Page 202 of Across His Line

She goes quiet. I can see the nerves come up in her face, real and clear, her throat moving, her eyes going to my hand on her wrist and back to me.

“We don’t have to do anything,” I say. “We can stop right now. It’s fine.”

“Do you want to stop?”

I look into her eyes and hesitate. “No.”

“Then why are we stopping?”

And that’s so completely her that I have to close my eyes for a second.

“Because I need to know you don’t want to,” I say.

She’s quiet for a while. I can feel her pulse under my fingers, at her wrist, going fast.

“I’m nervous,” she says. “I don’t know what I’m doing. But I know I don’t want to stop.”

I let go of her wrist.

And she sits up and takes her sweater off. She grabs the hem and pulls it over her head. Her elbow cracks into the headboard on the way, hard, and she says ow into the cashmere with her head still stuck inside it.

I laugh. I can’t help it.

She gets her head out. Her hair is standing straight up from the static and she glares at me through it, holding her elbow.

“It’s not funny.” She throws the sweater at my face. It smells like her, like the cedar soap in the guest bathroom and something under it that’s just her. I let it fall in my lap.

She’s in a plain black bra, the cotton kind, and she’s sitting there in it on my bed with her arms at her sides. They twitch, once, like they want to come up and cover herself. I watch her feel it. Her hands go down to the comforter on either side of her and stay there, and she lifts her chin a little and looks at me like she’s daring me to say something.

I don’t. I can’t.

I look at her. All of her, the way she looked at me. Her shoulders, and the line of her collarbone, and the place on her ribs under the edge of the bra where there’s a little scar I’ve never seen, thin and white. And then her face again, because that’s where I keep ending up, because she’s watching me look at her. I don’t know what my face does. Whatever it is, I watch her see it. And her chin comes down, her shoulders come down, and she breathes out.

“Okay,” she says very quietly to herself.

I put my hand on her waist. On her skin, this time, nothing in between. She’s warm and smooth. Her stomach jumps under my palm and then goes still.

I kiss her.

I take my time because I have to. If I go at the speed my body wants, this is going to be over before I get her bra off. So I kiss her mouth until she makes that impatient sound again, and then I kiss her jaw, and the place under her ear, and she goes completely still and grabs my shoulder. So I stay there. I learn that one. When I go lower, to her neck, she laughs and hunches up her shoulder because it tickles, and I do it again because she laughed and I want to hear it again. She shoves at my face with her hand. When I get to her collarbone, she stops laughing.

Her hands are everywhere on me. My shoulders, my back, down my spine, her nails, dragging up the back of my ribs in a way that makes me lose track of what I was doing. She isn’t lying there letting it happen to her. Every time I find something, she finds something back. When I stop to breathe against her neck, her hands slide down my stomach to the waistband of my sweats and stop there, and she’s watching my face again, and I know she’s waiting to see what that does.

I hold very still.

“Tess,” I say into her neck.

“I know,” she says.

She reaches back and undoes the bra herself. She gets one hook and then fights with the second one for a while with her arms twisted behind her and her face doing something frustrated, and I don’t help. I just watch her. She finally gets it and pulls it off and drops it over the side of the bed, and then she lies back on the pillow and looks up at me with her arms at her sides again.

And I forget what I was going to do.

I just look at her. Her face is red all the way down her neck and she’s breathing hard. She doesn’t cover anything. She just lets me look and watches me look. Something in her face is almost amazed, like she didn’t know this would be my reaction. I want her to feel how badly I want her, so I put my mouth on her.

She arches up off the pillow. Her breath goes out of her, a sound I’ve never heard her make, and her hand comes up into my hair and holds on. And I learn. I learn which side makes her breath catch and which makes her squirm, and what happens if I go slow and what happens if I don’t. Her fingers in my hair tell me everything. When they tighten, I stay. When they push, I move. When they pull me up toward her mouth, I go.

She kisses me like she’s angry about how long it took.