Page 16 of Working for Keeps

He puts one hand flat on my sternum and lays me back against the desk, and the cold of the laminate hits my shoulder blades, and my hair spreads out across it.

Then he touches me.

It’s not tentative and it isn’t a question. He knows exactly where, because he learned it at nineteen and apparently never gave it back, and the first pass of his fingers takes the whole room out from under me. My hips come up off the desk and he lays his other hand flat on my stomach and holds me down.

“Breathe.”

“I can’t,” I tell the ceiling, and he laughs low against my thigh and does it again, slower, until the argument goes out of me entirely.

I don’t do this. I don’t come apart in a room with a shift running underneath it. I have a spine and a plan and a division and a mortgage, and he circles two fingers and my hand finds his forearm and holds on, and every one of those things gets very far away.

He works me right up to the edge of it and stops.

I make a sound that isn’t dignified. He brings his fingers to his mouth and I watch him do it, and he holds my eyes the whole time, and that’s what finishes off what’s left of me.

“You said I couldn’t look at you without remembering how you taste,” he says. “You were right about that too.”

Then he stops. Even like this, he stops, reaches back for his wallet, and I hear the tear of foil.

Three years gone and he still takes care of it before I have to ask, and a knot I have been carrying under my ribs since Tuesday comes undone all at once.

I sit up. I put my forehead against his while he handles it, and I get my hands on him, on the shoulders, on the heat coming off him like a machine that’s been running all day, and neither of us says a word, and the presses go thump-hiss under the floor.

His hand finds my ankle then, thumb on the tendon, the same one he went down on one knee for on the floor of Line Three while we both pretended it was about swelling. He runs his thumb over it once, slow, the way you’d check a repair you made yourself.

Then he hooks my knee over his arm.

“Look at me, Vera.”

I look up, and he drives into me in one slow, heavy thrust.

The fullness of it pulls a cry out of me and my eyes close.

“No. Stay with me.”

I open them. He sets a pace three years in the making, the frame groaning under us in time with the thump-hiss of the floor outside.

He doesn’t rush it and he doesn’t gentle it either. He works into me at a depth that makes my breath catch every time and he does not once let me look away, and I am pinned in place by the two things I have spent three years running from, which are his body and his attention.

The desk shifts a half inch on the linoleum. Then another.

I get my heel into the small of his back and pull, and he swears into my hair, and the pace breaks and comes back harder.

“You’re mine, Vera,” he says against my ear. “You’ve always been mine. Say it.”

“I’m yours,” I gasp, my nails leaving red tracks down his back.

He makes a sound like he’s been hit. His arm goes under my shoulder blades and he hauls me up off the desk and into him, and now I’m sitting in his hands with my mouth on his shoulder and my whole weight on him, and he takes it easily, and he doesn’t slow down.

“Again.”

“I’m yours.”

“Again, Vera.”

“I’m yours, I’m yours.”

It coils tight and golden and then it snaps, and I come apart around him with my mouth open against his shoulder, and he finishes with a shudder that goes all the way through him, and then he holds still and holds me.