[John446]

The wall held her. He held her. The city went on blinking out past the railing, entirely unnoticed, and neither of them knew how long they stood there — only that at some point the kiss slowed, and softened, and finally broke.
Their foreheads came to rest against each other. Both of them were breathing harder than the small effort of it warranted. The night air, cool a minute ago, now felt warm enough to swim in.
Trisha's eyes opened slowly. There was guilt in them. And underneath the guilt, something else — something she had stopped being able to hide.
"Danish…" Her voice was barely audible.
He didn't answer at once. His thumb moved against her side, a slow, grounding stroke, as if he needed to remind himself where his hands were and that they were allowed to be there.
"I know," he said quietly. "I know."
Neither of them stepped away. The wall was still at her back and he was still close enough that she could feel him breathe, and the kiss had changed everything, and both of them could feel it settling between them like a secret neither was ready to say out loud.
He took her hand.
Not roughly, not with any hurry — he simply found her fingers where they rested against his chest, folded them into his own, and held them there a moment as if giving her one last chance to take them back. Trisha looked at their joined hands. Then she stepped away from the wall, and she came with him.
They went in through the open door and down the short passage with the lights off, past the switchboard he didn't touch, past the framed photograph of a wedding he could no longer look at without a strange ache behind the ribs. Her feet were bare on the cold mosaic. His were too. The nighty moved against her legs as she walked, and once she stumbled a little on the edge of the rug and his grip tightened and neither of them said anything about it, because the silence had turned into a thing they were both holding carefully, like water in cupped hands.
His room was dark except for the streetlight coming in pale through the window and laying a long faint rectangle across the bed. The bed was unmade. There were papers on the side table, a shirt over the back of the chair, all the small untidy evidence of a man who had stopped bothering with himself. He turned to close the door behind them.
The latch clicked. It was a small sound, an ordinary one, and it changed the whole room.
Trisha stood where he had left her, in the middle of the floor, her arms loose at her sides, and in the half-light she looked younger than she was and entirely out of her depth. Danish crossed back to her. He didn't say come and she didn't ask where. He just took her hand again and led her to the bed and sat her down on the edge of it.
She looked up at him. The strap of the nighty had slipped a little on one shoulder. She didn't fix it.
He bent and kissed her where she sat, one hand on the back of her neck, and she leaned up into it, and then he eased her back, following her down, one knee onto the mattress and then the other, his weight coming over her slowly so she could feel it arrive. Her back met the sheets. Her hair spread out on the pillow. And then he was over her, braced on his forearms, the both of them fitted into the narrow dark between his body and the ceiling, and he kissed her again.
It was slower than against the wall. Deeper. All the hurry had gone somewhere and left something more deliberate in its place. He kissed her like he had all night to do it, like the argument and the city and the photograph in the passage had never existed, and Trisha's hands came up and held his face and pulled him down the last inch until there was no space left at all.
Her legs shifted and he settled into the space they made. The nighty had ridden up her thigh and he could feel the warmth of her skin under his palm when his hand slid down, and when he reached her hip and held it she made a soft, helpless sound into his mouth that went through him like current.
He left her mouth. He kissed the corner of it, the line of her jaw, the soft hollow under her ear where her hair was, and she turned her head into the pillow and her breath came uneven and quick.
"Danish," she said, and it wasn't a question this time.
"I'm here," he said against her throat.
He came back up and kissed her mouth again, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and drew him down hard, and the kiss went on and on, long and unhurried and thorough, the two of them learning the shape of it together in the dark — the rhythm, the weight, the small negotiations of breath. Her fingers moved into his hair and stayed. His thumb traced the edge of her jaw and then the curve of her shoulder and then the thin strap, and she shivered under him once, finely, from head to foot.
Outside, a scooter went past and its headlight swept the ceiling, arced across the wall, and was gone. The room settled back into dimness. Neither of them had noticed.
When he finally lifted his head, her eyes were open and fixed on his, dark and steady and full of all the things she hadn't said yet. He could feel her heart going under his hand.
"Tell me to stop," he said, quietly, "and I'll stop."
Trisha didn't answer straight away. She reached up, smoothed his hair back off his forehead with a tenderness that undid him more than any kiss had, and shook her head against the pillow.
"Don't stop," she said.
He lowered himself by inches.
Down past her collarbone, down into the hollow of her throat, he kissed a slow descending line — and Trisha's chin came up, her head tipping back into the pillow to give him the whole length of her neck, an offering she made without thinking about it. Her hands slid off his shoulders and fell to the sheets, and her fingers gathered the cloth there into fists.
He found the strap.
It was thin, barely more than a ribbon, and it had already slipped. He caught it with two fingers and drew it down — slowly, deliberately, letting it drag across the slope of her shoulder so she'd feel exactly what he was doing — and when it came free her breath went out of her in a rush.
The nighty loosened. The neckline slipped and settled low, and the pale fabric gaped open over her collarbone, and Danish bent and pressed his mouth to the bare shoulder he had uncovered.
Trisha made a small, broken sound and turned her face away into the pillow.
