Stay Where I Put You

The chair was exactly where she had put it. She had moved it herself, two feet back from the foot of the bed, angled just slightly toward the lamp, and she had said: stay there. He had nodded and sat down and he had not moved since. That was the thing about him. He did what she asked.

The rain was steady against the window glass — not loud, but present, the kind of sound that made the room feel sealed. The lamp threw its low amber circle across the bed, and she was at the center of it, and she was aware of her own skin in a way that was almost uncomfortable. The air in the room had a temperature. She felt it across her collarbone, across the soft inside of her arms, in the small hollow below her sternum. She had been naked in front of him before. This was different. This was chosen and deliberate and she had made him sit in the chair and she had not yet done anything.

The dildo was beside her on the bed. Silicone, matte, a particular weight she knew the way she knew her own hands. She had used it for months in the dark, alone, with her face turned away from nothing. She had thought about this — about him in the chair, about the lamp, about the rain — and the thinking had been its own kind of wanting, separate from the object itself. Now the object was here and he was here and she was the one who had arranged all of it, and her stomach contracted once, sharply, at the realization that there was nothing left to arrange.

She looked at him. He was watching her face, not her body, which was somehow worse — more intimate — and she felt the look travel from her chest down to her thighs, which were still pressed together, the muscles holding a tension she hadn't consciously asked them to hold. She let herself feel the pressure of that. Thighs against each other, the slight heat of her own skin.

Her right hand moved to rest on her stomach, just below her navel. Not moving lower. Not yet. Her left hand was flat against the sheet beside her hip, fingers spread.

She inhaled. The exhale came out uneven, longer at the end than she had planned, and the sound of it — small, involuntary — arrived in the room between them. She watched his hands tighten on the arms of the chair. He did not move.

Her right hand drifted lower. She felt the first brush of her own fingers before they reached where she meant to go, and she stopped there — hovering, the warmth of her own body rising up to meet her palm before contact — aware of the rain, the lamp, the specific weight of his attention from the chair across the room.