Blackout. Rod pocketed. Floor to ceiling.
It’s unacceptable, falling asleep that late and then waking up at what—seven thirty? Eight? Nine? Just because some guy doesn’t know that shades exist. Seems like a pretty simple concept to—
“I’ll get you a sleep mask.”
I open my eyes and I think, Blue. Which—less than one-eighth of his eyes is blue. It makes no sense. “How do you know what I was—?”
“Your frown woke me up,” he says, voice rough with sleep. He shifts in a stretching yawn, and it’s like a seismic event, a huge tectonic fault shifting under the crust of the earth. Because during the night, I ended up facedown on top of Jack.
“How?” I ask.
“You moved around a lot,” he says. “Felt like the easiest way to keep you from kicking my shins.”
“Wait—when did you—?”
“About five minutes after you fell asleep.”
“Wow.” I should move away. But he makes for a good bed, firm and bulky and warm. I’m groggy with sleep that was either not enough or too intense, and don’t want to leave just yet.
For once, I feel myself, my body. Jack’s hand is on my lower back, under the hoodie. My feet are wrapped around his shins. His mouth is several inches away, but also accessible, and I reach for it.
I aim for a simple peck, suspecting a mess of rotten-eggy morning breath, but there’s none of that. He tastes like himself, familiar, and deepens the kiss into something gentle, slow, deliciously lazy. Time doesn’t exist. This bed is the expanse of the universe. We’re still dreaming, tucked safely inside our heads.
There is no urgency in him, no pressure point. Just the unhurried rhythm of his tongue against mine, leisurely patterns traced against my skin. His heartbeat speeds up but remains steady. His breathing grows shallow, but I know it only from the rise and fall of his chest against mine.
It’s a good way to wake up. I want to wake up exactly like this again and again and again. I want to feel the blinding sunrays wash over us, and this new brightness inside me, fragile and scalding hot all at once.
Maybe that’s why there are no curtains. In the light, it’s easy to feel brave. All those things I’m scared of seem conquerable, and honesty is almost effortless.
“Jack?” I pull back, balancing on my palms, one on each side of his head. My hair has come undone and drapes around us like a shrine.
“Elsie.” His palms come up to hold my face.
“I . . .” I’m not scared. I’m just not. “I lied.”
His mouth quirks sleepily. “Which time?”
I glare. “I hate you.”
“Sure.” His thumbs swipe gently over my cheeks. Lovingly. Because that’s what this is about. “What’s this lie you speak of?”
“I said I didn’t know. But I do.”
“Know what?”
I swallow. “Where this is going. Where we’re headed. The two of us.”
Something thickens between us, dense and weighty. I know. He knows. We’ve acknowledged it. It’s almost a sign, the universe’s permission to move forward. Jack’s eyes are warm and probing, and he says, “Come here.”
I don’t remember taking off my bra last night, but I must have, because when he tosses my hoodie to the floor, my too-pale skin is bare in the blinding light. I don’t even want to ask him to look away.
Jack sees me. And it’s okay.
“Come here,” he repeats, and his mouth’s on mine, insistent, brakeless this time. Like he’s kissing me for now, for all the times he couldn’t before, for later, too. Whatever it was that held him back yesterday, two nights ago, the past two weeks, it melts in the morning sun.
You, a voice suggests. All those Elsies that aren’t really you are what stood between him and this.
I’m out of breath when he sits up to take his shirt off, and this—this is actually new. He’s almost as undressed as I am, we’re equals, and when he tries to pull me down to him, I shake my head and begin to inspect him. I sit astride his hips, riding him as though he were a mellow, compliant beast instead of the most dangerous thing in my life.
“I used to . . . Back before my interview, I used to try to picture them.” I trace the inside of his elbow. “Your tattoos.”
He will stay where he is, but he can’t help touching me. His hand comes up to my rib cage, thumb stroking the outside of my breast. “How did you know I had tattoos?”
I swallow. “I could see the end of one.”
“Ah.” His thumb moves to my nipple, feathery light. I arch into the touch. “What did you think they were?”
“Barbed wire. A Bon Jovi quote. Elon Musk’s face.”
