How Not to Let Go

I shower first, then go to our room with a towel around my waist and another on my head. I drop my clothes on the floor and put my glasses on the desk. All at once I feel my exhaustion—no sleep last night, and then dinner tonight, and a year, really, of feeling lonelier than I’ve dared to realize.

Annie’s lying on the bed, reading. Dressed all in black, with her new glasses, she looks as European as I’ve ever seen her, but her shoes and socks are on the floor by the bed, her bare feet flat on the mattress.

I shut the door behind me and lock it.

I want her. I am abominable, a fuckshow, and I want her to kiss my cheek and forehead and nose and whisper to me and giggle in the dark. I want to drop all my weapons and let her touch me, undefended. I want to make love with her, feel those bare feet cool on the backs of my legs, and then fall asleep with her body pressed against mine, and then I want to wake up and do it all again. I want it so much my breath stops in my throat.

But: Disaster. Torn to pieces.

I rub the towel against my hair and then drop it beside the pile of clothes as I try to breathe.

“Hey,” she says, and she sets her book aside.

“Hey.” I sink onto the bed, lying next to her, and scrub my face with both hands.

“What’s in the cellar?” Annie asks.

“Simon’s bat cave. Gym, office, command center,” I answer without opening my eyes.

“Ah.”

“I had to beat the shit out of something. Better myself than you, I thought.” I look at her then, see her exhaustion, and I feel all the horror that I couldn’t feel before. “Oh god, I’m sorry, Annie. I am so sorry. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I had known this would happen. I can’t begin to tell you—”

She turns to her side and props her head on her hand. “It’s not your fault he’s so awful. And he is. I mean, he is really, really awful.”

I nod, wincing, and grip my skull in both hands, looking at the ceiling. “I had to stay. If he had come and I hadn’t been here, he would have taken it out on them.”

“I get that,” she says lightly. “What’s weird is how he never targeted you. Everyone else, even me, a total stranger, but never you.”

“Not directly,” I say to the ceiling. In disgust I add, “He was using you to get to me, just as he uses them.”

“Dude, that is fucked up.”

“It puts me in a hopeless . . . in an invidious position, because there’s nothing I can do or say to protect them. I’ve tried drawing his fire, I’ve tried putting myself between him and them, I’ve tried simply attacking him. Nothing works, not really. And I wind up . . . just . . . being a wanker.”

“Yeah, you were a douche bag there for a minute.”

I close my eyes against the wave of shame. “I hate that you saw that. I hate that I am that, I hate that that exists inside me and that I allow him to draw it out of me. God, what a fuckup I am. What a total wanker.” I rub my hands hard over my face again.

“You want a hair shirt to go with that flagellation, swamp boy?”

I laugh under my palms. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Fuck my self-indulgent self-pity. I’m such a fuckshow—”

“Hey,” she interrupts. “That’s my friend you’re talking about.”

I drop my hands to my chest and look at her again. But I can’t think what to say. There are too many things to say—and nothing to say, since words can’t change anything.

Softly, gently, she says, “I didn’t get it, when you told me last year. It took seeing it in real life to understand.”

I say, “That wasn’t even particularly bad. That was him behaving himself. All the same, I wish you hadn’t seen it. Especially today.” I reach out a hand and touch her face with my fingertips. I say, “They’ve gone now. Mum took him home. So I can sleep in the other room.” I search her eyes, wanting so badly to stay with her, wanting so badly to leave, now, before . . . Disaster. Capitalized. I add, “If you want.”

She just returns my gaze. She looks calm. Tired, but calm.

“How was Melissa?” she asks.

Oh god. I drop my hand, letting my arm drape over my belly, but I don’t look away from her. “She’s excellent. She’s getting married.”

“That’s nice.”

I sigh, remembering the awkwardness of breakfast. “She wanted to meet so she could tell me she’d forgiven me.”

“That’s nice, too.”

“She asked if I was seeing someone.”

