“You want to remember, Aly?” When I didn’t answer, Ransom returned his fingers to my body, rubbing against my clit exactly like he knew I wanted. The thick, warm pad of his thumb moved in circles, shaking away every thought, every sensation but the heat from his body and the weight of him on top of me. “Do you?” That hand quickened, the friction a sweet ache I didn’t want to ever stop.
“No,” I told him, wiggling one hand free, scratching my nails down his back, arching toward him, encouraging him to keep that thumb moving with the brush of my breasts against him. Even as I urged him on, I know I spoke the truth.
“No?” Ransom’s question disappeared behind the graze of his teeth down my neck. “You don’t want to remember?”
I didn’t. Not a single memory. A touch that was new, a taste that was different—that’s what I wanted. Memory came with emotion. It came with commitment, something that would land me back where I’d begun four years ago. I wanted to move beyond that. I wanted more.
“I…I want you to touch me like you don’t know me.” That hand slowed, the friction easing and I couldn’t look at him. “I want you to touch me like a stranger.”
He didn’t stop moving against me. Ransom wasn’t purposefully cruel. He thought he knew me, assumed he knew when I was pretending. But I wasn’t this time. I wanted him to give me what I asked for, not what he thought I wanted, not what I had wanted in the past. But he couldn’t do it. No, he wasn’t a stranger. He knew how close I’d come to climax. So he didn’t stop, only slowed before he moved his hips, released my wrist to pull my face up. And because I recognized how badly he wanted this, and knew that I would end up wanting it, too, I let go of wanting anything else and gave myself up to his touch, his fire, his desire.
“A stranger doesn’t touch you, Aly. Not like this.” And with that one touch, Ransom fractured the reserve I had tried so desperately to maintain. A push of my flesh, finger under my thong, right against my clit, bare, raw and that tactile, desperate urgency eased.
“A stranger wouldn’t know what you whimper when you want it, when you’re so close to falling apart that your breath becomes a muffle of sound.” He tugged at my pants, freed me from anything but the floor under me and his touch. His palm over my naked ass, then he pulled me against his body until he pushed his fingers inside me, working me hard, like no one but Ransom ever had. Ever could.
“No stranger would know that your breath hitches, that you hold everything still, the air in your lungs, even the beat of your pulse when I touch you.” He showed me then, with the dip of his fingers deep inside. And all did go still then—the breath between us, the axis of the world, my beating heart…it all seemed to stop until he moved his fingers over me, sliding until he found his way to a rhythm that made time coil and speed as quickly as it had slowed. Nothing held me back then. No excuses of why he shouldn’t touch me, no lies I told myself about not loving him anymore.
“I’m not a stranger, nani. Your body knows that.” Working faster, deeper, he smiled, pleased and happy when my mouth opened, when the space between us filled with the soft noises I made. His face wasn’t expressionless anymore. It told me all I thought I’d forgotten. The act of touching me, making me come, the noises I made, it was all familiar to Ransom. It was comfortable.
“Strangers don’t know love this deep. If they did, they wouldn’t be strangers at all.” That he whispered against my lips, kissing me like he couldn’t keep from it for another second.
“Ransom…”
“I’ll never be a stranger, Aly, because this body, your heart is mine. It always will be.”
He at least let me settle. The air had grown stifling, stuffy. I might not have noticed the sweat now covering my body unless Ransom hadn’t moved, shirtless now from the heat, from how he’d touched me, how he’d kept me from touching him in return.
The thermostat was next to the light switch near the doorway and with the low light falling around us, Ransom’s shadow grew as he stood in front of that switch. His body was wider now than the first time we’d danced, but he’d been a boy back then. Still, the lines of those shoulders were familiar. The narrow slope of his waist. The ridges along his torso; they all reminded me just then of the boy he’d been, beating himself up for a loss that he'd caused. Desperate to free himself from the need of touch, yet eager to keep touching. That had not changed much either. Ransom was a man who liked the feel of contact. When he was mine, he’d always held on to me even in little ways—his fingers against my shoulder as we watched T.V., his palm on my thigh while he drove us around Miami.