Date night. Vaughn picks me up from Ash's house at seven on his bike and we ride to a burger place on the east side that has outdoor seating and doesn't care if you show up in leather. I'm in jeans and a soft blue sweater — long sleeves — and Vaughn's jacket over the top because the night is cold and he handed it to me without a word when I shivered.
"How was work?" he asks over burgers, because he always asks, and I always say the same thing.
"Fine. Long."
Vaughn watches me across the table. He's doing the thing — the quiet assessment, the engine-diagnostic stare, reading me the way he reads a machine that's making a sound it shouldn't be making. I watch him watching me and I perform harder. Brighter. Funnier. I make jokes about fondant and steal his fries and lean across the table to kiss the ketchup off his mouth.
He lets me perform. But his eyes don't stop.
"Robin."
"Hmm?"
"You're doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you're being so aggressively charming that it's obvious something's wrong."
I sit back. "Nothing's wrong."
"Okay."
"It's not."
"I said okay."
He doesn't push. That's the thing about Vaughn — he never pushes. He just sees and waits and trusts me to come to him when I'm ready. It's the most infuriating and patient thing anyone has ever done to me.
We ride to Ash's. My room. The door barely closes before I'm on him, pushing his jacket off, pulling his shirt up, pressing him toward the bed. I know how to do this — sex is a performance I'm fluent in, a language where I know all the scripts, and right now I need to be fluent in something because the rest of my day made me feel incompetent and small.
"Robin." Vaughn catches my hands. Both of them, in one of his, held against his chest. "Slow down."
"I don't want slow."
"I know." He brings my hands to his mouth, kisses my knuckles. "I don't want the show."
I go still. "What?"
"The performance. The thing you do when you want to make someone feel good so they don't look too closely at how you feel." He releases my hands, frames my face instead. Thumbs stroking my cheekbones. "I want you. Not the production."
"This IS me."
"Part of you. The easy part." He kisses me. Slow. Thorough. The opposite of the frantic pace I was setting. "Show me the hard part."
I don't know what the hard part looks like. Even with Vaughn — even that first night, when he took the lead and I let him — part of me was still performing. Still making sure I was loud enough, responsive enough, good enough. Sex for me has always been the ultimate performance — all body, no soul.
Vaughn undresses me slowly. Kisses my throat, my collarbones, the hollow between my ribs. His hands are warm and unhurried and deliberate, and every time I try to speed things up — grab for him, pull him closer, redirect toward something intense enough to drown out the thinking — he slows me back down.
"Stay with me," he says against my stomach. "Don't disappear."
I try. It's harder than anything Gordon's ever demanded of me — being present during sex, actually feeling it instead of performing it. Vaughn's mouth on my hip bone. His hands spreading my thighs. His tongue dragging a hot, slow line up the inside of my leg, and I'm shaking, not because it's good — it's devastating — but because I have nowhere to hide.
"That's it," he murmurs against my skin, and my eyes are burning.
He doesn't rush. He takes me apart with his mouth — kissing the crease of my thigh, the soft skin below my navel, everywhere except where I need him — until I'm writhing, hands fisted in the sheets, every attempt at directing this stripped away by his refusal to be directed.
"Vaughn, please—"