Just for tonight
1172 Words
(Noah)
She kissed me back and everything else stopped.
Five years of distance collapsed in the space of one breath and I stopped thinking about any of it. Not the meeting I had missed. Not the men waiting downstairs. Not the fiancé whose name I already wanted to forget. There was only Reese, her hands gripping the front of my jacket, her mouth open against mine, and the feeling of something I had locked away a long time ago breaking wide open.
I walked her back until she met the wall and she made a sound against my mouth that went straight through me.
I pulled back just enough to look at her. Her eyes were darker than they had been a minute ago, her lips parted, her composure completely gone. This was the Reese I remembered underneath all the polish and the control. The one who felt everything and could not hide it no matter how hard she tried.
"Tell me to stop," I said. "If you want me to stop, say it now."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she reached up and pushed my jacket off my shoulders and let it fall to the floor.
I took that as my answer.
I kissed her again, deeper this time, one hand at the back of her neck and the other finding the zip at the back of her dress. She worked the buttons of my shirt open and pushed it off and ran her palms flat against my chest like she was checking that I was real. I pulled the zip down and the dress loosened around her and I stepped back just enough to let it fall.
She stood in front of me and did not look away and I took my time looking at her. Five years. She was more than I remembered and I had remembered a lot.
We moved to the bedroom, her hands at my belt while I reached down and unclasped her bra and dropped it somewhere behind us. She sat on the bed and looked up at me and I looked down at her and the dim evening light coming through the window caught the line of her collarbone and the curve of her waist and I thought I had been out of my mind to ever let her go.
I reached into my jacket pocket on the floor and found my wallet, took out a condom and set it on the bedside table within reach. She watched me do it and something in her expression shifted, not softer exactly, but less guarded.
I reached for her and she came to me without hesitation.
I laid her back against the pillows and ran my mouth down her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her chest, taking my time the way I had promised myself I would. She made a sound low in her throat and her fingers went into my hair. I moved lower, across her stomach, and she pulled in a breath and her back arched up slightly off the mattress.
I took care of her first.
By the time I reached for the condom her chest was rising and falling fast and her eyes were half closed and she was looking at me like she had forgotten every reason she had given herself to stay away. I rolled it on and settled between her and she wrapped her legs around me and I pushed into her slowly, watching her face the whole time.
She exhaled my name.
I started to move and she moved with me, her hips rising to meet mine, her hands gripping my back. The room was quiet except for the sound of our breathing and the city far below the window and I kept the pace measured because I wanted this to last. I wanted to remember every part of it. The way she felt around me, the way her body responded, the small sounds she made when I found the right angle and held it there.
Her nails pressed into my back.
I dropped my head and kissed her, open and deep, and she kissed me back with the same urgency and I felt her start to tighten around me and I did not pull back. I kept the same rhythm, the same pressure, and she broke apart with her face against my neck, her whole body shaking, my name barely a sound on her lips.
I followed her not long after, my face in her hair, every muscle in my body letting go at once.
Afterward I held her in the dark and listened to the city outside the window. She was still against me, her breathing coming back to normal, her hand resting flat on my chest. She had not pulled away. That meant something.
I pressed my mouth to her hair.
"Come back to me," I said.
She did not answer right away. The room was quiet.
"Break it off with him," I said. "Whatever this is with the fiancé, end it. Come back to me."
Still nothing. I waited. I had always been good at waiting when it mattered.
Her breathing was even. Her body was relaxed against mine in a way it had not been since the hallway. The wall she had kept up all evening had come all the way down and she felt exactly like she used to feel, like the one person in the world I could put everything down around.
I had made a mistake five years ago. Not in the choice itself. The choice had been necessary and I had made it with a clear head. But in the way I had done it. Four words said quickly like ripping something off that would hurt less if you moved fast. I had thought clean was kind. I had not understood what those four words looked like from where she was standing.
I understood now.
Whatever she needed me to explain or apologize for or prove, I was going to do it. The club was my life and that was not changing. But Reese had been mine before any of it and somewhere in the back of my mind she had stayed mine through all of it, whether I admitted it to myself or not.
She still had not said anything.
I looked down at her.
Her eyes were closed. Her face was the calmest I had seen it all day, every trace of the tension she had carried since the hallway completely gone. Her breathing was deep and even.
She was asleep.
I looked at her for a long moment. Then I pulled her closer and felt her settle against me without waking, her body finding mine the way it always had, like some part of her remembered this even when she was not conscious enough to fight it.
I took that as a yes.
I closed my eyes and held her a little closer and let myself have this, just for tonight.
- Writer
