Landed (Lata)

Chapter Summary

Arriving in New Jersey, Lata finds herself displaced in a sterile, silent high-rise, far from everything familiar and entirely dependent on Devashish. Expecting their unspoken physical awareness to bridge the vast cultural transition, she is instead met with cold, agonizing restraint as Dev fiercely suppresses his impulses to avoid taking advantage of her vulnerable position. Mistaking his noble distance for rejection and regret, the mounting domestic quiet eventually gives way to a raw, painful confrontation—one that strips away their polite pretenses and shatters their careful boundaries for good.

Glossary of Cultural Terms & Context

• Karnataka: A major state in southwestern India whose capital is Bengaluru (Bangalore); the cultural, linguistic, and geographic home Lata is leaving behind.
• Auto Stands: Designated curbside queues or street corners in Indian towns and cities where three-wheeled auto-rickshaws wait to pick up passengers.
• Sabzi: A general Hindi and South Asian culinary term referring to any cooked, spiced vegetable dish, often eaten alongside flatbreads or rice.
• Roti: An unleavened, round whole-wheat flatbread cooked on a hot griddle (tawa), serving as an everyday dietary staple across South Asia.
• Dal (Daal): A seasoned, spiced stew made from split pulses, lentils, or peas; a core source of daily protein and comfort food in South Asian cuisine.
• Rasam: A traditional South Indian soup, typically seasoned with tamarind juice, tomatoes, crushed black pepper, cumin, and fragrant spices, commonly mixed with steamed rice during meals.
• Watchman: A common term used in urban India for residential security guards or building gatekeepers who monitor entrances, visitor logs, and perimeter security.
• Sandalwood Soap (e.g., Mysore Sandal Soap): A widely recognizable, fragrant bath soap crafted with pure sandalwood oil, historically produced in Karnataka and deeply associated with traditional South Indian households.

The plane was a long, cold roar that never stopped. I sat at the window because he told me to, watching the tarmac at Kempegowda shrink until the whole city turned into a spread of yellow pinpricks, and then into nothing.

I had never seen Karnataka from the sky. Down there on the ground, in two crowded rooms off the bus stand, my sister was probably putting the children to sleep on the mat, telling them their aunt had gone far away for work. In another street, my husband was drinking, or sleeping off his rage, or banging on my sister’s tin gate looking for me. All of it—the vegetable vendors who knew to give me fresh coriander, the temple steps where I sat on Tuesdays, the sound of Kannada in the auto stands, every face and every corner I had known since I was a girl—was sliding backward into the dark. I was leaving an entire life behind, stepping into an empty space where I had no one, no address, no language of my own.

Only him.

He sat in the middle seat beside me, his shoulder heavy and warm against mine whenever the air dropped us. He stared straight ahead at the little seat-back screen where a tiny white airplane crawled across a line of blue, or into the dark cabin, or down at his own knuckles.

Fourteen hours across the black water, and he barely turned his head. I was clutching the armrest, terrified of the engines and the vast emptiness outside the glass, waiting for him to say one ordinary thing—to ask if I was cold, or tell me how much longer, or look at me the way he had looked in the kitchen when the afternoon heat made us reckless. But he kept his eyes locked to the plastic frame of the screen.

I understood then that whatever had passed between us in that other city—the looks, the tea, the knuckle pressed into my skin—had been left behind on purpose. He was going to save me from my former husband, but he was going to pretend he had never seen me.

At the airport he walked ahead of me so the white men with the stamps would see him first. When they took my blue passport and asked me questions in fast, flat English, I answered the way I had practiced with my sister on the stairs. He stood two paces back and did not speak for me, but was ready to jump in if needed.

The car ride was long and quiet. The roads had too many lanes, and the streetlights were white and hard instead of orange. I kept my pallu pinned broad and flat across my chest until the building’s glass door slid open by itself.

“You can sleep,” he said in the lift.

The lift was all mirror. I saw the faded moss-green saree I had worn on my very first day in his apartment. I saw him staring at the red numbers ticking up: 18, 19, 20. For a whole year his gaze had found the dip of my stomach whenever I reached for a shelf. In the lift, with our reflections trapped in the glass, his eyes stayed locked on the numbers.

“I am not tired,” I said.

“You are.”

The apartment was higher than the tower off the Outer Ring Road, and much quieter. There were no crows. No horns from the junction. Only the faint, hollow rush of the air vents. The kitchen counters were made of stone the color of wet sand.

He opened the door to a room at the end of the short hallway.

