Talk Dirty To Me – Chapter 2 – Room Above The Bar

His hands were on my face and his mouth came down on mine and every managed thought I’d been carrying since I sat down at that bar was gone.

Not gradually. All at once.

He kissed like he had a point to make – deep, certain, his hands moving from my face to my throat to my waist like he already knew what he was looking for and had found it. I grabbed his shirt. He walked me backward until the backs of my knees found the bed and I sat and he stood over me and looked down with those grey eyes and said:

“Take off your dress.”

Not a question. Not even close.

I took off my dress.

He looked at me – really looked, the specific unhurried kind, like he was seeing something and intended to remember it. Then his shirt came off and I reached out and put my hands flat on his chest and felt his stomach tighten under my palms and thought: this is a real person who is really here and this is really happening.

“Lie back,” he said.

I lay back.

He came down over me – weight on his forearms, close but not all the way yet – and his mouth found my throat. Not gentle. His teeth grazed my skin and a sound came out of me before I’d decided to make it. Not quiet. Not managed. Just the sound, arriving without permission.

He made a low noise against my neck that meant he’d heard it and was keeping it.

His hands moved – both of them, one at my waist and one sliding up my side to my breast, his thumb circling my nipple until I made the sound again and he said, against my throat: “There. Keep doing that.”

I wasn’t doing anything. My body was doing it without me.

His mouth followed his hands – collarbone, the curve of my breast, his tongue tracing patterns that made my back arch and my hands find his hair. He took his time at each place. Didn’t rush toward the next thing. Just stayed with what was working until I was pulling at him to move lower and he didn’t, not yet, not until I made a specific sound that apparently gave him the information he wanted.

Then he moved lower.

His hands went to my hips. His mouth dragged down my stomach – slow, his lips pressing open kisses against my skin – and his breath was warm and then his mouth was where I needed it and I grabbed the sheet with both hands.

“Tell me what you want,” he said, against me.

My mouth opened.

Nothing.

He didn’t push. Didn’t make the silence into a problem. Just started – his tongue moving with the specific deliberateness of a man who had decided to take his time and meant it. He found things. Filed them. Used them again. Every time I made a sound he did more of whatever had produced it – layering, building, unhurried and completely focused.

My hips moved.

“Tell me,” he said. Quieter. A different question underneath the same words.

Nothing. The wall. Sixteen years of it, right there.

He didn’t stop.

He added his fingers – one first, then two, curling in a way that made me pull his hair hard enough that he should have mentioned it and didn’t – and his mouth and his hands worked together like they’d done this specific thing before, like he already knew the combination. My thighs tightened around his shoulders. My back came off the bed.

“Nicko -” just his name, the only word I had “- please -“

He lifted his head.

“Please what?” he asked. Voice completely wrecked, low and rough in a way I felt in my chest.

I opened my mouth.

The wall came up.

He watched me hit it – patient, grey eyes, not disappointed, just watching – and I made a sound instead of a sentence.

He held my gaze for one long moment.

Then he lowered his head and put his mouth back and this time he didn’t build slowly. He went directly to what he knew worked – the combination, the specific pressure, the exact rhythm he’d already discovered – and he worked me with it until I came apart completely.

Loud.

Unmanaged.

The real sound – not the appropriate kept-to-a-reasonable-volume sound I’d been making in bedrooms for years. The actual one. The one that had been sitting in my throat waiting for a room where it was allowed to exist. It came out all at once and he worked me through every wave of it – every shudder, every aftershock – his hands holding my hips when I tried to pull away from the intensity of it.

“I’ve got you,” he said, against my inner thigh. “Stay with me.”

I stayed.

When it finally eased he moved up my body slowly – his mouth at my hip, my stomach, lingering at my ribs, both hands spreading warm across my skin like he was covering ground he intended to know. He got to my breasts and stayed there – his tongue, his teeth, his mouth warm and specific – until I made new sounds that were different from the ones before and he catalogued those too.

Then his mouth found mine and he kissed me deep and I tasted myself in it and grabbed his arms and pulled him closer.

