Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
By the time we circled back toward town, the sun had shifted into late afternoon. The light went syrupy and soft. I could’ve stayed out there for another hour, two, five. My body had gotten heavy in the good way, not the tired way—the way that says you’ll sleep without having to bargain with your own head for it.
He pulled into the back lot and cut the engine. The quiet pressed down around us. I stayed where I was for one extra second, cheek against the leather at his shoulder, and inhaled this moment to my memory banks. Then climbed off and unbuckled the helmet. My hair came loose in little escaping strands. I pushed them behind my ears.
“You want to come up?” I asked, my voice coming out gentler than I’d planned.
He studied me a second, then nodded. “Yeah.”
In the hallway, neither of us rushed. I unlocked my door and stepped aside so he could come in first. My room looked exactly like a hotel room looks—beige, generic art trying too hard on the wall, the small dresser with a drawer that stuck halfway. I’d made the bed that morning, habit welded into me. The only thing that was mine was the stack of paperbacks on the chair I bought at the second hand store up the road.
“Water?” I asked, because offering felt like a way to steady my hands.
“Sure.”
I poured from the bottle on my dresser into the cheap plastic cups with the little paper lids and handed him one. He took it and looked at me over the rim while he drank. My throat did a weird little click in response.
“Thank you,” I muttered trying to let him know I appreciated time with him. I didn’t know why. Things felt awkward, but not uncomfortable. More like two people that were connected but still learning one another.
“For what?”
I rested my hip against the dresser. “The ride. The way it felt. I know this is going to sound dumb, but it was like the air around me told me to remember I was alive. Like there was room to think without the thoughts crowding me.” I caught his eyes and didn’t drop them. “Like freedom.”
His mouth barely moved, but his eyes did. Something in them went soft and certain. “That’s the whole point,” he said. “It’s not dumb.”
I set my cup down on the dresser with a plastic thud, crossed the little square of carpet between us, and pressed my fingers to the front of his shirt. He didn’t move. He let me be the one to erase the last inch. I rose onto my toes, and when my mouth met his, he let it be what it was—slow, unrushed. The first pass was a hello, not a demand. The second was an answer.
He kissed me like reading, yes, but also like writing, each touch a word he didn’t waste. My hands went from his chest to the sides of his neck, thumbs under his jaw, and his breath changed. He was gentle with me the way a strong man remembers the weight of what he’s carrying. Firm in all the places that made my nerves settle instead of jump. I stepped back once, tugging him with me, and the backs of my knees met the bed. We sat without breaking apart.
I didn’t rush. I didn’t have to. His palms slid over my shoulder blades, down my sides. He didn’t go anywhere he hadn’t already announced, not with words but with patient touch. When I lifted my shirt over my head, it wasn’t because I felt like I ought to. It was because the air felt better on my skin, because I wanted to see his eyes change. And thankfully, they did.
“Okay?” he asked, voice low, when his hands found the bare skin at my waist.
“Yes,” I whispered firmly to make sure he heard how much I meant it.
We took our time. We learned each other in the slow language bodies speak when nobody’s translating for them. I felt it when he chose a pace that matched my breath, not the clock in his own blood. I gave back what he gave me, trying to memorize the map of what made his breath catch, the way his hand flexed on my hip when I kissed the corner of his mouth, the sound he made when I traced my fingers along the line of his shoulder. The room stayed quiet, but it wasn’t the kind of quiet that isolates. It was the kind that wraps around two people and holds.
When we finally moved together, it wasn’t a rush or a scramble. It wasn’t a thing that happened to me. It was something we did, both of us looking. My body knew more this time—less flinch, more yes—and he kept reading it, checking in, adjusting without making me name every small thing. He truly read my body, every inch. The world narrowed to warm skin and soft breath and a rhythm that had nothing in it that hurt. I let myself be there, really there, not bracing for the next bad thing or waiting for the ceiling to crack.