The room was clean and warm, the heating already humming low against the chill outside. The bed had been properly made with thick white sheets and a heavy navy duvet—prepared before he had ever left for India, or arranged so it would be waiting when we arrived. On the bedside table sat a glass carafe of water, an extra fleece blanket folded neatly across the foot of the mattress, and a lamp casting a soft, yellow glow over the wooden floor.

He set my suitcase down gently near the closet.

“Bathroom is inside,” he said, his voice quiet with exhaustion. “Towels are in the cabinet under the sink. If the water takes a minute to heat up, just let it run. Don’t try to adjust the valves behind the wall.”

“You should eat,” I said, looking at the hollows beneath his eyes. “I can go into the kitchen and make something simple. Rice, anything.”

“No cooking tonight,” he said, shaking his head. He gestured back toward the hallway. “I ordered from an Indian place on the way from the airport. Roti, dal, some sabzi. It should be delivered in twenty minutes. We’ll eat, and then you sleep.”

He hesitated in the doorway, his fingers lightly brushing his temple.

“If you need extra pillows, or anything at all, just knock. Don’t hesitate.”

He almost said my name. I heard the L catch behind his teeth before he stopped it.

“Tonight you just rest.”

Then he pulled the door nearly shut, leaving me in a room that felt larger and safer than any four walls I had ever slept between.

Morning was too clean. The light coming through the tall glass didn’t have dust motes dancing in it; it fell straight and cold onto the pale wood floor.

I tied the mustard-yellow saree. It was the one I had worn on the Mondays he came home early from the office, the one with the cheap synthetic border my sister had bought me for Diwali. I gathered the pallu into a tight, two-finger strip, creased it sharp, and pinned it at my shoulder the way I did in Bangalore—leaving my waist, the knot of my skirt, and my navel bare to the morning light. I knew how he liked to steal his glances, how his eyes would wander and anchor there. After the long, cold silence of the plane, I wanted to make it easy for him. I wanted to put it right in his line of sight and feel him looking again.

He was already at the stone counter with his laptop and a black mug.

“You didn’t have to start today,” he said, his fingers pausing over the keys.

“Then when?”

He gave a small, thin smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Fair.”

He kept his face turned toward the screen. He didn’t look down.

I found the ceramic cups in the high cabinet. They were heavier than the ones in Bengaluru, thick and smooth. I poured his coffee and set it down beside his elbow. Then I reached back up for the shelf, holding my hands overhead far longer than the cups required, deliberately arching my back so the cotton blouse pulled high. The bare strip of my stomach stretched taut. The American light was harder, sharper; it cut a clear, distinct edge across the soft rim of my navel that no ceiling bulb in Karnataka had ever made. It sat there, deep and shadowed, inches from his face.

I waited for the weight of his eyes on my skin. I waited for that quiet, familiar hitch in his breath.

Nothing.

“Plates are in the lower drawer,” he said, his voice flat, staring firmly into the glowing text on his monitor. “Don’t climb. I’ll order a step-stool today.”

He didn’t look.

I brought my arms down slowly. The narrow pallu slipped an inch to the side, leaving the golden curve of my belly entirely open. I didn’t fix it. I stood right beside his stool, letting the chilled air of the kitchen wash over my bare stomach, practically offering it to him.

He took a sip of the coffee, murmured a thank-you to the keyboard, and kept his gaze pinned straight ahead. Still, he didn’t look. Not a flicker. Not even the quick, guilty glance he used to try and hide.

A cold ache settled behind my ribs.

I understood then. He had decided the looking belonged to the old city—that it was something that carried on the humid air between two people who knew their boundaries, and that he was going to kill it here so the job could stay purely a job. He had pulled me across an ocean to keep me safe, and now, out of sheer terror of taking advantage of my helplessness, he was forcing himself to treat me like air.

He was being noble. And his nobility felt like ice.

I wanted it back. I wanted his look back. I wanted his touch back. I craved it. But I couldn’t ask for it. There had never been a word spoken between us about it.

All day he was kind in the way a man is kind when he is stepping around broken glass. When he came into the kitchen for water, his eyes glued themselves to the chrome faucet. When he took a plate of rice, he looked at the fork.

In the afternoon, I tied the saree an inch lower, resting it on the flare of my hip bones the way I had worn it in the pantry when the carton slipped. Low enough that if he passed behind me at the sink, the year we had spent together in the Bangalore apartment would still be in the air.

He walked behind me to get an apple.

“The living room looks good,” he said to the wall, and took his plate into his study.

