And then he is there in her doorway. “Wait,” she says before he comes back into the light of the bedroom. Right now he’s a shadowed figure in the dark of the hall. He obliges her request, leans against the doorframe, drops a hip and lets out a soft laugh. She feels herself in that burst of air, feels him loving her which makes her feel lucky. She’s been lucky for a long time, but she didn’t know.
She can see the ends of his hair catching the light from the lamp by her bed, can just barely make out the bare skin of his shoulders. She cannot see his face, and this is what she wants.
“What are you doing?” he says quietly from the door. And she feels it in her bones, the thunder of his voice coming from the shadow in her doorway.
“I’m trying to see how good I got.”
“How good you got at what?”
It occurs to her that he can see her completely even though she can only see the faint outline of his body. Her heart speeds up and she can honestly say she has no idea what she looks like right now. She feels frantic, dizzy, full of something, full of everything maybe. She wonders how much of this shows on her face. She knocks her knees together under the sheets, a childlike gesture of nervousness.
“How good I got at imagining you there,” she answers finally. She had hoped her voice would sound strong, and brave, but it comes out small.
Then he is coming toward her, and this is not something she could have imagined. She could never have predicted the look of him crawling toward her from the foot of the bed. She certainly never allowed herself to imagine his mouth coming towards hers, his arms and legs all around her. She holds onto one of his forearms, feeling his pulse, relieved to find it as quick as hers, and the stretch of muscle under his skin.
He kisses her and kisses her until he stops to ask, “So how good had you gotten?” She hears the breath she’s taken from him and she has to turn her face away from him, bury half of it in her pillow, close her eyes for a second. She is suddenly very concerned that she is about to give herself completely to this man, and she is ready but she is cautious.
She turns back to him and presses a finger to his breastbone. “Pretty good. This,” she runs her finger over his chest until it comes to rest in between his collarbones , “was not really part of my imagining though. This is new.”
This is new. This is new. This is new. How that applies to everything now.
She spreads all ten of her fingers out on his shoulders, finding freckles for her fingertips, and mutters, “Took so long.”
unfold is the author of 102 other stories.
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