mine follow behind them.
Wherever she puts her hands, I'm allowed.
Wherever she doesn't, I wait.
She notices me waiting—I watch it move through her, the small hitch of breath, the way her eyes come open to check my face and find me watching hers—and me holding back reaches her deeper than any move I could've made.
"You're letting me run it," she breathes, pulling back to look at me.
"Yeah."
"The whole time?"
"The whole time. Every time. The rest of my life, if you'll have me." I get a hand into her hair, slow, and she leans her whole head into it and lets her eyes fall shut. "I'm not in a hurry, Mila. I've never once in my life been in a hurry with you."
She sits up.
Straddling me, she pulls her own shirt off over her head, and I keep my eyes on her face, because she hasn't told me I can look anywhere else, and she watches me do it and her eyes go wet and bright.
"You can look," she says.
So I look.
And she's beautiful in a way that puts an ache behind my ribs, narrow and marked and so alive it hurts to see.
I don't tell her any of that, because tonight she doesn't want to be told she's beautiful.
She wants to be wanted, plain and loud and without one ounce of pity mixed into it, so I put my hands on her waist and I let her feel exactly how much I do.
Then she does the thing I'll carry to my grave.
She climbs off me and stands up beside the bed in the low lamplight, and she turns around.
She turns her back to me on purpose.
Stands there in nothing but the lamp and lets me see all of it.
Every rope, ridge, and silver seam of nine years, laid out plain in the light where I can't miss an inch.
She doesn't say a word, and she doesn't look back over her shoulder, and I understand what she's handing me.
She's showing me the worst that was done to her, in the light, on purpose, and she's waiting to feel what I do with it.
Every man who ever saw that back either put the marks in it or couldn't stand to look.
She's decided she'll know exactly what I am by what I do in the next ten seconds.
And it takes everything I've got.
Because it's unbearable.