By eight in the evening, he was back on the grey sofa. No laptop this time. He sat with his head tilted back against the cushions, his eyes shut tight, two fingers digging hard into his temple.

“Headache?” I asked from the kitchen archway, holding a dry dishcloth I didn’t need.

“It’s nothing. Time zones. The screen.”

I stepped onto the rug. “Some people do like this. A massage on the head with hands. It helps. I can give you a head massage.”

He opened his eyes. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I know.” I touched my own temple, pressing the bone once. “If you want. Only if you want. I see you keep pressing your head, and you will not take a tablet.”

He looked at the floor, then at the dark glass showing the lights of the New Jersey turnpike.

“All right,” he said after a long silence. “Only the head.”

I washed my hands at the sink, drying them slowly. I left the yellow pallu pinned narrow at my collarbone.

He sat forward on the sofa, his elbows on his knees, as if he were ready to bolt the moment it became too much. I came around behind him first, the way you are supposed to do a head massage, and set my fingertips against his temple. His hair was damp and clean from an evening shower; the skin beneath was burning hot.

“Tell me if it is too hard,” I murmured.

“It’s fine.”

Small, firm circles. My thumbs worked the hollows behind his ears, the heels of my hands pressing into the tight muscles where his neck met his skull. After three minutes, he let out a long, ragged breath he seemed to have held since the airport. His shoulders dropped an inch. For a little while it was only that: a headache, a pair of hands, and the hum of an expensive refrigerator in a country where my former husband could never follow me.

Then I moved.

I slid one hand down through his thick hair to his shoulder so he wouldn’t think I had finished. I took two quiet steps around the side of the sofa until I was standing directly in front of him, wedging myself into the narrow V between his knees.

He went completely still.

I kept my left hand resting lightly on the nape of his neck, pretending the massage was still the reason. My waist was level with his face. In that seated position, his mouth was barely four inches from the bare skin above my petticoat knot. His breath hit the golden slope of my stomach—hot, rhythmic, shallow.

He didn’t pull back. But he didn’t raise his hands to hold my waist, either. He gripped his own knees, his knuckles turning white through his trousers, fighting himself with every breath he took. It was killing me inside.

Yet, I stayed. My craving forced me to stay.

When he still refused to move, I closed the distance myself.

I stepped in until the curve of my belly met his mouth. The deep hollow I had spent nine months uncovering for him pressed straight against his closed lips—warm, soft, the firm outer rim molding to the line of his mouth. This was the maximum I could do. I crossed a line to show him that I want this.

He didn’t open his lips.

He sat rigid, his eyes squeezed shut, breathing the scent of my skin through his nose, but refusing to take a single fraction more than what I forced onto him.

The heat of his face and the cold shock of his refusal hit me in the exact same second.

I pulled back. I felt his rejection deep in my core.

His eyes snapped open. They were dark, strained, hollowed out by a misery I had never seen on him in Bangalore. 

“Do you not like me in that way?” I asked. 

The words fell into the quiet room like a brass bowl dropped on stone. Unpracticed. Stripped of every safe wall we had built.

He swallowed hard, his throat clicking.

“I won’t take this as a thank-you,” he said, his voice raw and harsh. “Not for the ticket. Not for the room. Not for the job. Not for getting you away from him. I won’t do it.”

I stood there in the narrow strip of fabric, my hands hanging loose at my sides, with no second sentence ready. For a whole year we had spoken in sarees and glances, and the first time he used words, he accused me of selling myself for a flight.

“All right,” is all I could come up with. I was speechless, shocked and felt insulted.

I turned, walked down the hallway, and shut my bedroom door. I sat on the edge of the mattress and pressed my flat palm over the deep dip of my navel—the spot where his lips had stayed closed—and thought that I had ruined everything. That he was a decent man, and that his decency was going to make this apartment feel like a prison to me.

For two days, he spoke less than he had on the airplane.

Morning coffee, thank you.

The aluminium stool arrived by courier; he assembled it, set it in the kitchen corner, and said, Use this so you don’t stretch.

When I made rasam and rice, he took a bowl into his study and shut the door. If he walked past me to get water, he kept his eyes on the floor tiles. The looking from Bengaluru wasn’t just dead; he was shoveling dirt over it.

On the third evening, I walked into the living room. He was sitting on the sofa in the dark, staring at the grey river through the panoramic window, his fingers at his temple again.

I didn’t bring a cloth. I didn’t offer a massage.

“Why are you not talking to me?” I asked.

He flinched slightly, then looked up. In the twilight, stripped of his laptop, he looked exhausted.

