Page 60 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

“We can pause,” he says. “We can stop. You’re still wanted either way.”

I shake my head against his shoulder, crying quietly while he holds me. The grief and the pleasure sit tangled together, and for once neither one is required to leave. His hand strokes my hair. His body remains warm and present and unhurried. When the tears ease I kiss the side of his neck and whisper, “Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”

He begins again only then.

The pace stays the same—slow, focused, built around the sounds I make and the way my hands pull him closer when the feeling becomes too much. He listens to every shift in my breathing. When my thighs tighten around his hips he deepens the angle just enough. When a soft, helpless moan leaves me he answers it with my name spoken low against my skin. The climax gathers gradually, fed by the care as much as the friction. When it breaks it is quiet and full, rolling through me in long, trembling waves while Dash holds me through every pulse.

He follows soon after, still careful, still close, my name a soft sound against my temple as he comes. He stays over me until our breathing slows, easing out only when I’m ready before drawing the blanket over us.

He eases out only when I'm ready, then draws the blanket over both of us and gathers me against his chest. One arm stays around my back. The other rests over the blanket covering my hip. His heart beats steady beneath my ear.

Dash hand rests in the center of my back, warm through the cooling air, and every few breaths his thumb moves once, a small proof that he's still awake and still here. I should be frightened by how natural his body feels around mine.

My phone is somewhere beyond the bedroom, facedown in the kitchen where I left it beside Mara’s texts. For the first time in months, I don't need to check whether the silence is still there.

Dash kisses the top of my head, slow and careful. “Sleep if you can.”

I close my eyes.

He feels like he belongs here, which makes no sense yet.

Still, I let myself stay.

Dash

By the fourth night, I know the sounds she makes when she forgets to be afraid of wanting.

That knowledge follows me through campus like a hand under my skin. I keep my office door open. I keep my hands in my pockets when Callie stands too close at the copier, her hair pinned messily at the nape of her neck and her cardigan sliding down one shoulder. I keep my voice even when she looks up at me from a stack of midterm packets with cheeks already bright from some argument she's having with herself in the margins.

I remind myself, every hour, that I'm still her department chair. I'm still the person who signs off on her course load and meeting assignments and leave requests. I'm still the man who gave her a lockoff behind my house before I became the man whose bed she has climbed into every night this week.

Some part of me already knows she's mine but I keep that thought to myself. Callie’s only just begun to sleep through the night with her cheek against my chest. She has only just started reaching for me first, shyly in the dark, as if each touch has to prove it won't turn into a trap. She's still shattered in places I can't see until the light catches them. I won't rush her.

Her office door is open when I reach it. Not fully open, because Callie never leaves any door fully open if she can help it, but enough that I can see the spill of papers over her desk and the warm lamplight catching on the freckles across her cheeks. She's behind the desk with one hand pressed over her mouth, eyes wide and mortified. Mara is perched in the guest chair with her shoes hooked around the chair legs, leaning forward like she has just delivered the worst sentence in the history of higher education.

“You can't say that in my office,” Callie whispers, but the whisper breaks in the middle because she's trying not to laugh. Her cheeks are pink enough that the freckles stand out darker, scattered over her nose and beneath her eyes, and the sight of her makes me stop just outside the doorway.

Mara lowers her voice in the way people do when they absolutely intend to be overheard by the universe. “I’m just saying, you disappeared into that house looking like a haunted Victorian widow and came back walking like you climbed him. Also, everyone talks about how big his dick is.”

“Mara.” Callie’s voice cracks around my name before it reaches it, and she drops her face into both hands with a sound sohelpless and bright that my chest hurts. “Oh my God. Please stop talking.”

I should turn around. I should make noise down the hall and give them warning before I arrive. Instead, I stand there for one second longer than decency permits because Callie is laughing into her palms, shoulders shaking, her whole body warmed by embarrassment instead of fear.

Then I knock on the archway.

Both of them look up.

Callie goes still in a way that would worry me if the color didn't flood deeper across her face a breath later. Mara’s eyes close briefly, as if she's accepting divine judgment with dignity, then she opens them and gathers the nearest folder against her chest.

“I was just leaving,” Mara says, standing with more calm than any woman who has just discussed her friend’s sex life at full volume has a right to possess. She smooths her skirt, gives Callie a kiss on the top of her head, and doesn't look at me until she reaches the door. “Take her home, Dash. She ate dinner, but she still has three packets in her bag and ambitions about grading them tonight. Crush those ambitions humanely.”

Callie makes a wounded sound. “I'm sitting right here.”

Mara touches her shoulder, softer this time, thumb rubbing once over the knit of her cardigan. “I know. That is why I said it where you could hear me.”

Callie looks down at her desk, still flushed, still smiling despite herself. Mara’s gaze flicks to me in the doorway, and beneath the humor there’s a silent warning to protect her friend.

When Mara leaves, the air doesn't go awkward immediately. It stays warm for a few seconds, held there by the echo of Callie’s laughter and the color still high in her cheeks. She starts stacking her papers with more focus than necessary, sliding rubrics into one folder and student drafts into another. Her hands are quick, but not panicked.