The Way She Wanted To Be Touched

The sun came through the curtains and found her face. She was already half-awake, half-naked, the sheets somewhere at her waist. She didn’t move. Her body was asking for something and she already knew she was going to listen.

She began to touch herself the way she wished he would. Softly. With patience. With the kind of attention that says I have nowhere else to be.

Her fingers found the outer lips and traced them slowly, and something in her hips released, a loosening she hadn’t known she was holding. She felt herself soften and open, the way a room opens when a window is finally raised. The softness beneath her fingers was extraordinary. Warm. Yielding. So unbearably soft she had to slow down just to stay present with it.

She thought of his hands. The way they never rushed.

She had always found this part of herself slightly withheld. Dry, constricted, a little reluctant, as though it had learned to brace. But this morning something was different. This morning she was wanted. She felt the warmth first, then the slow flood of herself rising to meet her fingers.

She wondered if this was what she felt like to him.

She stroked slowly, trying to sense the pulse of her clitoris, whether it was full, whether it was asking. It was. Unmistakably. Gorgeously. She was gorged and warm and present in a way that made her breath catch. Her hand was drenched with her own pleasure, and when she lifted her fingers into the slanted morning light, they caught it, a translucent shine that broke into tiny diamonds.

She brought her fingers to her mouth.

Sweet. Tangy. Like a kiwi on a warm afternoon.

She thought of him tasting her. Like she was something he had been looking forward to. She felt the pull of that memory low in her belly, and let it move through her without grasping it, the way you let a piece of music move through you.

Her hand slid back down.

She moved over the swollen bud slowly, feeling the slickness of her own pleasure against her palm, and then gently slid one finger inside. Then immediately a second, because her body asked for more without hesitation, without apology, and she loved her for it.

The warmth of herself received her fingers completely. Cozy, tight, impossibly soft. She moved slowly, feeling the walls close and release around her, like a slow exhale held and then let go. She bent her fingers slightly, found the soft interior ridge, and felt the sound before she heard it, a low, involuntary release from somewhere in her chest.

She thought: he knows this place.

And she felt a sudden rush of tenderness, for him, yes, but mostly for herself.

For this body that had learned to open. For this part of her that had been waiting, not for him, but for this, for her own hands, her own attention, her own slow return to herself.

She slid her fingers free and found the swollen bud again, circling it with a touch so light she was barely there, and then her body broke open — a sudden, electrical current that shot through her lower back, down the length of her legs, all the way to her toes, a wave that arrived and arrived and arrived.

She lay still afterward, the sun still on her face, her body quietly pulsing, luminous.

She thought of him again, softly, warmly, the way you think of someone you love when you are also, finally, at home in yourself.

This, she thought, is what I would want to give him. Not just my body. This. All of this alive, open, loving thing.