I don’t have an argument. I don’t have anything but the want and the trust, which it turns out are the same thing now. He kisses down my body the slow way I did his, and when he takes me in his mouth the entire managed surface of me goes to static. I make a sound I’ve never made. My hands find his hair and hold on, because there’s nothing in the world but heat and his tongue and the obscene patient skill of him, and the wanting underneath it, the care, the fact that this is Soren and he’s doing this because he wants me to feel good, not as a transaction, as a gift. The first language comes up through the cracks before I can catch it. Oh, câlisse, Soren.
He pulls off just far enough to ruin me with his voice. “Yeah. That. I want to hear you, give it all to me,” and then he takes me deep again and the English goes.
It builds with nowhere managed to put it. He pins my hips when they buck and takes everything and hums around me like I’m the best thing he’s ever had in his mouth, and his eyes come up to find mine, holding them, making sure I know exactly who this is. I’m gone, babbling, viens, je vais, s’il te plaît, Soren, the words spilling out unsanded because there’s nothing left to sand them with.
“I’m going to,” I get out, the last English I own, a warning, and he doesn’t pull off, he takes me through it with my fingers laced in his on the sheet, and I come harder than I ever have in my life, the whole architecture coming down at once, no surface, no count, no managed anything, just a body finally allowed to be only a body and a name in my mouth that means home.
I’m still shaking when I reach for him, because I need to give it back, and he’s close enough already that it takes almost nothing, my fist tight the way he showed me and my mouth at the hinge of his jaw and his real name said low against his skin, again and again, Soren, Soren, like I’m learning it. He chases my hand and his breath goes short and his forehead drops to mine.
“Like that. Don’t stop. God, look at me when I…”
I look at him. I keep my eyes on his and my hand moving and I tell him the true thing in the only language that’s left, watching the exact second his control finally goes, his whole face opening, and he breaks apart over my knuckles saying my name like it costs him something to give it away. I catch every frame of it. I’ll be replaying this one on purpose for the rest of my life.
After. The lamp still on. His heart going under my ear.
The what-now starts to stack. He feels it begin, because he reads me. His hand comes up into my hair and stops it before it builds.
“Not tonight,” he says. “No list tonight. You wanted something, you said it out loud, you got it. That’s the whole entry.”
“That’s not how my brain files things.”
“I know. Let me hold this page for you. Just this one. You can audit it in the morning.”
“In the morning I’ll have forty questions.”
“I’ve got a long road trip and nowhere else to be. Ask me all forty.”
“Question one,” I say.
“Already. I said morning.”
“It’s a stupid one. I’m getting it out of the way first, like you told me to.”
“Go.”
“Was that normal. For a first time. For me.”
“There’s no normal. There’s what we did, and what we did was good. Really good, Jules. You don’t get to audit that one down.” A beat. “Was that one of the forty?”
“Free sample. The forty start tomorrow.”
“I’m going to need a nap before the forty.”
“You said long road trip, nowhere to be.”
“I did say that. Past me was generous with present me’s time.”
He laughs at something in that. The whole-chest one.
I keep the sound. It goes somewhere I’ve decided never to audit.
His hand keeps moving through my hair. Slow and even. A pattern I’m not running because he’s running it for me.
“You’re still thinking,” he says, eyes shut.
“I’m always thinking.”
“The allowed kind, or the audit kind.”