“You told her you were seeing Clarissa,” Annie jokes.

I blink and bite my lip. She doesn’t look away.

I say, “I’m a fuckshow, Annie.”

“You were my knight in shining armor today.”

I close my eyes and shake my head through another wave of shame.

“Hey,” she says again.

I open my eyes again, despairing, hoping, so lonely I can hardly stand it.

“I want to come over there,” she says. “I want to lie there with you.”

I open my arms and she comes to me, tucks her long, strong body against me, and I pull her to my chest. Her head fits neatly in the crook of my shoulder. Except—

“Hey,” I say.

“Hm?” She lifts her head and looks at me.

I pull her glasses from her face and put them on the nightstand.

“They were poking me,” I say, grinning, and guide her head back to my shoulder.

She settles against me and drapes an arm across my body. I feel her sigh and soften, and my body relaxes with hers—and then I feel her lips on my chest. She kisses the bare, damp skin, and then inhales . . . holds the breath in her tensed, flexed body . . . then releases a huge, muscle-softening sigh. Her body relaxes fully in my arms. She kisses my chest again and nuzzles against me.

So I sigh, too, coaxing my muscles to relax. I put both my arms around her and we lie quietly, breathing together. And if this is what we do all night, I think, it will do nicely.

But then she kisses my chest again, lightly.

And then again.

Then her palm begins to travel over my skin. I tell myself she’s only making contact, she’s just reconnecting, but my heart begins to thrum anyway. I kiss her hair—only to make contact, only to reconnect.

She turns her lips to my skin again and places another soft, silent kiss over my heart.

And then another one, right next to it, her mouth open this time.

And then another one right next to that one, her lips and tongue warm on my skin.

She kisses me this way, slowly and softly, across the whole breadth of my chest. Each lingering kiss is its own event. Each one could be the last. After each one, I wait, taut, to see if she decides to rest her head against my shoulder again . . . or to put another kiss next to the last one.

Her palm drifts over my stomach and chest, brushes my nipple in a slow, soft circle, and her touch becomes more decided—though still calm and unhurried. More contemplative than erotic. Painstakingly, systematically, she kisses every inch of my chest and shoulders.

I touch her hair, brushing it away from her face. I touch her face, trying to be delicate even as my breathing accelerates and the muscles in my neck and jaw tighten. When she bites at my nipples softly, I make an involuntary noise through my nose.

Her lips follow a line up my chest and then my throat, and I know she’s going to put her mouth on mine. I know that’s coming. I wait, anticipating, even as I savor each touch, as her lips brush lightly over my larynx. She touches her fingertips to my throat as she kisses a slow, deliberate path, one kiss at a time, up to the corner of my jaw . . . and then along my hairline . . . kisses on my forehead and I put my palms on her back; kisses on my cheek and I caress my hands up her scapulae and down to her waist; kisses along my jaw, in no hurry, one kiss at a time, bringing her mouth closer to mine.

She kisses her way to my chin, and it’s too much. With another small noise, I lower my chin the little bit that it takes, and I find her mouth with mine. I kiss her mouth.

And then I open my lips and kiss her again.

Then I pull away a fraction of an inch. I push her hair away from her face and search her eyes.

“I’ll tear you to pieces,” I say. I meant to say it confidently, to put a substantial barrier between us, but it comes out as a whisper.

She shakes her head slowly, her eyes never leaving mine.

She whispers back, “You’ll put me back together.”

The words shoot through my heart like a bullet, and I’m done for. With my hands in her hair and my eyes on hers, I tell her, “It’s the other way round.”

And I kiss her. I kiss her and kiss her, as if kissing her is all I ever intend to do for the rest of my unworthy life. I put my hand on the back of her neck to hold her there, and I put my tongue in her mouth—she answers with hers. With a growl, I pull her over me. I run my hands over her body, feel the shape of her as her clothes slide between my hands and her skin. I follow the shape of her with my hands, I coax and caress and hold her as she kisses me. She aligns our bodies so that the heat between my legs presses and rubs at the heat between hers. Still I’m kissing her, my tongue in her mouth. She has one hand around the back of my neck, the other in my hair. With my hands everywhere on her, I offer my body to her like a scratching post to a kitten. I push and pull at her body, helping her, urging her, until she comes with high, soft, urgent sounds, kissing me the whole time, as her body softens over me.

