The scar.
The long silver line that runs from below his ribs to his hip. The one I reached for in the dark kitchen two weeks ago and stopped an inch from his skin in my bedroom an hour ago when I said tonight, I'll touch it.
I trace it.
Slowly. From the raised edge just below his ribs, down, following the ridge with my fingertip the way a blind woman reads a language she's just learning. The skin is different here. Smoother than the rest of him, the tissue knitted back together by time and stubbornness. He got this at twenty-two. The worst night. A knife. He got between someone he loved and a blade meant to kill them.
His breath catches. His whole body goes still under my hand, a stillness I recognize from before in him before negotiations and before violence. The stillness of a man holding everything together by force of will. My finger reaches the end of the scar at his hip. I flatten my palm against it. Cover the length of it with my hand.
Neither of us speaks. The touch says everything: I know what made this. I know what you are. I know what your hands do and what's been done to you and I walked thirty feet of hallway and knocked on your door and I am here. With all of it. With all of you.
His eyes are bright. He blinks. Once. He kisses me again. Different now. The first kiss was controlled hunger. This one is unguarded, open-mouthed, a man who's been seen and is terrified and grateful in equal measure. I kiss him back and taste what I've never found in any kiss before: trust.
He lifts me. I wrap my legs around him and feel the strength of him, the heat, the hard press of him against me. The sensation makes me gasp into his mouth. He carries me to the bed. His bed. The bed that's only ever held him. He lays me down. His sheets smell like him. Warm. Clean. The scent I've been stealing from t-shirts for two weeks, and now I'm surrounded by the real thing, and I'll never sleep anywhere else and we both know it.
He doesn't rush.
His mouth finds my neck. The hollow below my ear, the place where my pulse hammers. His lips trace the line of my throat and every press lands like a brand. He's mapping me the way I've been mapping him. Through details, through inventory, through the specific geography of a body he's been studying from a distance and is finally allowed to touch.
My collarbone. The one his eyes tracked every morning when his stolen t-shirt slipped off my shoulder. His mouth lingers there, and his breath is warm and unsteady, and my fingers thread through his hair and grip.
Lower. His hands cup my breasts, and his thumbs sweep across and the sound I make is involuntary, helpless, a sound I don't recognize from my own throat. He replaces his thumb with his mouth and my back arches, and my hand tightens in his hair and I hear him make a low, satisfied sound against my skin, the sound of a man who's found another data point, filed it, committed it to permanent memory.
He's cataloging me. With his mouth. With his hands. With the tactical precision he brings to everything. The focus I've watched him use in boardrooms and warehouses, applied now tomy body, to the specific spot below my left breast that makes me grip his hair, to the sensitive line below my ribs that makes me inhale sharply.
Lower.
His mouth traces my stomach. My hips. His hands grip my thighs and part them and his breath comes first, warm, a ghost of sensation, and then his mouth is on me, and the world narrows to a single point of contact.
My head falls back. My hand finds his hair. He's reading me. I can feel it in the way he adjusts, in the way his tongue slows when my breath catches and quickens when my hips lift, in the devastating patience of a man who has decided to learn me the way he learns everything: thoroughly, precisely, without rushing. His hands grip my hips. I move against his mouth because I'm not just receiving this. I'm taking it, chasing the feeling, my body knowing what it wants before my mind can form the thought.
He finds the rhythm. God. The exact rhythm. His tongue shifts and my vision goes white at the edges and my thighs tighten against his ears and my hand pulls his hair hard enough that a sound escapes him, low and rough, vibrating against me, and the vibration pushes me closer.
I'm climbing. Fast. His hands anchor my hips when I start to shake and his mouth doesn't stop, doesn't slow, doesn't waver with a precision that should be illegal, and I shatter.
I come with his name on my lips. The second time tonight I've said it to the dark. In the hallway it was a whisper, a test, the weight of his name in my mouth. Now it's a breaking point. Now it's a sound ripped from somewhere I didn't know existed.
He presses his mouth to my inner thigh. His breath is ragged. I can feel him trembling. His shoulders. His hands. The tension in his body that tells me his control is a thread stretched tosnapping. He would stay here. He would wait for me to tell him the next step. He would give me all night.
I pull him up.
My hands on his shoulders, pulling him over me, pulling him to where I need him. He comes, bracing himself above me, and his eyes find mine and in the dim light they're darker than I've ever seen them. Gold gone amber, gone liquid, the color of something on fire.
"Please. Nico. I need —"
"Tell me."
"I need you inside me."
His hand finds my hip, positioning, and the blunt press of him at my entrance, and he watches my face with an attention so total that it lands like another touch.
He enters slowly.
The fullness. God. The stretch and the heat and the overwhelming rightness of him inside me, filling me, the completion of what started in a dark kitchen with a hair tuck and a scar I didn't touch. I feel every inch. My breath catches and holds, and my hands grip his shoulders and my eyes don't leave his because I need him to see what this is doing to me.
His jaw is tight. His arms shake with the effort of going slow. A sound escapes him, low and guttural and wrecked, and his forehead drops to mine and for one moment neither of us moves. The weight of him above me. The heat of him inside me. The silence of a room that's held one person for years, holding two for the first time.
Then he moves. Slow. Deep. A stroke that makes me arch off the bed and grip his back. Another. He's everywhere. Inside me. Above me., his breath against my neck, his hands cradling my hips.