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This was something else.

This was slow.

He reached for the hem of her sweater and waited, and she lifted her arms, and he drew it over her head, and her hair fell back down around her shoulders. There was a second sweater under that one. She laughed at herself, and he smiled, and took that one off too, just as slowly. The room was cold at the edges, and goosebumps came up along her arms, and he put his hands on her and warmed them, palms moving slow over her shoulders, down her arms, until she stopped shivering.

She unbuttoned his flannel. She took her time about it. When she got to the bottom, she pushed it off his shoulders and laid both palms flat on his chest, right over his heart.

“It’s going fast,” she said softly.

“Yes,” he said. He didn’t pretend otherwise.

He laid her back on his bed, on the wool blanket, and followed her down, and for a while he just kissed her. Her mouth. Her jaw. The soft place just below her ear that had made her gasp during the storm. He went back to it on purpose. She gasped again, and her fingers curled into his shoulders, and he smiled against her throat.

“I remembered,” he said.

“You’re a menace,” she breathed.

He kept going. Slow. Her collarbone. The full curve of her breast, warm and heavy under his mouth, her breath catching and her back arching up off his grandmother’s quilt. Lower. The soft round swell of her stomach, and he stopped there, because he wanted to. He pressed his mouth to it, slowly, like it was the part he had been waiting for all day, and he felt her laugh under his lips, low and surprised and pleased.

She was so soft. That was the thing he kept coming back to. Everywhere he touched her she was soft and warm and generous. Full hips. Full thighs. Faint silver stretch marks along her sides that caught the lamplight like the grain in a good piece of wood. He had spent his whole life with his hands on hard things. Lumber and steel and stone. Nothing he had ever touched in his life had felt like this. He could have stayed right there all night, just learning the shape of her.

He took his time with all of her. He paid attention the way he paid attention to every single thing that mattered to him, learning what made her breath hitch and what made her say his name and what made her hands go tight in his hair, and he did those things, and did them again, unhurried, until she was trembling under him and saying his name in a voice he had never in his life heard anyone use for him.

At some point he realized his hands weren’t steady. He didn’t hide it. He let her see exactly what she did to him, and the look on her face when she saw it was one he meant to earn again and again.

He reached for the drawer of the nightstand, and she started to laugh, soft and breathless.

“Since October?” she said.

“Since October,” he said, and she laughed harder, and pulled him down, and kissed the smile right off his mouth.

When he finally moved over her, she reached up and held his face in both her hands.

“Look at me,” she said.

He had said that to her once, during the storm. Now she was saying it to him.

He looked at her.

He sank into her slowly, watching her face the whole time, and her eyes fluttered and held on his, and her breath went out of her all at once. Neither of them looked away. He moved deliberately, and every slow stroke was a choice he was making, and making again, and making again. Her legs wrapped around him. Her hands spread across his back. The old house was quiet around them, the woodstove ticking down the hall, the snow falling soft against the window, and she moved with him like she had been doing it her whole life.

“Shane,” she said against his ear. “You don’t have to be careful with me.”

Something in him that had been holding still for eleven years let go.

He wasn’t careful. He was deep and sure and hungry, and she met every bit of it, her nails in his back and her heels pulling him closer and her voice rising in the quiet old house, and the old bed knocked against the wall in a rhythm that would have made him blush on any other night of his life. Tonight he didn’t care. Tonight there was nothing in the world but the heat of her and the sound of his name and the way she looked up at him, like she wanted every single thing he had.

Something rose up in him. A name. The one that had slipped out of him once in the hardware store, the one Doug had heard, the one that was just his.

He held it. Not yet. Soon.

“Shane,” she whispered. “I’m...”

“I know,” he said against her mouth. “I’ve got you.”

She came apart under him with his name on her lips, and he followed her over, and for one long, bright, endless moment there was nothing anywhere in the world but the two of them and an old house holding them both.

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