What I Wanted Part II

His hands found the hem of my sweater.

He lifted slowly, asking with the motion itself and I raised my arms and let him take it off me. He laid it over the arm of the armchair. Careful. The same unhurried attention he had brought to the mask, he brought to this.

Then his mouth was on my skin.

I will not do an inventory. I want to tell you it was careful and I want to tell you it was thorough and I want to tell you that he went slowly on purpose that every inch of me he passed over, he passed over twice, because he had learned something in a kitchen earlier tonight about what it meant to have a body that had been, across three years, cumulatively unseen, and he was not going to miss any of it.

His mouth found the place below my sternum. A place I had not known was sensitive. He paused there, held the warmth of his lips against the thin skin over the bone, and I felt the heat travel downward in a long slow wave into my belly, lower. I heard my own breath catch.

His hand moved. Slow. From the small of my back to the curve of my hip to the inside of my thigh through the fabric of my pants, and he held it there, flat, warm, still, and he lifted his mouth and said, low, into the skin above my navel

"Tell me."

"Yes," I said.

He undid the button.

He undid the zipper.

He waited.

I stepped out of the pants myself. I did that on purpose. I was not going to let a single piece of this happen to me. It was going to be done, on all sides, by me.

"Sit," I said.

He sat back down in the armchair.

"Closer to the edge."

He moved forward on the seat. His knees parted. The silver of the upper mask caught the light again, almond slits dark, the bare mouth below it flushed now from mine.

I stepped between his knees.

His hands came up slow, waiting and settled on my hips. Warm. Steady. Not pulling. Holding.

I put my own hand, with what was mine from the pink box, between my thighs.

I want to tell you what that was. I had used it alone, in the dark, behind a locked door, for two years. I had never in three years of marriage, in a decade before that used it in front of another person. Not once. Not for Derek. Not for anyone. What was in my hand was the most private thing about me, and I was holding it, and I was going to use it, and I was going to use it with a man whose mouth was about to be where my own hand wasn’t.

I looked down at him.

The almond slits of the mask held my eyes. Steady.

"Now you," I said.

His mouth moved to the inside of my thigh.

He did not rush. He kissed, open and warm, along the soft skin of the inside of my leg up, slow, the heat of his breath getting closer and slower and when he reached me, finally, he paused for a single unhurried second, breathed out once against the skin he was about to put his mouth on, and then carefully, exactly the way I had been telling him all night to do everything he did.

The sound I made was not a word.

My hand, with what was mine, was already moving. Slow. My own rhythm. The rhythm I had learned in the dark across two years, now coming out into the lamp light of my own living room, and his mouth worked alongside my hand not taking over, not trying to run the room, simply adding itself to what I was already doing, lifting my whole body’s response into a register it had never reached before.

His tongue moved in a slow flat stroke.

My hand answered.

His mouth again.

My hand.

The two of them his and mine, the man outside my body and the woman inside it moving together, in a conversation I had not known two parts of a single moment could have.

I put my free hand in his hair.

It was dark and thick and surprisingly soft, and the edge of the silver mask pressed, warm, against my belly, and I felt the smile of his mouth against me when I pulled lightly, once, and he made a low sound himself the first sound he had made all night that was not a sentence and I understood, with a small clear clarity that made my hips push forward, that he was enjoying this.

That was new.

That was something I had not had, in three years, a man who was enjoying it.

Derek, somewhere in my peripheral vision, made a sound from the rug. Once. I did not look.

I did not need to look.

I felt him watching. That was the only part of him that belonged, tonight, in this room.

My hand moved faster.

His mouth matched it.

The heat that had been building in my chest, in my belly, in the inside of my arm where his thumb had circled, in the small of my back where his hand still rested warm and steady gathered itself.

I felt it coming.

He felt it coming. His hand tightened once at my hip a small signal, steady, here and he did not slow. He did not speed up. He kept the exact rhythm I had taught him in the last two minutes with my own hand, and my hand kept its own rhythm, and the two of us for the first time in my life, in a whole room of my own, with a man doing exactly what I had asked arrived at the same second.

I came.

I am writing that word directly because I am not going to make it into a euphemism on the page where it happens. I came, in my own living room, in my own hand, with a man in a silver-and-skin half-mask whose mouth I had uncovered and whose body I had arranged around me exactly as I wanted it. My knees gave. His hands caught me at the hips and held me up through the whole of it. My own hand did not stop. I rode it out mine, his, both of ours and I heard myself make a sound I had never made before, in any bed, with any man, at any point in my life.

A full sound. Not quiet. Not small.

I had spent three years crying with the fan on.

I came in my own living room at a volume Derek Calloway heard.

The sound from Derek was small.

The same small architectural sound that had come out of my wrist an hour and a half earlier.

I understood and this is the thing I want you to keep that what was breaking in Derek had been waiting to break for a long time, and had been held together, across a whole life, only by the belief that what he had taken from me belonged to him.

He had understood, finally, that it had never been his to take.

After.

My legs were still not fully under me. The Verdict Killer lowered me slowly down onto his lap, sideways, my head against the silver of the upper mask, my bare skin against the fabric of his dark shirt and his arm came around my back, and he held me, warm, unhurried, while my breathing found itself again.

My hand, without thinking, went to his hand where it rested on my thigh.

I did not say anything.

I put my hand over his.

A woman who has not been able to ask a man to stay for three years puts her hand over his the way she would put it over a candle flame she did not want to blow out. Carefully. Not to take the heat. To keep it.

He understood.

He did not move.

He stayed.

I closed my eyes for one long moment the first closed eyes I had allowed myself all night and I felt, under my palm, the warm bare weight of a hand that was choosing, for as long as I was asking for it, to be where I had put it.

When I opened my eyes, the silver of the upper mask caught the lamp light.

And through the mouth that was still uncovered, low, close to my ear, he said the last thing before I stood up:

"You tell me when you want me to put him back in the kitchen."

I took another long breath.

"Now," I said.