I Still Love You

I Still Love You
POV: Felix

I didn't sleep.

The shower had taken the night off my skin but not out of my head, and I lay in the dark with Selina beside me and the ceiling doing its quiet work of holding the house up and my mind doing the thing it does when there's something it hasn't finished processing.

Martin's face in the road. The sound in the enclosed stretch. The way the quiet afterward had felt like a door closing and also like a door opening and I couldn't tell which was which.

Selina's breathing wasn't sleep-breathing either.

I knew the difference now. The rhythm of her asleep was something I had catalogued without meaning to, the way you catalogue things about a person you're paying attention to, and this wasn't it. This was the rhythm of someone lying very still in the dark with their eyes open.

"Lina."

She turned toward me. The movement of her body under the sheets was the specific sound of someone who had been waiting to be addressed.

"I can hear you thinking," she said.

"Can you."

"Loudly. It's very annoying." A pause.

"What are you thinking about."

The question hung in the dark. Three weeks of her knowing and not saying. Three weeks of me carrying the thing I hadn't told her. The kitchen lamp and her hand on my shoulder and the weight of that, the specific weight of being chosen by someone who knew exactly what she was choosing.

"I'm thinking about you," I said.

She was quiet for a moment.

"That's a very good answer," she said. "But also very general."

"I'm thinking about the first time you came to this house. The benefit. You walked in and looked at everything like you were cataloguing it for later use."

"I was," she said. "You had very expensive art and terrible furniture."

"My furniture is not terrible."

"Felix. The leather sectional."

"That was a very good sectional."

"That sectional looked like it had been selected by a man who had never sat down in his life." She shifted closer, and I could feel the warmth of her in the dark. "You've improved since then."

"Have I."

"In some ways."

"Which ways."

She didn't answer with words. Her hand found my chest in the dark, palm flat against the place where my heart was doing its ordinary work, and the weight of it was the same weight as the kitchen, the same specific presence.

"Martin is dead," she said.

"Yes."

"You killed him."

"Yes."

"For Elsa."

"Yes."

She moved her hand slightly, the barest shift of pressure.

"And for me."

I covered her hand with mine.

"For a lot of reasons. But yes. For you."

The dark held us there for a moment. Her breathing had changed, the rhythm shifting into something less controlled, and I recognized it the way I recognized all her rhythms now, the specific catalogue of Selina that I had been building without meaning to since the first night she walked into a room and rearranged the furniture of my attention.

"I've been waiting," she said.

"For what."

"For this. For it to be over. For you to come home." She paused. "For myself to stop being frightened long enough to do what I've wanted to do for weeks."

"What have you wanted to do."

She moved then, and suddenly she was above me in the dark, her legs on either side of my hips, her hands braced on my chest, the same position as that night in my bedroom when she had kissed me and then pulled away, when she had said she wasn't ready and I had stood in the bathroom with the cold water running and the specific frustration of wanting something I couldn't have.

"This," she said. "I've wanted to do this."

Her mouth found mine in the dark, and this time she didn't pull away.

The kiss was different from the one in my bedroom. That one had been hunger and denial and the specific desperation of two people who knew they were going to stop. This one was something else entirely. This one was the door closing and the door opening and Selina's hands moving from my chest to my face, holding me there, kissing me like she was making a decision and the decision was yes.

"I never stopped," she said against my mouth. "I need you to know that. Through everything. The distance and the performing and the pretending. I never stopped loving you."

Something cracked open in my chest.

"Lina."

"I love you. I have loved you since the night you told me about Elsa and I watched you fall apart and put yourself back together in the same breath. I have loved you since before I knew what loving you was going to cost me." Her voice was steady but only just. "And I am tired of being careful."

I pulled her down to me.

The kiss was deeper now, the kind of kiss that has been waiting for three weeks and six weeks and months of careful distance, and she opened her mouth to me without hesitation, her tongue meeting mine with the specific electricity of something that has been denied finally being allowed.

