Page 116 of Windlass

Stevie slowly raised her eyes. They turned a clear, luminous blue after sex, calming and steady. Now they tightened with fear. “No?”

Figuring it outwaswhat they’d been doing, except what was there left to figure out? Her own shit, yes. But how she felt about Stevie? That wasn’t complicated. Not really. She searched Stevie’s lovely, glowing face.

It was cruel to leave Stevie hanging on her answer, but speaking the truth had never come easily in these moments. Not since she’d told that terrible truth years ago.

“You can’t let the selfish actions of one man dictate the rest of your life.”

Screw her uncle. Screw her parents for denying her the use of her voice, for punishing her when she’d been defenseless and in need of their love. Screw them all for being in her head at a moment like this, a moment when the woman she loved needed her to say the right words.

Angie stroked damp hair from Stevie’s forehead, tracing her eyebrows with her fingertips, then her lips. She could not imagine a future without Stevie in it. When she tried, she shied away as she might from a precipice.

But because she needed Stevie, because without her she saw a world stripped of color, she felt the long fingernails of a spiteful universe already sinking in. She’d been wrong about many things, but never that: Life identified what you wanted most and stripped it from you, and she’d been prey for as long as she could remember. Prey animals hid, ran, fought.

She was so tired of running. What would it be like to stop?

“We should get dressed,” she said, brushing Stevie’s lips again with her thumb.

Stevie tried to hide her terror without success. That stricken look gave Angie physical pain. She needed to speak. She owed it to Stevie. Stevie deserved better than silence. Surely Angie could give her that.

Angie stood and held out her hand. When they left her lips at last, the words fell lightly into the room. “Come on. I only date women who look good in suits.”

It took Stevie a comically long time for Angie’s words to sink in. She could almost see Stevie repeating them in her mind, tumbling like river stones. She was doing the same thing herself.Date. Such a simple, silly word—a verb, a noun, a day, a fruit—that bound two people by a precarious rope of trust. Terrifying. She probed the abyss, waiting for the void to grumble and demand she feed it.

Nothing. Nothing stirred behind her breastbone except the frantic beating of her heart.

“Did you say ‘date’?” Stevie surged to her feet, eyes no longer luminous but burning.

Angie too was burning. She closed the distance between them and stood before Stevie, nearly tripping over a discarded towel, until she could slide her fingers into Stevie’s hair and, not pausing to respond verbally, press their lips together.

Kissing for Angie was personal in a way sex was not, or hadn’t been until Stevie. Stevie met her halfway, and the sound they both made when Angie’s mouth first found Stevie’s was anguished. Angie swept it away with parted lips. They both tasted like sex; she whimpered, this time not anguished so much as starving.

This had been the last barrier she’d put between them, rickety and clumsy though it was. Without it, with nothing left between the aching chasm in her heart and Stevie, precious Stevie, something else bloomed. It didn’t fill the hole—maybe Emilia was right, and other people couldn’t ever fill that hungry void—but it threw a net across the gap that she could maybe hold on to when next she fell.

Her legs wrapped around Stevie again as Stevie sat. She wanted to slow the kiss, to savor it, but she couldn’t stop her body’s hunger.

There will be time for slowness later, her body told her.This is a promise, not goodbye.

Stevie would wonder later if she’d ever really kissed anyone. She had. She knew this intellectually, but kissing Angie wiped away every kiss that had come before. It wasn’t just that her lips were soft and yielding; kissing Angie felt like drowning. Stevie never wanted air again.

Were they sitting? Standing? She didn’t know and didn’t care. Angie’s hair curled around her fingers as she cradled her face, pulling her closer. Angie crawled onto her lap—they must have fallen back against the bed—and whimpered as she clung to Stevie’s shoulders.I’ve got youStevie told her with each sweep of her tongue.Please stay.

Downstairs, someone yelled up for them while someone else shushed the speaker. Stevie heard this dimly. Their friends could move on to the next activity without them. Stevie’s world had shrunk to this: Angie’s lips, Angie’s weight on her lap. Angie.

When they broke apart at last for air, Angie’s crooked smile cracked what was left of Stevie’s self-preservation. Sweet, simple happiness shone from Angie’s face. Stevie had never seen her look like that. She hadn’t fully known how much sadness usually shaped Angie’s expressions.

But her lips were swollen and red and irresistible. Stevie didn’t resist. She tumbled Angie onto her back. Propped on her elbows, arms shielding their faces from the world, she kissed Angie the way she’d been wanting to kiss her since she first saw her.

Kissing Angie wasn’t something that could be imagined. Imagination couldn’t reach down her throat and pull her heart back out for Angie to eat, lick by lick, bite by bite, until Stevie was utterly and totally hers as she’d always been.

She could have happily stayed in bed all night were it not for the sound of footsteps on the stairs reminding her they weren’t alone.

“I want to keep kissing you,” Angie said when Stevie pulled away.

“I didn’t say you had to stop, just that we have to go downstairs.” Stevie smoothed Angie’s rumpled hair.

Angie searched her face, then nodded as an impish smile tugged at her lips. “I taste good on you.”

Stevie was only human. A few more minutes wouldn’t hurt.

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