We do not move apart.
That is the first thing I notice — that neither of us pulls back, that the kiss continues and shifts and deepens and his hands are in my hair and mine are at his chest and neither of us is stopping, and that itself is different from the office, where I was careful. I am not being careful tonight.
He pulls back only far enough to look at me. His thumb is at my jaw. The candle has burned almost to nothing.
"Emily," he says, very quietly.
"Don't ask if I'm sure," I say. "I'm sure."
Something in his face shifts — the last held thing releasing. He stands and I stand and we are on the same side of the table and there is no distance between us at all.
He kisses me again, differently — not tentative, not asking — with his hands in my hair and his mouth open against mine and I make a sound I did not plan to make, and I feel him smile against my lips, brief and warm, and then he is not smiling, he is entirely focused, and the focused quality of him like this is something I was completely unprepared for.
We make it to the hallway. The kitchen light is still on behind us.
"Which room?" he says, against my mouth.
"Mine's closer," I say.
His laugh is low and I feel it against my cheek and then we are moving.
The room is dark. He doesn't reach for the lamp and neither do I. There is enough light from the hall, amber and warm, and I want to see him in it.
He stops just inside the door and looks at me. I reach for his shirt and he lets me, watching my hands move down the buttons with an expression that does something immediate to my breathing.
I push the shirt off his shoulders and he is warm and solid and real and I press my palms flat against his chest and feel his heartbeat and it is not steady, which undoes me, because nothing about Christian is ever unsteady.
He reaches for the zip at the back of my dress. His fingers are slow, deliberate, his knuckles grazing my spine all the way down, and I close my eyes.
"Look at me," he says, low. "I want to see your face."
I open my eyes. He is watching me with the full weight of his attention and the dress falls and he steps back for just a moment — one breath, two — and looks at me in the amber light.
"Twenty years," he says, to himself or to me. "And you're even more—" He stops. Starts again. "God, Emily. You're so beautiful it's making me lose my mind."
Something in my chest opens wide. "Then stop waiting," I say.
He crosses the room.
He takes his time in a way that should be maddening and is instead the most intensely erotic thing I have experienced in my life. His hands move over me like he is memorising, like he has a long time and intends to use it. His mouth follows where his hands were — my shoulder, my throat, my collarbone — and I pull him closer by the back of his neck and he goes, entirely, without resistance.
"Tell me what you want," he says, against my skin.
"You," I say. "I want to feel you."
He makes a sound low in his throat and his hands tighten and the patience dissolves slightly at the edges, which is its own particular satisfaction — finding the place where his composure gives way. I file that information. I intend to use it again.
He lays me back and kneels above me and I look up at him in the low light and I think: there he is. The boy from the fire escape and the man from the courtroom and every version in between, here, looking at me like I am the thing he has been waiting for, because I am, because I have always been, and the knowledge of that is not a weight anymore. It is something else entirely.
"I've thought about this," he says. His voice is rough. "For a long time. I've thought about this."
"Show me," I say.
He does.
There is a point where I stop tracking anything except sensation — the heat of him, his weight, his hands that know exactly where they are going as though they have always known, as though his body has been carrying the map all this time and is finally allowed to use it.
He reads me the way he reads everything, completely, and he uses what he learns, and I am not quiet about it, and he seems to find my not-being-quiet deeply motivating, which I also file away.
"Look at me," he says again, when I close my eyes. "Stay with me."
I look at him. In the amber light, above me, entirely present, twenty years of waiting written in the way he is looking at me — not a performance of desire but the actual thing, raw and specific, aimed entirely at me — and something breaks open in my chest and I pull him down.
I say his name and he says mine, low and rough against my ear, and the room is warm and the city is outside and in here there is only this.
"Let go baby," he says, quietly. "I've got you."
I do.
He follows, not long after, and the sound he makes — his face against my neck, my name again, barely breath — is something I am going to remember for the rest of my life.
Afterward we lie still in the quiet. He is warm beside me and I am lying with my head on his chest and his arm is around me and his heartbeat is steadying, evening out, exactly like him. I press my hand over it and listen.
"Hey," he says, into my hair.
"Hey," I say.
"Are you all right?"
I think about that question — what all right means in this room, after this night, after twenty years of everything that led here.
"I think," I say, "I might be better than all right." I press my palm flat over his heart. "For the first time in a very long time."
He doesn't say anything. He pulls me closer, and the room is quiet, and outside the window the city does its night things, and in here there is just this — his heartbeat under my hand, steady, the warmth of him, the particular peace of being exactly where I am supposed to be.
I fall asleep without a single thought about what tomorrow will require.
Tomorrow will require things.
Tonight there is only this.