He kissed the same place again, and again, open-mouthed, unhurried, working his way along the ridge of her shoulder to the soft join where it met her neck, and there he stopped and used his teeth, lightly, and she gasped and her hand came up and closed hard around the back of his head.
"Danish—" His name came out cracked down the middle.
He didn't answer. He kissed the length of her neck instead, the whole long side of it, from the edge of her jaw down to where her pulse hammered under the skin, and he lingered there, mouthing at it, feeling it beat against his lips like something he'd caught. She tasted faintly of soap and of the night air, and her skin was warm and alive under his mouth, and she arched up off the mattress under him in a slow curve, pressing into him, and the strap slipped the rest of the way down her arm.
His hand came up to the newly bare skin of her shoulder and cupped it, then slid inward, thumb tracing along the edge of the fallen neckline, following it down into the shallow hollow between her breasts. Trisha's breathing had gone entirely to pieces. Her chest rose and fell under his hand in quick shallow lifts and every time it did his thumb moved with it.
He lifted his head and looked at her — hair across her face, eyes dark and half-lidded, one shoulder bare and the other still covered, the whole nighty knocked askew — and something in his chest turned over, hard and painful, at the sight of her.
"You wore it," he said. His voice was rough.
Trisha blinked up at him, and the corner of her mouth pulled, and she looked away, caught out. "You noticed."
"I noticed the moment you came out."
She made a small embarrassed noise and covered her face with her forearm. He pulled it gently away and kissed her again, deep, until she stopped hiding and kissed him back, and then he went down her throat once more to the bared shoulder, and further, and her back bowed and her heel slid up the outside of his calf and hooked there.
The other strap was still in place, and he caught that one too, and drew it down.
The nighty slid. He kissed the second shoulder, and the dip below it, and then the point where the loosened fabric pooled, and Trisha's fingers were in his hair again, and her breathing was a ragged unsteady thing near his ear, and the room had gone so warm that the window's pale rectangle on the sheets seemed like something from another night entirely.
He raised his head just enough to look at her.
"Still don't want me to stop?"
She shook her head without a word, and her hands slid down from his hair to his back, and pulled.
He slid lower.
Down the sternum, down over the thin fabric, and it was then he understood — properly understood, the way you understand a thing only when your mouth is on it — that there was nothing between the nighty and her. No bra. Just cloth, and then her.
His breath came out warm against her, and Trisha's stomach fluttered under his lips.
He lifted his head to look, and his hands went to the neckline and took it in both fists and drew it down. The cloth slid over her without resistance, gathering, baring her by degrees — and then all at once, and he pulled it past her ribs and past her waist and down over her hips, and Trisha lifted herself off the bed to let him, and the nighty came away entirely and he dropped it somewhere off the edge of the mattress and forgot about it.
She was bare under him. In the pale streetlight she was almost luminous, so fair that she seemed to be giving light back rather than taking it, and she brought her arms up over herself in a quick reflex and he took her wrists and moved them aside because he wanted to look and he was not finished looking.
God. He could not quite get his mind around it. This was Trisha. This was his mother-in-law — the woman who had handed him a plate the first time he'd come to this house, who called him beta, who was nearly twenty years older than him and had raised the woman he had married — and she was under him in the dark with her arms pinned and her hair in her eyes, and she was beautiful, and her breasts were perfect. Small and full and heavy with their own weight, going a little soft at the undersides the way only real ones ever do, going a little to the sides when she lay back, and the nipples a soft light brown that had tightened in the cool of the room.
Twenty years. He could not believe it. He bent his head and took one into his mouth and stopped believing anything else.
Trisha's whole body jerked and then went slack. He sucked slowly — deliberately slowly, drawing it in, letting it go, coming back — and her back arched up off the sheets in a long bow and her hand slapped down flat on the mattress beside her, fingers spread, gripping nothing.
A moan came out of her, low and open, and she caught it half a second too late.
Her head turned toward the door. Her free hand came up over her own mouth. "Rajesh," she whispered, muffled behind her fingers, as if saying his name would summon him. "Danish — he's just there—"
He lifted his mouth an inch. "Then be quiet," he said, and put his mouth back on her.
She laughed — or tried to, and it came out as another broken moan she had to swallow — and then she pulled the edge of the sheet up and pressed it over her own mouth and bit down on it, and the sounds she made after that were small and smothered and desperate, escaping her nose, her throat working.
Danish worked his way across to the other one and gave it the same slow attention, his hand cupping and lifting the first, his thumb stroking over it where his mouth had left it wet and cool in the air. The sheet was doing less and less to hold her back. Her hips shifted against his thigh, restless, small circular movements she didn't seem aware of, and her heel found his calf again and dragged up it.
He came off her and looked. Both of them were glistening, both nipples standing tight, and Trisha lay there with the sheet in her teeth and her eyes on him over the top of it, and there was nothing left in her face of the composed woman from the balcony.
He kissed the undersides, where they went soft and full, one and then the other, and then back up, and she made a sound into the sheet that was almost a word.
He lifted his head and pressed his mouth to her ear. "You have to breathe," he whispered.
