Intrusion (8 page)

But I needn't have worried—he doesn't break it. His expression is just like mine when I finally dare to look, full of shivering wonder at the idea that something so small could be so powerful. We barely touched and yet everything is suddenly different. My body is alight. I think
his
body is alight.

How else to explain the hand he suddenly pushes into my hair? Or the way he pulls me to him? He does it like someone lost at sea, finally seeing something he can grab on to. His hand nearly makes a fist in my insane curls, and when he kisses me this time there is absolutely nothing chaste about it. Nothing cautious.

His mouth slants over mine, hot and wet and so incredibly urgent. The pressure this time is almost bruising, and after a second I could swear I feel his tongue. Just a flicker of it, sliding over mine. Barely anything really, but enough to stun me with sensation. I thought my reaction in the movie theater was intense.

Apparently there's another level altogether—one that makes me want to clutch at him. I
need
to clutch at him. My bones and muscles seem to have abandoned me, and if I don't hold on to something I'm going to end up on the floor. Grabbing him is practically necessary, even though I have no idea where to grab.

He put his hand in my hair. Does that make it all right to put mine in his? I suspect not, but have no clue where that leaves me. Is an elbow any better? What about his upper arm? His upper arm is hardly suggestive at all, yet I can't quite bring myself to do it. If I do he might break this kiss, and I'm just not ready for that.

I probably won't be ready for that
tomorrow
. His stubble is burning me just a little and the excitement is making me so shaky I could pass for a cement mixer, but I still want it to carry on. Every new thing he does is just such a revelation—like when he turns a little and just sort of catches my lower lip between his, or caresses my jaw with the side of his thumb.

I didn't think he had it in him.

It could be that he doesn't. When he finally comes up for air he has to kind of rest his forehead against mine for a second. His breathing comes in erratic bursts, as though he just ran up a hill that isn't really there. Those hands in my hair are trembling, unable to let go, and his first words to me blunder out in guttural rush.

“I wasn't expecting that to be so intense,” he says, and I get it then. He didn't mean for things to go that way. They just got out of control. All of that passion and urgency isn't who he is, and now he wants to go back to being the real him. He even steps back, and straightens, and breathes long and slow until that man returns.

Now he is the person he wants to be: stoic and cool. Or at least, that's what I think until he turns to leave. He tells me good-bye and I accept it; he touches my shoulder and I process this as all I might reasonably expect in the future. And then just as he's almost gone I happen to glance down, and see something that suggests that the idea of a real him may not be so clear-cut:

The outline of his erection, hard and heavy against the material of his jeans.

Chapter Five

I
DON'T KNOW
how to ask him about the erection. Every time I think up a good question it dies a death in my throat—probably because none of them are good questions at all, really. They have words in them like
stiff
and
arousal,
and neither of those seems like a great road to go down. They were barely passable when I tried to dirty talk my last boyfriend.

How can they be passable here? He's so traumatized by whatever happened to him that he can hardly touch my hand. Somehow we make dinner side by side without so much as a brush of my elbow against his arm. He dances around me and I dance around him, and in the end I just have to accept that maybe I hallucinated that solid shape.

It certainly seems like something my imagination wants to make up. Last night I had a dream about him slowly peeling off my clothes in the exact way I saw him taking off the outer casing of a computer the other day, and I didn't wake up feeling rested and content. I woke up slap bang in the middle of what can only be described as an orgasm.

I had an orgasm in my sleep while thinking of him piecing together a motherboard. I had a wet dream like a teenage boy, only much more awful than that because Noah doesn't want to. I am absolutely certain that he doesn't want to. I wish I could ask him if he ever wants to.

But the very act of asking seems like a transgression.

Instead I make do with the tiniest hints of affection, waiting patiently for another moment like the one in the hall. And it does come—even if it's sort of by accident. He leans past me to get the salt, and I think he's leaning in for something else, and there it is. My mouth is on his, and his mouth is on mine, and neither one of us is pulling away exactly. In fact, when I go to do just that his hand comes up and cups the back of my head.

I could live to be a thousand and never feel anything as good as that. It spins my stomach around the sun. All I can do is marvel at his ability to be so cautious and so daring at the same time, with the tiniest of moves and the littlest of things. He holds me there so he can carry on kissing, and I go wild for him.

And wilder still when I realize he's looking at me. His eyes are open as he presses more deeply into it, as bright and assessing as they've ever been. Watching me watching him as we carefully maneuver our way through this. I part my lips a little more, stopping just short of the messy, open-mouthed kiss I really want to give. Then in return he licks at my upper lip in this tiny darting flick, as though to say that one step further is okay.

I might even be permitted to put a hand on his leg. At the very least, I think I'm allowed to touch his hair. Somewhere in the middle of it all he started stroking through my curls, and it feels so good and seems so full of freedom that I can hardly stop myself from doing the same. That little cowlick just above his left ear is
right there
. I could just reach up, and wrap it around my finger. Maybe tug on it a little, or sink my fingers a little deeper in.

Would he mind?

I don't think he would mind. He just put his other hand on my waist—almost as though it happened by accident, but not enough to make me really believe it. He wanted that hand there. In my more delirious moments I could even believe he wanted to feel how thin this dress is, because of course the answer is
very fucking thin indeed
.

I didn't think anything of it when I put it on, but by the time our eyes close and our mouths kind of start to tangle in that deliciously feverish way, I have to wonder. Maybe I was waiting for just this moment. Could be I thought of him seeing the shape of my breasts beneath the material, and instead of feeling fear at the thought, I got a blissful burst of the opposite. I wanted to entice him.

For once, it was okay to want to entice someone.

