Hands-On - part 2 (Patreon)

I came up here on purpose. I owe myself that much. I stood at the bottom of the stairs running the math, no phone, no wallet, nowhere of my own to sleep tonight, and Connor's key card was right there in his fist, and I knew if I let this read as yes I'd have a bed and a ride out in the morning. So I let it read as yes. I went up the stairs behind him.

I just need him to hold still long enough to hear me. "Connor. Listen to me one second. It's - " His mouth finds my neck and the word drops out of my head. " - it's me, it's Knox, something happened, I need you to stop and - "

He isn't listening. He's found the strings instead. One tug at my neck, one at my back, and the top's gone, on the carpet, and his fingers are already at the bow on my hip and that goes too, the bottoms sliding down my legs and settling over my feet, and I'm standing in his hotel room with nothing on and the air over all of me and the body lighting up like it's been waiting for this.

That's where I lose a second. His hands come up my sides slow, thumbs dragging, and it pours up into my chest and down into that low ache from the pool, and the body answers him, leans, my spine arching a little on its own, and for one long second I don't shove. I just stand there. The body wants whatever comes next and some part of me is so tired and so scared and so far past anything I have a word for that it would be easy, the easiest thing going, to let it have what it's asking for and sort the rest out later. I can't even tell anymore if that thought is mine or the Opal's, smoothing the panic flat the way it's built to.

Then his hand drops lower and I snap back, plant a foot, shove him with both hands, everything these arms hold, the shove that used to swing a heavy bag on its chain. He gives a foot. Maybe a foot. Rocks back, blinks, comes up smiling, and I feel exactly how much force I just made, which is next to nothing.

So I quit trying to move him with my body, because my body's got nothing, and I go for the one thing it can't strip off me. The Opal gets there before I do, the way it always beat me to the opener on a dead approach, no words, just a certainty dropping into place in my own voice, that he still knows the sound of me even with the face gone. So I use it. I slap him. Open hand, across the cheek, not hard, there's no hard left in this arm, but it lands and it cracks and his head turns with it.

"Hey." The voice comes out high and cracked and it doesn't matter. "It's Knox, you doofus. Quit with the hands." He's staring. "The pool, ten minutes ago, I told you to stop forcing it with the girl at the diving board. That was me. Half a minute before whatever this is, that was me, in your ear."

Something gets through. I watch it land the way I used to watch a lesson land, the slow blink, the jaw coming loose. His hands come off me. He steps back without being told.

"You're on the couch tonight," I tell him. "Tomorrow you're driving me home."

And the kid nods. Hands going to his sides, that stunned slack look, waiting on me for the next thing. Eight inches and eighty pounds on this body and he heels like it's a Saturday drill. Guess the size was never the part anybody was actually listening to.