Page 205 of Across His Line

I can’t breathe.

She moves under me experimentally, the way she does everything, just to see what happens. And what happens is I make a noise I’ve never made in my life. Her face does that thing again, that pleased thing, and she does it again.

After that, it isn’t careful anymore. It isn’t me holding still and her breathing. It’s both of us. She figures out what to do with her hips. She figures it out fast, faster than I’m ready for. Her hands are on my back and then in my hair and then on my face again, and her eyes stay open. She’s looking right at me, right up at me from the pillow, and she says my name again, and she doesn’t sound like she can believe it’s the word in her mouth.

I’ve been losing my mind for four days. Since the reading room. Since a booth with a candle in a wine bottle. Since a lock turning in the dark. And with her looking at me like that, saying my name like that, moving under me like she was made for it.

It’s too much. She’s too much. I put my face down in her neck and swear, low and heartfelt, into her hair.

I come.

She goes still under me.

Then she laughs. Her whole body shaking with it, under me, around me. She laughs into my shoulder and wraps her arms around my neck and laughs and laughs.

“Tess,” I warn into her neck.

“I’m not.” She’s still laughing. “I’m not, I swear.”

“You are.”

I lift my head and look at her.

She’s red-faced and grinning up at me with her hair all over my pillow and her eyes wet at the corners from laughing, and she isn’t laughing at me. I can see that. She’s laughing like somebody who’s never been anywhere this good and doesn’t know what to do with it. Like it’s too big to hold in, so it comes out of her as this.

“It’s been four days,” I say. “You’ve been sitting across from me at every meal for four days.”

“I know.”

She laughs again and puts her hand over her face, and I kiss the back of it.

I’m not done.

I know that without thinking about it. That was me. That wasn’t her. She hasn’t gotten there. I can see it on her face, and I know her face, and I’m not leaving it there.

I get rid of the condom. I come back, and I kiss her, once, on the mouth, and then I move down.

She stops laughing when she figures out where I’m going.

“Rafe—”

I look up at her.

She’s up on her elbows with her face gone red all over again, looking down the length of herself at me, and I can see her trying to decide what she thinks about this. I wait. I don’t move. I just look at her with my hands on her hips.

She lies back down.

I start slow, and I watch her. Her stomach jumping under my hands. Her breath going short. Her hands, first flat on the comforter, then fisting in it, then finding my hair and holding on. I find out what makes her laugh, still, the first few times, a nervous laugh that she tries to swallow. And then I find out what makes her stop laughing. And then I find out what makes her forget she was ever embarrassed. She stops looking down at me. She stops checking. Her head goes back into the pillow and her hand goes over her own mouth and her hips move against me without asking her first.

She tells me. Not with words, she doesn’t have any words. With her hands. When her fingers tighten in my hair, I stay. When she pushes my head a little to one side, I go. When her thighs start shaking against my shoulders, I don’t stop.

And I find out what she looks like when she lets go.

She doesn’t hold anything back. That’s what I’m not ready for. Tessa, who holds everything back. Who has a face that doesn’t show anything to anybody. She arches up off the bed with her hand over her mouth and a sound coming out from behind it, and her whole body goes tight and then shakes, and she says my name into her own palm, and then she isn’t saying anything, she’s just breathing hard with her hand falling away from her mouth onto the pillow.

I come back up and lie down next to her.

She’s lying on her back with one arm over her eyes, breathing hard, with her other hand flat on her stomach.