And I think he might be enticed. That hand is certainly making some interesting shapes over my side. He seems to be rubbing me there—unless that's just my pleasure-addled imagination talking. I sort of feel as if I'm swimming through an ocean of syrup, and that full sensation has returned to my general groin area.

Only now it's halfway down my thighs and most of the way up my body, and when his hand definitely moves toward my breast I think my insides try to squeeze out of my skin.

His kisses are really, really heated now. His tongue is practically fucking my mouth, and I can hear him making sounds. It isn't just breathlessness or him clearing his throat. That little humming sort of thing—the one that rolls down through me in a wave—is a moan of pleasure. So is it really that strange to imagine he might touch me there? That he could maybe tug at those flimsy buttons and pull the material of my bra aside, find my stiff and aching nipple and run the pad of his thumb over the tip. . .

He's so close, I think.

Just another inch.

Just a little more.

And then he pulls away, and oh God, I could cry. My body was so primed for it I can practically feel the heat of his hand on my breast. That tight little nipple tingles as though he pinched it, and for one mad moment I nearly pull him back. I almost let out a sound of protest, before I remember what kind of person I am.

A respectful person, who allows people their boundaries.

If he wants to stop, we stop. If he wants to stand and go to the sink and not look at me or speak to me, then that's what happens now. I was probably wrong about his feelings, anyway. I thought he wanted to touch me or do more—quite clearly he didn't. What I took for excitement was probably just grim determination, as he tried to grind his way through a kiss he didn't want.

It certainly seems that way when he speaks.

“That was pretty much my limit,” he says, in a voice so hoarse it could sing the blues in a back-alley club. I see him put a hand to his mouth, and know what he's doing even though I try not to linger on it. I glance away quick, and still see it behind my eyes.

He's wiping my kiss off his mouth, in a way that looks like someone tending to a bloody wound. I punched him without realizing it, and now he has to find out where it's tender with trembling, tentative fingers. He has to steady his breathing, and relax every muscle he just had to tense—and there are a lot of them.

The ones in his shoulders try to drop first. Then the sharp planes of his back settle down somewhat. By the time he speaks again he seems to have sagged, and my heart goes with him. Did I cause this? Am I so greedy, so invasive?

And if so how did that happen?

I've never been greedy for anyone.

I've never wanted to invade anything.

I will not start with him.

“Are you okay with that?” he asks, and I answer without question.

“Yes,” I tell him. “Yes, absolutely, whatever you need.”

But the trouble is—I do so before his next suggestion. I keep making promises that seem small on the face of it, but get larger and larger the longer this goes on. There are curveballs I don't anticipate and sharp turns that almost send me off a cliff, and they all creep up on me when I least expect them.

“You maybe want to watch that documentary?” he asks—and he even does it like this is going to cool us both off. It will help with our slow progress toward total calmness. There is literally nothing sexy about watching killer whales try to eat a penguin.

So I believe him. I nod eagerly, relieved that the fever that seemed to rise between us has died down to manageable levels. I help him clear away the rest of our meal and we idly chitchat about things that have nothing to do with kissing, completely safe in the knowledge that our little crisis has been averted.

Soon we will be miles apart in those two chairs he has in his living room, surrounded by all kinds of bizarre junk that my eyes can never seem to get enough of, and no risk of kissing will ever come up again. My urge to ask him about all of this—to press him for horrible answers to painful questions—will die down.

And then he calls to me as I move toward the living room, and I see him standing at the bottom of the stairs that lead up, up, up to God knows where, and I realize.

He has no television downstairs. At least, none that I've ever seen. When I pictured us watching the penguins I somehow erased his fireplace and replaced it with a flat-screen. I completely forgot that those chairs faced a sooty grate and some half-burnt logs, and now I have to pay the price for my own faulty imagination.

I have to go with him upstairs, to what will no doubt be his bedroom.

It must be his bedroom—no one has a TV next to a toilet. But even if he did, what difference would that make? How would that be any better? The nearness to him would still be an issue, if we were both somehow crammed into his bathtub. It might actually make things worse, because people can reasonably watch a show about penguins from a bathtub only if they're both naked and swathed in bubbles.

Christ, why am I thinking about being swathed in bubbles?

Now not only do I have to quite possibly lie next to him on a bed and pretend to be interested in David Attenborough, I have to do it with the mental image of him all slippery with scented oils playing behind my eyes.

Is it any wonder that I climb those steps like I'm going to my doom? The very idea is unbearable. It seems wreathed in thorns and full of booby traps, and I really don't want to have to deal with any of them. When we finally get to his bedroom, I just stand there in the doorway, sure I should run now.

His bed is just so
narrow
. Surely he knows that this is the narrowest thing in the history of sizes? I've seen needles fatter than his supposed sleeping apparatus, and yet there he is sitting on it all casually as though this is really what we're going to do.

Unless he expects me to sit somewhere else? I glance around hopefully, but I get no relief there. He barely has any other items of furniture in here, never mind something that could be used as a chair. If I clamber onto his clearly handmade wardrobe he's going to think I'm very weird. For a start, I'd need a stool to get up there.

And then there's the fact that he just patted the space next to him.

He has to know that our bodies will touch when I occupy that space, but he does it anyway. So what should I allow myself to think here? That he wants our bodies to touch in this way? Maybe he wants to keep pushing up against some raw, red edge inside himself, to see how much it stings. He might think that this time will be different—that this will be the moment when everything turns out okay and we just melt into each other's arms.

But if he does, he makes no real sign. He simply waits for me to join him, and once I do, he turns on the documentary. We watch penguins chirp and peep with a line of fire burning between our bodies, each glancing touch a new kind of agony. Both of us intently staring at the screen so we don't have to see all the things we might want.