She pulled the sheet away, gasping. "I can't—" She was half laughing, half wrecked. "You're going to make me—"
The door creaked. Both of them froze.
Out in the passage, a light went on under it, thin and yellow, and a floorboard took a man's weight and complained.
Trisha's eyes went wide. Her hand found Danish's shoulder and dug in, and neither of them moved, and the sheet was still tangled in her fist, and Danish could feel his own heart going hard against her ribs.
They lay still as stone.
The floorboard complained again, and then again, further off — and then a door somewhere at the other end of the passage opened and shut, and the yellow line under the door dimmed but did not go out. No footsteps came near.
Trisha's grip on his shoulder loosened by fractions. Her breath came out in a long, shaky spill.
"It's the kitchen," she whispered. "He's got up for water."
Danish listened. The faint clink of a glass against the counter, the tap running thin. Rajesh, half asleep, in his vest, drinking water with his back to the passage, ten feet from the door and with no idea at all what was on the other side of it.
"Then we've got a minute," Danish murmured.
"A minute," she repeated, and then his mouth was back on her and the word dissolved.
He went at her properly now, without the carefulness, and the difference was immediate and complete. He sucked hard, pulled at her, moved between the two of them with a greed he had not known he had in him, and Trisha twisted under him and got the sheet back into her teeth and bit down on it so hard that Danish could hear her breathing tear.
The tap shut off. The door at the far end of the passage opened and closed a second time. The yellow line under their door went out, and the passage floor creaked away from them, and then there was nothing but the dark and the sound of his own mouth on her.
She came down slowly from the fear, and what was left when it drained away was worse — she was clinging to him now, one leg hooked hard around his hip, her body moving against his with a steady rhythm she was no longer trying to control. Her hand skidded down his back, caught the hem of his t-shirt and pulled at it, and when he didn't stop she pulled harder, and finally got her fist in the cloth and gave it a wrench.
He understood.
Danish pushed himself up and sat back on his heels, and she let go of him and lay there breathing in the dark, watching. He took the shirt at the back of the neck and hauled it off over his head in one movement and dropped it. Her eyes moved over him, down his chest, unhurried, and she reached up and set her palm flat against his sternum and held it there, and her hand was warm and small and shaking slightly, and he could feel his own pulse beating up into it.
Then he came down on her.
Her arms closed around him at once and the skin of them met, chest to chest, belly to belly, warm and damp and so new that both of them made a sound at the same moment. He kissed her. Deep, hungry, without any of the earlier patience, and she kissed him back with everything she had, her hands moving across his shoulders, his back, his sides, mapping him like she was committing it to memory.
He could feel her breasts pressed soft and flattened against his chest. He could feel her heart going under his. He kissed her until her fingers went slack against his shoulder blade and her mouth turned slow and dreamy under his, and then he kissed her a while longer anyway.
Out on the road a car went by, and the light came through the window and slid over the two of them tangled together on the sheets, and neither of them opened their eyes.
He slid down.
He went slowly, and he made her feel every inch of the going. From her mouth to her jaw, jaw to throat, and then down the long hollow of her chest with his tongue and his lips, unhurried, and between her breasts, dragging his mouth down the channel of it, and she brought her hands up and pressed them to either side of her own breasts and squeezed them together around his face, and he groaned against her skin and went on down.
Over the soft plane of her stomach. Down. Her navel was a small pale knot of shadow in the streetlight, and he put his mouth on it and licked it, and Trisha's whole abdomen flinched and then rippled, and she made a strangled sound into the sheet.
He stayed there. He worked at it with the flat of his tongue, with the tip, dipping and circling, and every pass made her stomach jump and her hands scrabble at the sheets, and after a while her hips were lifting off the mattress in small involuntary jerks. It was a ridiculous place to be so thorough, and that was precisely why it undid her — nobody had ever been thorough with her there before.
When he finally moved on she was breathing in shallow, ragged pulls, and she said something that might have been his name.
Down over the curve of her belly, down to the elastic of her panties.
He stopped and lay his mouth against it. The elastic was thin and white and it had left a faint pink line on her skin, and he kissed along that line — the whole length of it, hipbone to hipbone, a slow row of small wet kisses right on the seam where cloth met skin, and Trisha's hips lifted and circled and her hands came down to his head and pressed, and still he didn't take them off.
Instead he dropped his face to the centre of her and breathed in.
Deeply. Slowly. He had both hands on her hips and his nose and mouth pressed to the damp cotton and he just breathed her in, and Trisha went absolutely still, and then her head fell back and a sound came out of her that had no shape at all. She smelled warm and salt and faintly of soap and underneath all of it unmistakably of herself, and Danish stayed there long enough that the cloth went damp against his lips.
"Danish," she whispered, wrecked. "Please."
He hooked his fingers into the elastic at either hip and drew it down.
She lifted for him at once, unprompted — her back bowing, her hips rising clear off the mattress in a smooth high arch, her thighs coming together a little in a modesty she couldn't quite shake even now. He worked the cotton down over the curve of her, past her thighs, and she lowered herself back to the bed and let him take them off her ankles, and he held them a moment, and lifted them to his face and breathed in one last time before tossing them away over the side.