Josh’s mouth brushes against her neck. She feels his left hand beneath the hem of her dress, drifting up between her thighs. Gentle. Deliberate. Practiced.
Ari turns to face him—to make a joke or play it off. But there’s no clever line at the ready. She has nothing to say. Because some random Hinge match will never look at her in this specific way that breaks her heart and melts it back together in the space of one breath.
He touches her face and she can see his eyes moving across everything—like he’s taking it all in again from this closer angle. There’s a little burst of tenderness, warming her chest, smoothing over sharp, painful edges. There aren’t any more layers to strip away. Just the slightest push and she’ll bruise.
The rattle of the furnace punctuates the quiet.
The kiss doesn’t come the way she’s expecting—just the soft, lingering press of his lips against her cheek.
She lets a tiny pleasurable prickle unfurl at the back of her neck. It feels like an admission. More, please.
Their lips touch once and part. And no, that’s clearly not enough because they meet again. And again. A little deeper, a little bolder every time, until they don’t separate at all and his hands tangle in her hair and they breathe each other in and—
Aside from the Ramble Incident, Ari hasn’t Kissed in a while. She’s lowercase kissed, the way you do when your date isn’t terrible and you feel like it would be rude not to. Usually, making out is mostly a box to be checked en route to some other activity.
But this feels urgent—like they wasted the last hour by not kissing on the train, on the walk, waiting for the elevator. His mouth meets the hollow of her throat and Ari tips her head back, hungry and dizzy with his tongue in her mouth and his fingers sliding over the flowery fabric of her dress, bunching it up in his fists.
Her heavy exhales sound inordinately loud in the quiet room.
“Can I take your dress off?” he mutters into her neck.
Ari nods, letting out some feral noise of assent, needing the last scrap of a barrier to fall away. Right now.
Out of the corner of her eye she can still see them reflected in the windowpane. It’s a nice picture. Now it doesn’t look like two depressives bonding over shared loneliness and coping mechanisms. They could be any normal Sunday couple. They could take trips to Bed, Bath, and Beyond and walk around the city holding hands and share boozy brunches and spend all afternoon in bed, checking items off their fuck-it lists.
You never know.
This goes wrong one hundred percent of the time—until the one time it doesn’t.
* * *
THE WALK TO the bedroom only takes about ten seconds, but it gives Josh a moment to turn over the Rubik’s Cube of the whole encounter and look at it from a new angle. To push aside the vague, formless dread that she might get up, run out of the room, and send a text from the elevator: Thanks for the sex.
It means something—crossing the mystical threshold into his space. Every step and gesture and piece of removed clothing and point of contact feels like moving deeper into the unknown.
Josh lowers her down onto his bed—it’s not the most fluid transition, but at the moment, it’s not like his body is capable of nuance.
Ari rolls over onto her stomach and he immediately misses seeing her face, getting that crucial bit of visual feedback. But it’s better to follow her lead and the caution tempers his desire to go fucking nuts. He drags his fingers down her back, over the delicate curve of her spine, observing every tiny manifestation of her nervous energy, examining tattoos he’d never realized she had.
He tries to quiet his brain, which is racing two or three minutes ahead, visualizing all the possibilities laid out in front of them: flashes of the most tantalizing mental porn he’s ever concocted.
Josh finds himself unable to shut up—he’s never been so talkative in the bedroom.
“Why did we wait so long to do this?” he hears himself say, like the thought was so loud in his head that it had to come out. He continues kissing down her shoulder, taking his time, feeling the way her body responds to him. This is an exploration. Something to build on.
There’s this idea of her that exists in his mind: where she’s some kind of enigma, where the passcodes are always off by one number, where she almost opens up, but not quite.
He gathers up Ari’s hair, winding it around his hand. He slides his hand between her legs, mimicking the position of her fingers over his in the elevator. She makes a little incomprehensible sound. Josh is good at memorizing these things. Leaning down to her ear, he tugs lightly on her hair.
“This okay?” he murmurs.
“J-just keep…” She nods and closes her eyes. “Shit.” He’d wanted to draw more words out of her but this is almost more satisfying. “Josh, please.”
He lifts his head up. “?‘Please’ what?” He stills his fingers. “Tell me what you want.”
She fumbles for his hand. “Don’t stop.”
“Give me more feedback or we’re just going to cuddle.”
“Really?” Ari cranes her neck to the right to look at him. “You think you’re cute?”
“No. That’s why I got good at this part.”
She squirms. “Keep going, exactly like you just were.” After a few stubborn moments of silence, she adds, “But don’t let me come on your hand.”
He pauses. “Okay.”
“Make me come while you’re inside me? It doesn’t usually happen that way for me but…I feel like it could.”
A burst of pride hits his chest like a lightning bolt.
“You still need to use your fingers, though. You know that, right?”
Josh stops again. “Yes, Ari. I have done this before.” He imagines that she’s biting back a smile. Then he nudges her over onto her back. “Is this okay? I really want to look at you.”
She hesitates for a moment and then nods.
It’s like he has a mission now. For years, Josh’s accomplishments relied on his belief that his hands could do anything. Even though the last year had put an enormous dent in that conviction, at this moment, he’s never been more confident in his sense of touch.
Actually, he hasn’t felt this good in months. Maybe he just needed to be given a task—specifically, the best task in the entire fucking world—which is making Ari whimper and arch her back off his mattress.
Unvetted words start tumbling out of his mouth again. “I feel like I’ve been waiting eight fucking years for this. I want this, Ari.” With his other hand, he traces a finger behind her left ear and down her neck. She shivers. It’s the tiniest involuntary response, but the serotonin shot from that one little movement could power his workouts for the next few weeks. Fuck. “I want this.”
The condoms…where? His brain isn’t working. His hand gropes across the bedside table, where he’d optimistically placed them a few days after moving in; they hadn’t been touched since.
Ari grabs the foil packet before he can even fumble with it. Because she’s fucking perfect.
The judgmental voice somewhere in his subconscious mocks Josh for these erection-driven thoughts but he can barely make it out over the sound of Ari’s heavy breaths. He’s going to turn them into moans in about ten seconds.
His first instinct is to fuck her into his mattress immediately, but she might not want to be caged in.
His brain rotates the Rubik’s Cube again. He slides over to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Come here.” He pats his thigh. “Like this.”
He’s dangerously hard—one slide of skin against skin with the right angle and friction could be his undoing. Ari climbing on top of him seems to render all his usual calming tactics completely ineffective.