“Jesus.”
I laugh, but I’m not breathing easily. “Sorry.”
His tattoos are beautiful. The Dirac equation. The electron cloud. Beta decay. The Fibonacci spiral. Kinematic models, astral planes, Drake’s formula, the molecular structure of MBBA. Black strokes of faded ink interlocked together in a beautiful painting. The entire foundation of modern physics is on his broad shoulder, wrapped around his large biceps. I trace every line of it, every curve and every corner, and he lets me explore. Vibrating with restraint, but he does. I’ve never been so selfish before, never taken up so much time for something that is only mine, and I think he knows. I think that’s why he allows it.
“Remember how it was?” I ask. “Learning them for the first time? The Schr?dinger equation. The standard model.”
He nods. His throat bobs. He’s hard under my core, patiently impatient. “Knowing that the universe can be made sense of.”
“Made of patterns. Rules that can be learned, discovered, predicted.”
“Find them out, and you’ll know how to make the world into what you want,” he says.
“Find them out, and you’ll know how to make yourself into what the world wants,” I say in return.
We regard each other for a moment. My hands are on him, and his hands are on me, and I’m thinking of two-, five-, ten-year-old Jack, alone in the world, calling someone Mom, being told not to. The only fair-haired Smith. I’m thinking of a young boy determined to shape his surroundings. He chose his own world in the end, didn’t he? Greg. Millicent. His friends. He carved a place for himself.
And I’m certain he’s thinking of me. All the Elsies I’ve created to fit all the worlds I’ve inhabited, all the people in them. He’s stripping them off me one by one, like he has since the day we met.
We’re not so different, you and I, I think, and then hear myself exhaling hard. I’ve been holding my breath without realizing it. “I know where we’re going,” I say again, feeling the certainty of it deep within my bones, like Dirac, like relativity, the strong interaction between quarks and gluons, and he takes it like what it is: permission to take charge, to roll us over, pin me underneath him.
He takes my panties off. Slides them under his pillow—hoarding, like a dragon. “You could be my entire world,” he whispers in my ear before moving to my collarbone. “If you let me.”
I stroke his hair. “I think I will.”
“Then I’m sorry.”
“What are you—ah, what are you sorry for?”
He’s making room for himself between my legs, spreading them open, touching me there purposefully, exploringly, urgently, like he’s looking for answers. Do I want this? Am I ready? Am I wet enough? Yes. Yes. I don’t know.
“Because I’m never going to let you go.”
I moan. His erection brushes against my stomach, and I reach down for him. I want to feel him, too. I want to touch him. But the second my hand closes around him through his pants, he seems to stutter. His expression blanks and then he inhales sharply. He is hard. He’s really hard.
“Stop,” he orders, choked.
I obey. But say, “Honesty? I’d like to keep going.”
He’s not sure whether to believe me. But he lets me push us on our sides, and when I slide my fingers past his waistband, he’s still, motionless but for the movement in his throat.
“You don’t like this?” I ask.
“I do,” he rasps.
“You seem . . .”
“It’s new for me, too.”
I laugh softly. “Hand jobs?”
“Being with someone that I . . .” He doesn’t finish. My fingers wrap around him, and his eyes drop shut. He seems to fall backward. Into himself. “Fuck.”
I pump up and down, but it’s weird, clumsy, with his pants on. He’s too distracted by my touch, and I have to tug at the waistband several times before he understands that I want him to pull them down.
“Can you tell me? How do you like this?” I ask, adjusting my grip. I need two hands. Yes, it’ll be better with two hands. Still an awkward position, but also intimate, how close we are. Nice. I smell him deep in my nostrils and he’s good. So good.
“I like it too much, Elsie.”
“No, I—” I shake my head against his chest. “Tell me how you do this. When you’re alone.”
“This is—fuck, it’s good. Just . . . slow for now. Steady. And if you—the head—yes. Yes, there.”
“What else?”
I hear him swallow. “Your voice.”
“I . . . What?”
“Just speak.”
“I’m not . . .” Laughter bubbles out of me. “I don’t think I can do dirty talk.”