Page 91 of Sounds Like Love
And so I slipped my hand lower, lower.Here, I said, and he caught it in his and twined our fingers together.
That tricky, crooked mouth thatCosmohad once said was best suited for a smirk bloomed into a smile that fit his face so much better.“As you wish, bird.”
And the anxiety in my head, the panic in my belly, it all melted away.
There was just his mouth against me. His hands. His body. The way his lips pressed against my neck. The way his fingers slid under my dress, the calluses on his fingertips rough, making my skin prickle with gooseflesh as he slipped off my underwear and then inched my dress up. He kissed the insides of my thighs, and the soft flesh just below my navel, and then he pressed his mouth against me. I knew he had good diction in his singing, but his tongue made cunning work of the talent. I stifled a moan, biting my hand, as he pulled one of my legs over his shoulder for better purchase.
“Take out your hand,”his voice growled in my head, and I did, instead reaching down to curl my fingers into his messy hair.“I want to hear you. Make me work for it.”
“Sasha.” I stifled a gasp.
He licked and nibbled in a slower, agonizing rotation. His hands spread over my thighs, gripping tightly. I squeezed my eyes closed, all the thoughts in his head in mine, bright and burning andpresent, singing into me in an ancient language of tongues. I felt my whole body tense, desperate for that steady, unwavering climax, my fingers tightening around his hair, back arching, and then released in a heaven-sent gasp.
I felt, for the first time in months, that awful tension in my chest evaporate. My head was full of noise and empty of words, dizzy with his pleasure dancing with mine.
“You sound so sweet when you come,”he told me, letting my legs down. Kissing my neck again. My cheek.
I didn’t have a witty answer for that.I want to hear you, too, I thought, feverish, as my fingers picked at the hem of his shirt, pulling it up.
I traced my fingers over the scar on his abdomen. He shuddered at the sensitivity.
There were so many things I didn’t know about him. So many little nooks and crannies I hadn’t yet discovered.I want to know it all, I thought.Everything about you.
His eyebrows furrowed in uncertainty.“You might not like it.”
“Sasha,” I said to him, looking up into his gaze, “there is nothing about you that I won’t like. And if there is, I’ll just write a song about it.”
He chuckled, a smile crossing his mouth to mirror mine. “You’re the worst.”
“You like me anyway.”
“I do.”
And then he found the condom in his wallet on the coffee table and gently peeled off my dress the rest of the way and dropped it to the ground. He knelt over me, eyes feverish and hair wild, his bulge hard against his boxers. A thousand songs came into my head. A hundred perfect notes for love. He saw me fully now. “What are you thinking?” I whispered, hesitant, because my panic was suddenly louder than his thoughts.
“How beautiful you are,” he replied, slipping himself into me. “Let me show you.” And when he kissed me again, my head exploded with light.So much light. Love for all the parts of me that I didn’t think anyone noticed. The constellations of freckles on my shoulders, the divot of my hip bone, the scar just under my chin from when Mitch accidentally hit me with a Frisbee when I was seven.
And we pulled into each other again, and again, and again.
If we were a song, I would want to be this one.
The feeling of slow dancing when no one was looking, pressed cheek to cheek with someone who knew you better than you knew yourself. I wanted this buoyant, breathless feeling in every lyric. It didn’t feel like falling the way you did when love was quick and exotic. No, it felt like finding a song you hadn’t heard in years played on a jukebox in an old music hall.
The feeling of the world stopping. Of hearts beating together.
The soft lull of a lovely moment, his lips against mine. He smelled so good, like bergamot and fresh laundry, and his skin was so warm, his breath soft against my skin, matching mine. It was so familiar that I had a hard time placing it, until I realized—it was the same feeling I felt when he was in my head. Just there, just beside me. Not a dominating force, not overpowering.
But in harmony.
This was the song, and it sounded like love.
Chapter34You Were Meant for Me (I Was Meant for You)
THE HOUSE LOOKEDtidy and unlived-in, the signs of someone just passing through. Or, you know,twosomeones passing through into the bedroom, stripping off the rest of our clothes, and tumbling into the bed together. At some point we fell asleep, because now as I blinked blearily awake, I found myself tangled in the sheets with Sasha. Morning light came in through the large windows. At first I thought the curtains were drawn, because the room was so dim, but that was just the weather outside. Gray clouds stretched across the horizon, hazy with the early morning. The outer bands of Hurricane Darcy had reached us, rotating out in the Atlantic, stirring up dark waters. There was something soft and serene about cloudy windswept summer days. It was the kind of stillness that never came to LA.
Sasha was asleep, his face angled toward me, burrowed into my hair. He was a quiet sleeper, though every now and then a muscle in his jaw twitched, as if there were things he couldn’t escape even in dreams.His messy hair stuck up at odd angles, the shadow of a beard against his otherwise clean-shaven face. In the soft gray light of morning, he looked like the kind of muse any rose-tinted heart would write a thousand songs about.
I rested my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. Ninety-five beats per minute. Keeping in perfect time with the melody in my head. I closed my eyes and relished the sound. Was this, I began to wonder, what love sounded like? Was this, simple and certain and scary, how it started?
