Page 17 of Protected By Razor

She makes a sound that might be a laugh. Her hand comes up as if she wants to cover herself. I catch her wrist and put it back down.

“Let me look at you.”

I undress her slowly. I pay attention to everything. The way she sucks her breath in when I trace the curve of her hip with my thumb. The way her stomach trembles when my mouth finds the soft skin under her ribs. The way she watches my hands like she’s trying to memorize them, and the way her lips part when I bend down and put my mouth on her breast for the first time.

She makes a sound I’ve never heard before.

It’s not performed. It’s not for me. It’s the sound of a woman who didn’t know her body could feel like that, and she’s surprised by it, and I file that too.

I lift my head and look at her. Her eyes are half closed, and her chest is rising and falling fast, and her bottom lip is caught between her teeth, and there’s something stunned in her expression that I want to put there again and again until I die.

“What do you like, baby. Tell me.”

“I don’t?— that. What you just did. Do that.”

I do it again.

I do it slower this time, watching her face the whole way, and her hand comes up and grabs a fistful of my hair and her hips lift to meet me and she gasps something that isn’t a word.

I’ve been with women. I’m thirty-four and I’m not a monk. I know what experience looks like and I know what its absence looks like, and what I’m seeing, the careful way she watches me, the slight unfamiliarity in the way she touches me back — is a woman who hasn’t done much of this. Not nothing. But not much.

I don’t say anything. I don’t make it a thing.

I just slow down even more.

I learn what makes her arch off the mattress — the soft spot at the hollow of her throat, the inside of her thigh, the place at the small of her back that makes her gasp. I watch her face when I slide my hand between her legs and find her ready for me, and when she comes apart for me with my name on her mouth I think I might die from how good it is to hear.

“You okay?” I ask.

“I didn’t?—” She swallows. “I didn’t know it could feel like that.”

I close my eyes for a second. I have to.

When I open them, she’s still looking at me. Pink-cheeked, half undone. She looks like every fantasy I never let myself finish having.

“It can feel like a lot of things,” I say. “We’ve got time.”

I take my own clothes off. She watches me. Her eyes go wide when she sees the rest of the ink, and wider still at the rest of me, and she swallows once, and then she reaches for me, and I let her pull me down to her.

I settle between her thighs, and her breath catches the second she feels me there, hot and hard against her. I’m not in yet and I’m just letting her feel me.

“Look at me,” I say.

She does.

I push in slowly. An inch, then another. I’m watching her face the whole time, and her mouth falls open and her eyes go wide, and I feel her stretch around me, and the sound she makes — half gasp, half something deeper — goes straight through me.

“Fuck,” I breathe. I can’t help it. She’s tight and hot and trembling, and the way she’s looking at me right now??—

“More,” she whispers.

“Slow, baby.”

“More. Please.”

I push in further. Her hips lift to meet me, instinctive, and I have to grit my teeth and stop for a second because she’s going to undo me before I’ve even started. Her hands are on my shoulders, fingers digging in, and her breathing’s gone shaky.

“You okay?”