“I am talking,” he said quietly.

“You say the washer, the stool, the coffee. That is not talking.”

He let his hand drop onto his lap. “I didn’t know what I should say. After the other night.”

I walked closer, stopping three feet from the edge of the rug. For the last two days, I had tied the moss-green saree the old way—spreading the pallu wide across my chest, pinning it high and flat at the collarbone, hiding every scrap of skin from my throat down to the pleats of my skirt. I had armored myself in the fabric because I was humiliated, because I thought I had made myself cheap. Standing there now, completely covered, there was no bare midriff between us to soften the room or make an excuse for him.

He sat back against the cushion, looking stunned by the sharpness in my voice.

“What you said during the massage,” I pressed on, keeping my hands clamped at my sides to stop them from shaking. “About that being a thank-you. It was not that.”

He waited. He was always good at waiting when he was terrified of what came next.

“It was only a girl crossing her limits,” I said. “For a man she has found herself wanting for months. Not for a ticket. Not for a room. Not to pay you back for the job.”

The word hung between us.

“Wanting,” he repeated, as if testing the weight of the syllables.

“Yes.”

“Me?”

“I would not have stood in front of the watchman like that.” It came out dry and sharp. A ghost of a bitter smile touched my mouth. “I didn’t pull you that night. You didn’t even open your lips. I was the one who stepped in. I put myself there. Then I went to my room and sat on the bed and thought: What kind of woman does that in a house someone gave her? A room, a ticket, an escape—and this is how she behaves.”

He started to stand up.

“Don’t,” I said, shaking my head. “If you stand up, I will stop talking.”

He sank back.

“In the pantry,” I whispered, the words coming thick now. “Before we left… when the carton slipped. Your knuckle went inside. Right here.” I pressed my hand flat against the heavy cloth over my stomach. “It stayed there for three breaths. You felt how warm it was. You felt me breathing against your bone. And you pulled away like you had touched fire, but when I looked back at you, you were shaking. I saw your eyes. That wasn’t an employer helping with a box.”

He swallowed hard. The muscle in his jaw jumped.

“I wanted your mouth that night,” I said, looking straight into his face. “Not on my cheek. Lower. For a long time, even in that old kitchen, I have been thinking about your tongue. There. In my navel. Before the passport. Before the plane. That is what I was doing when I stepped in and made the touch. I was Wanting you. I don’t have a cleaner word for it.”

The room went completely dead. Outside, a train horn sounded far away along the water.

“You promised me in Bangalore,” I said, my voice tightening. “Standing right at the sink. You looked at me and said, Just like here. You swore it would be just like there. But it is nothing like there. You don’t even look at me. You look at the tap, you look at the screen, you look at the floor. If you don’t want me that way, say it. Say it once, and it is fine. I can accept that. I have lived through worse things than a man not wanting me. But don’t turn into a ghost and make this house feel like a prison.”

“I want you,” he said, the words rough, dragged up from somewhere deep inside him. “I have wanted you since the first week you climbed that stool in the closet. I wanted you so badly in that pantry I thought I would lose my mind. Part of the reason I brought you here is because I couldn’t bear the thought of an empty kitchen where you weren’t standing by the sink.”

He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, his voice dropping to an uneven rasp. “I didn’t open my mouth the other night because I was terrified that if I did, I would become the kind of man who buys a woman with a plane ticket and a job. I wanted you to have a choice.”

A hot, stinging pressure burst behind my eyes. The tears came before I could stop them, spilling down my cheeks, burning with pure insult.

“Is that what you think of me?” I asked, my voice breaking into a ragged, furious whisper. “That anyone who spent money on me could have my body? That if the building manager had bought me a ticket, I would have walked into his room and put my waist against his mouth?”

A sob caught in my throat, ugly and raw.

“You think I am so cheap that a flight across the ocean is all it takes to make me open myself to a man? I offered it to you. Because it was you. Because for a year I watched you burn every time I reached for a shelf, and I was burning too. And you sat there thinking I was paying a bill.”

He stood up before I could tell him to stay seated, clearing the space between us in one long stride.

His hands came up to my face—not cautious, not polite, but shaking with a fierce, frantic regret. His palms cupped my jaw, his thumbs sweeping hard across my cheekbones to catch the tears as fast as they fell.

“No,” he breathed, his forehead coming down to press against mine, his breath hot and uneven against my mouth. “No. Lata, look at me. Look at me.”

I forced my eyes open, blurred with tears, inches from his dark, tortured stare.