As she pants and kisses my neck, I reach out to the nightstand and turn off the light.

“Charles, I need—”

“I know what you need.”

It’s what I need, too. Contact. Reconnection. Our breath in the dark. One body.

I turn her to her back and pull off her clothes, push off my towel, and lay my body over hers, all of my skin touching all of her skin, and we both gasp with it, her hands gripping my shoulders. I kiss her everywhere, as she kissed me, every inch of skin I can reach from her forehead to her waist. My mouth and hands never leave her body. In the dark, there’s only the feel of our bodies and the sounds of our breath. I kiss her shoulders and throat and ear as I put my cock against her entrance. I touch her face and kiss her lips as I begin to push into her, and her arms come around me in a desperate grip.

“Is this all right?” I whisper against her lips.

“Yeah,” she says, just a high whisper.

So I hold her close, push into her gradually, a little deeper with every small, slow thrust, kissing her tenderly all the while. I remember this so well, every angle of penetration, every pulse of pressure. I know the way her breathing changes, the way her belly tenses under me.

Her back curls, her legs wrap round my waist, and her arms tighten around my neck, and I feel her want, feel her need. I push deeper and deeper into her in small, slow, focused thrusts.

“Don’t let go,” she whispers.

“I won’t let go,” I tell her, and I push deeper still into her.

Gradually, I move in longer and longer strokes, pressing my body more and more firmly against hers. Little by little, she tightens around me. She doesn’t move with me, she just lets me in, her whole body wrapped around my whole body, my lips kissing her lips and her cheeks and her jaw.

She’s breathing in heavy gusts when I move my hand to her forehead and touch my lips softly to hers and whisper, “Look at me.”

Her eyes flutter open and find mine in the darkness. She watches me while I kiss her softly and fuck her hard. We watch each other, with my tongue in her mouth and my cock finding a way to go even deeper inside her.

As the tension in her body builds and layers, mine builds with it, until my jaw is taut and my hands are fisting in her hair. I put my forehead against hers, eyes still trained on hers.

I watch the pleasure and tension in her face grow, see her slowly nearing the edge.

Her eyes flutter closed, and I beg her, “Annie, please.”

Her eyes open again. I keep my eyes on hers, my breath suspended in my throat, as hers is suspended in her throat. Right at the edge, not wanting it to end, wanting to drown in pleasure and her eyes and this, this, now.

“Charles?” she breathes.

“Yeah.”

“Charles, don’t—”

“I won’t let go, Annie, I’ll never let go.”

In silence, she erupts around me. I drink in the sight of her as she comes almost silently. I go still as her hands grip and slap at my back, her feet press my hips hard, as her body pulses around mine. I brace her head between my palms and put kisses on her wide-open mouth, watching her eyes as she comes and comes, writhing and pushing under me. She’s still coming as her eyes mist with tears, as one falls down her temple into her hair, and still I’m watching her. I watch her as she quietly pours herself out, rolling and melting under me into softness and a half-hidden glow, until her eyelids drift down at last.

As her limbs soften around me, I kiss her cheek and her nose and her chin, kiss the tear clinging at the corner of her eye. I kiss her and hold her, still hard inside her, until her breathing steadies and slows.

“I won’t let go,” I whisper with my lips near her ear. “I won’t let go.”

Little by little, her body relaxes, until every bit of tension drops away, at long, long last, in a deep, shuddering sigh.

I pull out of her then, gently and slowly, turn her to her side, and spoon myself behind her. I hold her close, both arms wrapped around her.

“Sleep, sweetheart,” I say. “Everything’s okay.”