“One.” She inhaled.
“Two,” exhaling.
He fumbled for the pen. His balance was rickety without his grasp on the bench. She increased the pressure between their hands and said quietly,
“Three.”
A line of pigment straggled across the page.
“Four.”
He tried again, tried to trace the safe, orderly lines of the grid.
“Five.”
His breath was a hiss past his teeth.
“Six.”
He outlined one wobbly square.
“Seven…Eight…”
He traced a second square more slowly, while she counted.
“Nine…Ten…Eleven…Twelve…”
Pen and lines steadying slightly with his focus, the third square was acceptable. Not ruler-perfect, but the quadrants were clear.
“Twenty-six…”
He shifted her elbow aside by an inch to ink his next blocks. The warm weight of her hand remained in his. Nine squares down on the blueprint… and nine across.Inhale,exhale…One hundred and thirty-seven. The space between those squares became a sudoku grid.One hundred and fifty. He could design his own logic puzzle now, but he’d been sketching a constellation earlier today and hadn’t gotten the angle of its rightmost star correct, so he marked the bright points of the northern sky, placing them within the neatness of his graph…
One hundred and eighty-eight…
“Cassiopeia?”
“Yes.”
“The boastful queen.Two hundred and four,” she exhaled. “I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”
“You’re ontwo hundred and three.” He drew theWline between Cassiopeia’s stars.
“Thanks… and now,two hundred and four. Better?”
“Two hundred and five.”
Better.
Was he?
In the dusky shelter of SVLAC’s redwood grove, duff and shadow and a faint sough of sweet, earthy wind muffling the noise from Ring Road while Erin enumerated their inhales and exhales, while she held his hand, he was breathing.
He’d forgottennotto breathe.
He’d tasted her on his desk, had sheathed himself inside her and gasped out his release against her neck, but this…thiswas intimacy.
I love…