“I never thought that,” he said, his voice cracking on the words. “I swear to you on my life I never thought that. I was terrified of myself. I was sitting there hating myself because I wanted to take you into that bedroom from the second you stepped off the plane, and I thought if I touched you, I was no better than every other bastard who uses his money to trap someone. I was trying to save you from me. I wasn’t thinking you were cheap. I was thinking I had to be decent.”

“Your decency felt like a slap,” I whispered, my chest heaving against his shirt. “It felt like you were washing your hands of me.”

“I know. I’m sorry. God, Lata, I’m so sorry.”

He didn’t take his hands from my face. He held me there while the wild, ragged shivering in my ribs began to quiet down, his thumbs wiping the wetness beneath my eyes. For a long time, the only sound was the low rush of the vents and our breath mingling between our mouths.

The heat in his palms was steady, grounding. He was looking at my face as if he were trying to memorize the fact that I hadn’t run away down the hall.

“You really thought I was pretending?” he said, his voice dropped so low I had to strain to hear it. “All those months?”

I looked at the open collar of his shirt, then up into his dark eyes. “You never said anything.”

“I couldn’t.” A faint, self-conscious crease formed between his brows. “I thought… if I said one word, I’d lose the right to even look at you. I was terrified you’d walk out and never come back to that kitchen.”

“I left my waist open every day for you,” I murmured. “I stood right where you could see.”

He let out a slow, uneven breath that ruffled the hair near my temple.

“I know,” he said, his voice dropping into a rough, quiet gravel. “Do you think I didn’t notice? I sat there at that table with cold tea, trying to pretend I was reading an email, while you reached for every high shelf in that flat.”

He swallowed, his hands sliding down slowly from my cheeks, his thumbs tracing the line of my jaw down to the side of my neck.

“When you were standing here two nights ago… when you pushed your waist against my mouth…” His voice hitched, raw with the confession. “I wanted to open my mouth so badly my hands were shaking. I wanted to do exactly what you said. Put my tongue right there. Taste it. See if it was as hot as it felt on my hand in the pantry.”

Hearing it out loud—plain, unpolished, without shame—sent a sharp, liquid heat straight through my lower belly.

“Then why didn’t you?” I whispered.

“Because I was scared,” he said simply. He looked down at the safe, heavy green cotton pinned across my chest, his fingers stopping at my left collarbone. “I didn’t want to take something you didn’t mean to give. But I want it. I’ve wanted it for a whole year. And tonight… tonight I want to show you how much I’ve been wanting you.”

His knuckles brushed the skin above the fabric, warm and rough. He hesitated for half a second, his dark eyes asking a question he didn’t need words for, before his fingers found the small steel safety pin.

He didn’t rush. He worked the clasp open, pulled the pin free, and laid it on the wooden table behind me.

With slow, careful hands, he took the edge of the moss-green pallu, folded the heavy cloth between his fingers, and drew it across my shoulder—clearing it from my ribs, from the curve of my waist, and leaving my entire midriff, including the deep, shadowed hollow bare to the amber light of the room.

The cool air hit my stomach, making the skin contract.

He let out a low, ragged breath. He didn’t say anything more. The silence came back, but it wasn’t the dead silence of the plane or the kitchen tap; it was thick, heavy, and completely shared.

He sank down onto the front edge of the sofa, keeping his eyes locked to the bare curve of my belly. The distance between us was barely six inches. In that seated position, his face was level with the bare curve of my stomach; his eyes were dark, dilated, drinking in every contour of the golden skin, the faint horizontal crease where my saree sat low on my hip bones, and the shadowed pit at the center.

His hands reached out. His fingers were trembling slightly, but when his bare palms met the flare of my hips, the grip was hard and solid. His thumbs pressed deep into the soft flesh of my sides, feeling the sudden, rapid flutter of my pulse beneath the skin.

“You stood right here,” he murmured, his voice thick with wonder and self-loathing. “Two nights ago. And I let you walk away.”

“I’m standing here now,” I whispered.

I stepped into the cradle of his thighs. My knees brushed the outside of his trousers; my hands found his shoulders, feeling the heavy, bunched muscle beneath his cotton shirt.

He didn’t wait for me to press against him this time. He pulled. His hands slid around to the small of my back, drawing me forward until the bare skin of my belly met the hot, parted line of his mouth.

A low, guttural sound tore out of his chest—a noise of pure, broken surrender—and then his lips sealed over the hollow.