“I want you inside me,” I said. The words arrived before the wall could form.

He pulled back. Looked at my face. “Tell me how,” he said.

I stared at him. “What?”

“How do you want it,” he said. Flat. Patient. Like this was the most reasonable thing to ask and he genuinely couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t.

My mouth opened.

The wall came up.

He saw it. Didn’t push, didn’t make a thing of it. Just looked at me for one moment and said: “You’re going to tell me. Not right now – but you’re going to,” and pushed inside me slow.

One long certain stroke, full and deep, and I gasped and grabbed his shoulders and he went still – completely still – and let me feel it. The weight of him, the fullness, the specific overwhelming quality of a man who fit and knew it and wasn’t rushing past the moment.

Then he dropped his mouth to my ear.

“What do you want,” he said, right there, low and warm. “Tell me one thing.”

I moved my hips instead of answering – pressing up against him, trying to get him to move –  and he made a sound against my ear that was low and broken and honest and started to move.

He fucked me with purpose. Not urgency – purpose. Like he had specific information and was using every bit of it. He found the angle that made my head fall back and came back to it again and again, varied the rhythm just enough that I couldn’t brace against anything, kept his mouth at my throat saying things in that low, certain voice that landed on my skin like heat and dissolved into the rest of what was happening.

“Harder?” he asked, against my jaw. Not telling me. Asking me. Waiting.

I opened my mouth.

“Harder,” I said.

He did it – deeper, harder, both hands gripping my hips – and I made the loudest sound yet and he said there against my throat like he’d been waiting for exactly that specific sound and I came with both hands on his back and my face pressed into his neck and a sound filling the room that I did not recognise and did not try to manage.

He came not long after – buried deep, his arms tight around me, a low broken sound against my hair that was the most honest thing I’d heard in years – and then his weight settled and the room went quiet.

I lay in the dark of the hotel room above the bar and stared at the ceiling.

The city was outside doing its four AM thing. Ella was home and asleep. The bar downstairs had probably last call already.

None of it mattered.

I thought about harder coming out of my mouth in the dark and the world not ending. I thought about you’re going to tell me said like a scheduled event. I thought about the wall and the sounds and the specific quality of being in a room with someone who treated wanting things as the most ordinary thing in the world.

I thought: I want more of that.

Not the sex. Well, yes, the sex. But more than the sex. The part where he asked. The part where he waited. The part where saying one word produced not a closed door but there said against my throat like a reward.

I thought: next time I’m going to say more than one word.

He was awake before me.

Grey light. Him on his back, hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling with the comfortable stillness of a man who had been awake a while and found it entirely acceptable.

I watched him before he knew I was watching.

He looked the same as he’d looked at the bar. Settled. Decided. Like being in this room at this hour was a thing he’d chosen and had no complaints about.

“Morning,” he said, without turning his head.

“Did you know I was awake?” I asked.

“Your breathing changed,” he said.

I sat up. Found my dress on the floor. Put it on – zip, straps, the efficient reassembly of a woman who knew how to leave.

“I’m going to go,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

“Last night was -” I stopped. Good was an insult to what had happened in this room. Unexpected missed the point entirely. The first time in sixteen years I said what I wanted out loud and didn’t get punished for it was not something I was handing to a man whose last name I still didn’t know.

“I know,” he said, before I found the word. Like he’d heard the whole sentence anyway.

I stood. Picked up my bag – the bag that had started all of this, sitting where I’d dropped it without caring, hours ago, a different version of this night.

He picked up his phone. Held it out.

I looked at it. Thought about his voice in my ear saying you’re going to tell me. Thought about harder arriving in the dark and being received like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I put my number in his phone.

He looked at it. Looked at me. “I’ll call you,” he said. Simple as that.

“You say that like you’ve already decided,” I said.

“I have,” he said.

I left.

Took the elevator down alone and walked through the lobby and out into the warm morning and stood on the pavement and thought: one night. That’s all that was. Good story.

I knew before I reached the corner that I was lying to myself.

I kept walking anyway.