My hands found the hem of her shirt, the thin cotton of whatever she had been wearing while she waited at the kitchen table, and I pulled it up and over her head in one motion.

She wasn't wearing anything underneath.

The fact of that landed somewhere in my lower spine. She had been waiting at the kitchen table in only a shirt and whatever was underneath her sleep shorts, and the thought of it, the specific thought of Selina sitting in the circle of lamplight with her sketchbook and her bare skin and her decision already made, waiting for me to come home, made my hands tighten on her hips.

"You were waiting," I said.

"I was hoping." She was breathing harder now. "There's a difference."

"Is there."

"Waiting is passive. Hoping is active." She rocked her hips against me, the friction of her through the thin fabric of her shorts. "I was actively hoping."

I groaned.

The sound came from somewhere I hadn't been accessing, somewhere that had been locked down for weeks while I managed the operation and the surveillance and the specific performance of a man whose primary concern was the legal process. Somewhere underneath all of that, where Selina lived, where she had been living since the beginning.

My hands found her breasts in the dark. The weight of them, the familiar shape, the way her breath caught when my thumbs found her nipples. I had memorized her body months ago and the memory was still there, still accurate, still producing the exact response I remembered.

"Felix." Her head fell back. "Yes."

"Sit up," I said. "I want to see you."

She rose above me, her silhouette against the dim light from the window, and I turned on the bedside lamp. The light made a circle around us the way the kitchen lamp had made a circle, and she was in the center of it, her skin warm in the low glow, her nipples tight, her eyes on me with the expression that was no longer guarded or careful or performing any version of distance.

"That's better," I said.

"You and your lamp circles."

"They're good circles."

She smiled, and the smile was the one I had catalogued as her real smile, the one that reached her eyes and softened something in her face and made her look younger and more present and entirely herself.

"Take off your shirt," she said.

I did.

Her hands went to my chest immediately, tracing the lines of old scars, the map of things that had happened before her. She had traced them before but this was different, this was a reacquaintance, her fingers learning the territory again after months of absence.

"I've missed you," she said. "All of you. Every part."

"Show me."

She leaned down and kissed my chest, her mouth finding the place over my heart where her hand had been, and the gesture was so intimate, so specifically tender, that my breath stopped.

Selina moved lower. Her mouth traced a path down my stomach, and my hands found her hair, the dark weight of it, the silk of it between my fingers. She reached the waistband of my sleep pants and paused.

"I want to," she said. "Is that alright."

"Lina. Yes."

She pulled the pants down.

The air was cool on my skin but her mouth was warm, and the contrast of it, the specific sensation of Selina's mouth on me after months of wanting her and not having her, made my hips rise involuntarily. She made a sound against me, something between a hum and a moan, and the vibration of it traveled through my entire body.

"God," I said. "Selina."

She took her time. That was the thing about Selina, she never rushed. She approached everything with the specific attention of someone who understood that time was the point, that the duration was the pleasure, that the space between wanting and having was where everything important happened.

Her tongue moved in a pattern I recognized, something she had learned I liked in the months before everything fell apart, and the recognition of it, the specific evidence that she remembered, that she had been paying attention, that the catalogue went both ways, made something in my chest constrict.

"Come here," I said. "I need you up here."

She released me slowly, deliberately, and climbed back up my body with the grace she brought to everything. Her face was flushed, her lips wet, her eyes bright with the thing that wasn't performance, that had never been performance, that was simply Selina being entirely present.

"I want you inside me," she said. "But first I want you to know something."

"What."

She bent down and put her mouth to my ear.

"I am not going anywhere. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not ever." Her breath was warm against my skin. "Whatever comes next. I am here. I am staying. Do you understand."

I turned my head and found her mouth with mine.

"I understand,
" I said against her lips.

"Now let me show you what that..."

Her hand moved down between us, finding me, guiding me.

"means to me."

She sank onto me in one motion.