Broken First (Never Again)

Episode Eighteen

After the dishes, he took her hand.

It was such a simple thing his fingers closing around hers, the gentle pull toward the living room but she felt it through her whole body, the way you feel the first note of a song you love when it arrives unexpectedly in a quiet room. The living room was just as carefully arranged as the dining space: the lighting soft, the cushions rearranged so that the sofa faced the television at a closer, more intimate angle. From somewhere, music had begun playing R&B, slow and warm, the kind that doesn't ask anything of you except to feel it.

He had put on Fifty Shades of Grey on Netflix.

She looked at the screen, then at him. He looked back at her with an expression that was entirely innocent and entirely not.

"Really," she said.

"It's a good film," he said.

She laughed a real laugh, the kind that came from somewhere unguarded and settled into the sofa beside him. He put his arm around her and she folded naturally into his side, her head finding the specific place against his shoulder that had become hers over these months. The rain continued against the window. The music played beneath the dialogue from the screen. And slowly, the way warmth always moves gradually, undeniably, from the outside in the evening began to change.

She was not watching the film. She was aware of him specifically, completely aware of him the steadiness of his breathing, the warmth that radiated from his skin, the way his thumb moved in slow, absent circles against her shoulder. Every small motion registered with the heightened clarity of a body that has decided to pay attention to everything.

At some point she turned to look at him and found he was already looking at her. Not at the screen. At her. And the look on his face unhurried, certain, open in a way she had rarely seen from him said everything that the room had been slowly building toward all evening.

"Hey," he said quietly.

"Hey," she said back.

There was a pause, the kind that holds its breath.

Then he reached up and moved a strand of hair from her face just one strand, just that small gesture and his fingers stayed at her jaw, and he looked at her for one long moment as if asking a question that didn't need words.

She answered it the same way.

The kiss began gently. It always began gently with them that had always been his way with her, careful and deliberate, as though he understood that she was someone who needed to arrive at things herself rather than be rushed toward them. But tonight there was something different beneath the gentleness. A current. A seriousness. His hands found her face and she felt herself moving closer without deciding to, the distance between them collapsing the way it does when two people have finally stopped pretending they aren't already in the same place.

Katherine," he said, pulling back just enough to look at her. His voice had dropped into something low and private, something she felt more than heard. We don't have to I mean it. We don't have to do anything you're not ready for.

She looked at him steadily. At this man who had waited. Who had been patient in a way she had not expected, in a way she was only now beginning to fully appreciate. Who had made her dinner with his own hands and covered the floor in rose petals and asked, right now, at the exact moment that mattered most, whether she was ready.

Six months, she thought. Six months of being sure.

"I know," she said. She held his gaze. "I'm ready, Chris.

That was the assurance Chris wanted. The assurance he has been waiting for. The confirmation from her mouth and he finally got it. The game was about to be over.

The music from the other room drifted through the wall, soft and unhurried. The rain against the window had settled into a steady, intimate rhythm that made the apartment feel like the only warm place in the world.

He stood and held out his hand to her. She took it. And she followed him, past the rose petals and the dying candlelight, past every careful, patient month that had led to this moment, into the room that Miss Donly had decorated like something from a dream soft light, flowers, the scent of something sweet in the air a room that had been prepared for exactly this, for her, with a thoughtfulness that made her chest ache in the best possible way.

At the edge of the bed, he turned to face her. His hands found her waist. She looked up at him at this man she had chosen, this man who had been her peace and her laughter and her warmth and she was not afraid. She had thought she might be. She had expected some residual nervousness, the kind that lives in the body even when the mind has already decided. But there was none of it. There was only the rain and the soft light and the steadiness of his hands and the certainty that she was exactly where she had, without quite realizing it, been moving toward for six months.

"I've got you," he said quietly. "I've always got you.

She believed him. And she let herself fall. She didn’t believe him because of mere words, she believes him because he made her happy. He made her feel warm. He made her feel safe this past six months.

Chris reach to her underwear and pull it aside. She continues to kiss him as he kisses back and then he finally went into her and she moan with satisfaction. It was her first time having a man touch her and make love to her. She continues to moan and Chris will ask her if she want him to stop but she did reply ‘No continue’. This time Chris makes sure to make her feel like a woman. Make her feel the way she has never feel before and he did. They both had the best moment and Chris was the happiest he has finally gotten in between her legs and to him it was a mission accomplished. But to Katherine it was something extraordinary a love story built in Riverside College.

After they were done, she didn’t wear her underwear, it was a beautiful pink Victoria Secrets lady’s underwear she had bought the same day she bought that gown. Emily had suggested that they all buy that Victoria Secret underwear and all three of them; Emily Rachel and Katherine bought them. It wasn’t for any occasion it was just girls been girls.

There was a blood stain on the bedsheets since it was her first time and Chris had to change the bedsheets to a new one before they where able to sleep on it after they both went to take their bath together.

The night stretched out around them, slow and unhurried, full of all the things that words are too blunt to carry the particular language of two people becoming finally, completely known to each other. Outside, the rain continued its gentle, indifferent rhythm against the glass, and inside there was warmth, and closeness, and the soft sound of breathing, and everything that had been waiting patiently for six months finding its way, at last, home.

She did not leave that night. There was never really any question of it.

Much later, in the dark and quiet that follows something that changes you, Katherine lay still and listened to Chris breathe beside her. The room was dim, the candles long since burned down, the rain outside settled into something barely there. She stared at the ceiling with the particular stillness of someone whose body has come to rest but whose inner world is wide awake.

She felt different. Not in the way she had been told she would feel, not in the dramatic, rupturing way that people sometimes describe. Different in a quieter, more permanent way as though something that had been almost true had now become completely true, as though a door she had been standing in front of for a long time had finally swung open and she had walked through it and found exactly what she had hoped would be on the other side.

She turned her head and looked at him. He was asleep or nearly his face relaxed into an expression she had never seen in daylight, unguarded in the way sleep makes everyone unguarded. He looked younger. He looked, for the first time, like someone she could see the whole of.

She loved him. She knew this with the same calm, unargued certainty she knew her own name. She had not said it yet, not tonight, but it was no longer something she was carrying alone. It was in the room with them. It was in everything that had just happened. It was as present and undeniable as the rain, as the warmth of the bed, as the steady fact of him beside her.

She would say it when the morning came. She decided this quietly, to herself, in the dark.

She would say it, and it would be the truest thing she had ever offered another person, and she would mean every syllable of it with the whole of who she was.

For now, she closed her eyes, and let the night hold her, and for the first time in a long time she felt not just happy but complete. Chris gave her one of his black polo t-shirts to wear and she wore it. She wasn’t wearing her underwear anymore and her dress was kept one side of the wardrobe. She has fully committed herself to him. The rain wouldn’t stop. It was like a planned event by Chris. But a real love encounter for Katherine. Did Chris really planned this? What all this worth the wait? What is the reason for this bet the first place. All this questions need to be answered. One thing was cleared here. A man can be patient for as long as he want with a lady just to get what he wants and Chris was a definition of that. He just wanted to be remember in campus as the guy who girls cant control themselves around him. A guy who was the baddas ladies daddy. A guy who was just living his life in college.

For Katherine some nights are ordinary. And some nights become the ones you measure everything else against.