Page 54 of Open Road

The door opens.

I don’t turn around.

My back is to the room. Tohim. The towel is still in my hands, and I make myself very still, and I let it fall.

The rug receives it without sound.

There’s silence behind me because he has also gone very still. I can feel it, the particular quality of a large man holding himself in, the way the air in a room changes when someone with that kind of mass stops moving.

Then the sounds.

One boot, a pause, then the second boot. The soft weight of them coming off. The pull of a zipper, slow, unhurried. Thesound of denim and leather hitting the floor, the soft knock of a buckle, then nothing.

His hands find my waist.

Warm, wide, calloused palms against my skin and the shock of the texture of them, the roughness, the particular friction of a man who works with his hands, who has always worked with his hands, moves through me before I’ve decided to let it. Craig’s hands were smooth, desk-soft, and manicured. They were the hands of a man who managed the world from behind glass.

These hands have never been behind glass.

His mouth finds my shoulder. Warm pressure, no rush in it. He is not taking. He is arriving, and the distinction matters. My body registers it before my mind does, a slow loosening that starts in my chest and moves outward.

No words.

He turns me.

Slowly, his hands are at my waist doing the work, giving me every opportunity to resist it, to stop it, to put my hands up and saynot yet.His face when I’m facing him is in shadow, the room too dark to read, but I feel the weight of his attention moving across me. Taking me in the way he takes everything in—patiently, completely, and nothing decorative about it.

My head turns, eyes to the floor.

An old reflex. The one Craig built into me, the one who learned to look away from its own body because looking meant hearing what he thought of it, and what he thought of it was something I eventually believed. My chin starts to drop.

His hand comes up.

Two fingers under my jaw. Not gripping but present. He turns my face back toward his, and in the dark, I can see his shape, the silver of his hair, and the set of his expression.

“Eyes on me,” he says.

Three words. The same voice he uses for everything—flat, certain, no performance in it. Not a request.

My eyes stay on his.

He kisses me.

Not the way I expected, not careful or tentative, not the measured first kiss of a man testing the water. He kisses me the way he does everything, with complete attention, with the full weight of his intention behind it. His mouth moves against mine, and one hand comes up to my jaw, the other to the small of my back, and the callouses trace the length of my spine in a slow, deliberate path that makes my breath stutter against his lips.

His mouth moves to my throat.

The callouses map what his eyes already covered—my shoulder, collarbone, the curve of my ribs, the plane of my stomach. Every place they move, I feel the texture of them, the roughness, the specificity of a man who has never been careful about getting his hands dirty. Each pass of them pulls something through me, involuntary and bright. My fingers find his chest. The dog tags are warm from touching his skin.

“It’s only us in this room.” His voice is low, close to my ear. “No one else.” A pause, his mouth at my temple. “It’s me wanting you. Needing you.” His hands are still on my skin, holding. “And you wanting this too.”

My throat tightens.

Not from fear but from the accuracy of it. The way he named it exactly, not asking, not performing certainty for my benefit, but stating the shape of what is true in this room as simply as he states everything.

“Yes,” I say.

His hands slide to my hips, and he lifts me. The move is effortless, my weight nothing to him, and my legs find his waist before I’ve decided to put them there. His hands hold me as though I’m something worth holding. My face is level with hisnow, and he looks at me in the dark, a long unhurried look, and then the corner of his mouth moves.