The heat was immediate, overwhelming. For twelve months in that Bengaluru kitchen, I had felt the weight of his stare like a warm hand on my stomach; now, having his real mouth flush against that hidden place made the air rush completely out of my lungs. His mouth formed a tight, damp seal over the rim, inhaling sharply, tasting the ambient salt and the warm fragrance of sandalwood soap held deep within the depression.

“Dev,” I gasped, my spine arching back.

He opened his mouth wider, taking the entire rounded circle of the navel between his lips, and his tongue surged forward.

It wasn’t a tentative brush. The broad, flat surface of his tongue flattened against the upper lip of the hollow, slick and heavy, before curling down into the throat of the pit. The tip pressed directly against the secret, knot-hard floor inside—the nerve-dense bottom that had never known anything rougher than a bath sponge or the light, accidental scrape of his knuckle in the pantry.

A violent, electric shiver ripped straight through my groin, down the inside of my thighs. My hips bucked forward against his chin with a desperate, involuntary jerk.

My fingers knotted violently into his thick hair, bunching the strands between my knuckles, dragging his head harder into the curve of my belly.

He groaned against my skin, the sound muffled and vibrating directly into the pit of my stomach. His tongue began to move—small, fierce, rhythmic circles that scraped the sensitive, shadowed inner walls. He licked the deep floor, his breath blowing hot, wet bursts of air into the depression with every heave of his chest. Each swirl of his tongue sent a thrumming ache radiating downward, so sharp and heavy it felt as if a wire connected that little shadowed hollow directly to the wet heat pooling between my legs.

His hands shifted on my waist. His fingers dug hard into the soft flare above my petticoat string, bruising and steady, anchoring me so firmly that every movement of his mouth had the full, unyielding weight of my body behind it.

He pulled back an inch. The sudden, cool draft of the room hit the slick skin where his mouth had just been, breaking the contact. After two days of being treated like a ghost, the sudden absence felt like he was pulling away all over again.

“Don’t stop,” I whispered, my hips twitching forward, trying to follow the heat of his face. “Dev, please—don’t pull away. Don’t pull away now.”

He wasn’t pulling away; he was looking. In the amber wash from the floor lamp, the hollow was flushed a dark rose, glistening wet, trembling with every rapid, shallow breath I drew. Seeing it laid bare and marked by his own mouth seemed to shatter whatever last shred of restraint he had left.

He leaned back in with an animal hunger.

His lips closed around the outer edge, drawing the soft, yielding rim deep into his mouth, sucking hard until the hollow inverted slightly under the pressure. The vacuum pulled the inner core taut against the roof of his mouth. Then his teeth grazed the sensitive top edge—a slow, bruising nip that made my heels leave the rug.

A sharp, breathless scream caught behind my teeth. My knees gave out entirely.

If his arms hadn’t snapped around my lower back, locking me tight against his chest, I would have collapsed onto the floor. Instead, he held me suspended, half-sitting on his thighs, his face buried so deeply into my navel that his nose pressed into the soft swell of my upper abdomen while his tongue continued its relentless, greedy work inside the pit.

He licked it until the hollow was completely drenched, until the skin throbbed with a burning, tender heat, his beard scratching roughly against the smooth swell of my sides. He didn’t move higher to my breasts; he didn’t reach lower between my thighs. He stayed right there, centered on the exact spot that had held his gaze captive across two continents, claiming it with a desperate, devouring focus that proved, with every wet stroke, that I had never been an obligation.

When his mouth finally slackened and pulled away, the skin made a soft, wet sound in the quiet room. He had to gasp for air—he had buried his face so deep that the soft swell of my belly had smothered his nose and mouth completely. That was the level of his hunger. A whole year of choked-down want, of forcing himself to be polite and careful so he wouldn’t take advantage of me, had broken loose all at once.

He rested his forehead against the damp swell just beneath the hollow, his breath shuddering out against my skin in ragged, broken gasps. His hands remained locked around my waist, his thumbs slowly caressing the flushed, slick circle of my belly, feeling the frantic, wild pounding of my pulse beneath his palms.

I stood there trembling in the circle of his arms, my fingers still tangled deep in his hair, the room spinning softly in the dark. The cold, sterile apartment was gone. The distance was gone. There was only the wet, thrumming brand at the center of my body, radiating his heat, anchoring me to him in a way no signature on a paper ever could.

“Just like here,” he whispered against my damp skin, his voice cracked and raw.

I looked down at his dark head resting against my waist, letting out a breath that was half a laugh and half a sob.

“Just like here,” I answered, and drew his mouth back in.