Slow Hands, Late Nights

I want to start by saying that I'm twenty-four years old, I edit other people's manuscripts for a living, and I have been having sex with the same man for almost two years, and I still sometimes feel like I'm faking my way through all of it. That's a strange thing to admit on a Tuesday night in Portland, sitting across the living room from Vernon while he scrolls through design drafts on his laptop, rain ticking against the window of our cramped brick walk-up like it's got nothing better to do either. But there it is.

He was on the thrifted velvet couch with his feet on the coffee table, lamp light pooling on the screen, and I was supposed to be reading a manuscript that a client wanted back by Friday, and instead I was watching him squint at a logo he'd been fighting with for two days. He's twenty-five, he does graphic design for a small agency downtown, and he has the patient, unhurried way about him of someone who has never once rushed a decision in his life. We met in a workshop in college, dated for a year and a half, broke up amicably because we were both idiots about distance, and then ran into each other at a coffee shop on Hooper a year later like the universe had left a sticky note on both of us. Six months ago he moved in here. It's the first time we've tried the whole sharing-a-bathroom thing, and so far the only real casualty has been a mug he loved.

The thing is, watching him there, I kept thinking about a conversation I'd had with my friend Eden over the weekend, where she asked me if the sex was good and I said yes, because it is, it genuinely is, and then she asked if I felt good at it, and I said "what does that even mean," and she said exactly what it means and I changed the subject to her sourdough starter. But the question had been sitting in me like a splinter all week. I know what I like. I know what he likes. And yet somewhere between the wanting and the doing I still get this flutter of stage fright, like I'm a temp filling in for the real girlfriend, the one who would know what to do with her hands.

So I closed the manuscript, and I decided that tonight I was going to be the one who started things.

You have to understand, in our history I almost never do. Not because Vernon wouldn't love it, and not because he's ever made me feel unwelcome, but because somewhere along the way I built this habit of waiting for him to make the first move, and habits like that calcify. He'd probably say it doesn't bother him. He'd mean it too, because that's who he is. But I'd decided, sitting there pretending to care about someone's meandering memoir, that I was done waiting to be picked. I was going to walk over there and pick him.

I set the manuscript on the stack by the lamp, crossed the room, and moved his laptop off his lap and onto the coffee table without asking, which is technically a violation of several apartment treaties we have.

"Hey," he said, laughing a little, "I was working."

"You were squinting," I said. "That's not working, that's squinting. It can wait."

He looked at me, and I sat down beside him, close, closer than the couch strictly required, and put my hand on his thigh. Not dramatically, not with a movie-score swell, just my hand on the denim of his jeans, warm and still. He paused, and I mean really paused, his whole body going quiet, and then this small knowing smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the one he does when he's already three steps ahead of me but is polite enough to let me catch up on my own.

"Well hello," he said softly.

"Hi," I said, and my stomach did that flip it does, the traitorous thing, because apparently two years of knowing him in bed and six months of cohabitation still leave me defenseless against a man saying well hello.

"You okay?" he asked, and there was nothing but genuine question in it, no teasing, which is one of the thousand reasons I keep him.

"I'm fine. I'm better than fine. I just decided I'm done reading tonight," I said, and my thumb was moving on his thigh without my permission, slow little arcs, and I watched his breath change. "And I had a thought."

"What kind of thought?"

"The kind where I do the thing," I said, which was vague and ridiculous, but he seemed to understand, or at least he nodded, and his hand came up and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, patient as ever, waiting to see what I had.

"Okay," he said. "You do the thing. I'm a big supporter of the thing."

I leaned in and kissed him, which wasn't the thing, that was just the appetizer, warm and easy, his mouth familiar as my own handwriting. When I pulled back he was watching me with half-lidded eyes and I felt that old stage fright start to whisper, and I told it to shut up, because tonight I had a plan, and the plan was slow.

I started on his shirt. He wears these flannel things in the fall and winter until I threaten him, and tonight it was the green one, and I took the top button between my fingers and undid it like it was a difficult and ceremonial task. He raised his eyebrows but said nothing, bless him, and I did the second button, slower than the first, and by the third he had gone very still in that way of his, the stillness of someone who has realized something interesting is happening and doesn't want to spook it.

"You're taking your time," he observed.

"I am," I agreed. "That's the whole point, so don't rush me."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

I worked down to the fourth and fifth, and the shirt fell open a little, and there was his chest, plain and dear and known to me, and instead of doing the expected thing, which would have been to run my hands down over his stomach, I put my fingertips on his collarbone instead, just traced the edge of it, light as anything, from the hollow of his throat out toward his shoulder and back again. He made a small sound, surprised, and I felt a flash of something new and electric, because I had surprised him. Me. The one who usually gets surprised.

"That's new," he murmured.

"I'm full of new things tonight," I said. "Don't get used to it, or do, I haven't decided."

I kept tracing, along the ridge of bone and down to where his chest began, and then deliberately, wickedly, I skipped past his nipples, past the flat plane of his stomach, and traced back up the other side of his collarbone like I'd never had any intention of going anywhere else. He laughed under his breath, low.

"You're a menace," he said.

"I'm an artist," I said. "There's a difference. Menaces rush. Artists have vision."

"And what's the vision, exactly?"

"Patience," I said, and kissed the corner of his jaw, and felt him shiver, actually shiver, and something in my chest unknotted a little. Maybe this was the thing Eden had been talking about, maybe experience isn't a bag of tricks at all, maybe it's just this, knowing a man well enough to know that tracing his collarbone slowly while rain hits the window will undo him, and being brave enough to actually do it instead of waiting for a script.

I pushed the shirt off his shoulders and he let me, shrugging out of it, and I took my time looking at him, which I never let myself do, I always get self-conscious about staring like it's rude, but tonight I stared, and he let me stare, and his ears went a little pink, which I found unbearably charming.

"Shoshana," he said, my whole name, slow, "what are you up to?"

"I told you," I said, sliding closer, "the thing."

"And the thing involves my shirt on the floor, I see."

"The thing involves a lot of things on the floor, probably," I said, "if you're patient," and he laughed, and leaned back against the arm of the couch, and put his hands behind his head as someone would who was getting comfortable to watch a performance, which was such an act of trust that it nearly finished me off right there.

"Take all night," he said. "I've got nowhere to be."

So I started down. I kissed his collarbone first, then the hollow of his throat, then worked my way across his chest one slow kiss at a time, and somewhere around the third or fourth kiss I felt his breathing change, this little catch in it, like a skipped stitch in knitting, and I swear I nearly giggled into his skin because I had done that. Me. I let my mouth drift lower, over his sternum, down toward his ribs, and I could hear it again, that hitch, and I had to say something about it because it was too good not to. "I love that sound," I murmured against his chest, my lips barely leaving him. "What sound?"

"That," I said, kissing him right below his nipple, deliberately, and there it went again, his breath catching, a tiny snag in the middle of the room. "That little hitch. Every time I do something slow, it's right there. It's like a metronome that tells on you."

"It does not tell on me," he said, but his voice had gone rough at the edges, which told on him plenty. "It absolutely does. It's the most honest thing about you. You sit there with your patient face and your hands behind your head like some prince on a throne, and then I kiss you one inch lower and your whole breathing pattern falls apart."

"Shoshana."

"Yes?"

"Keep going."

"That's what I thought," I said, and I kept going.

I worked my way back up, because I wanted him to feel the whole loop of it, the way you'd reread a paragraph to make