Page 13 of My Broken Biker

Window down two inches, the warm night air moving through, the radio off. The fields flat and dark on either side, breathing out the heat they've collected all day.

I don't think about anything specific, or I think about everything at once without any of it forming into language, just the road and the particular feeling of driving somewhere at night you decided you wanted to go.

His street is quiet. Porch light on, the rest of the house dark behind the screen door.

He opens the door before I'm halfway up the front path, which means he was listening for the car.

He stands in the doorway and looks at me.

"I've been picking up my phone for two hours," he says.

Not softened or framed. Just the true thing in the way he says things. Two hours. He sat in that house and picked up the phone and put it down for two hours.

"Me too," I say.

He pushes the screen door open. I come inside. He closes it behind me and when he turns around we're close in the narrow hallway and what's on his face is everything that's been building since we first saw each other, since the sidewalk and the coffee shop and this afternoon on the path through the oaks, and there's nothing between us now that's functioning as a buffer.

His hand comes up to the side of my face and he kisses me, and it isn't tentative, it's his whole mouth and his whole body coming toward mine, his other hand finding my waist, and I grip the front of his shirt and kiss him back with everything I've been sitting on all day.

His hand slides from my waist to my hip and grips hard, his fingers pressing into the full curve of it, and I make a sound against his mouth and he pulls me in closer rather than easing.

When we finally break apart we're both breathing differently.

"Bedroom," he says.

"Yes," I say.

His bedroom is at the end of the short hallway. He switches the lamp on low and comes to stand in front of me near the foot of the bed and looks at me the way he looks at everything, which is directly and without rushing it.

He reaches for the hem of my sweater and pulls it over my head and drops it.

He steps back. Takes his time.

I'm full through the chest and wide through the hips and soft through the stomach and thighs, the real weight and shape of my body in the low light, and he looks at all of it and what's on his face is want.

Not performed. Not managed.

He takes his shirt off and I look at him. The breadth of his chest, the density of his arms, the long silvered scar below his left ribs.

He reaches behind me and undoes my bra and pulls it off and his hands go to my breasts immediately, both of them, shaping them in his palms and squeezing, and I make a sound before I've decided to.

He does it again, harder, watching my face. His thumbs drag slowly across my nipples and my eyes close.

He walks me back to the edge of the bed. I sit.

He's standing in front of me and I reach for his jeans and undo them and he steps out of them, and I look at him and reach out and wrap my hand around him and feel exactly how much he wants this.

The sound he makes is short and low. He lets me do it for a full minute and then he puts a flat hand on my chest and pushes me back onto the bed. Not rough, but not gentle either.

I go.

He hooks both thumbs into my underwear and pulls it down my legs in one motion and off.

He kneels between my thighs and looks at me, the full spread of me on his bed, my chest and stomach and the wide flare of my hips and my thighs, and his jaw is tight.

"Open your legs wider," he says.

I do.