The Yes Next Door

We make it to the kitchen because water sounds wise and the bed was becoming a storm with no edges. The light over the sink is a warm coin; the counter is cool, slick under my palms. She hands me a glass and watches me drink like the act itself is foreplay. Maybe it is.

“Rule check,” Sahana says, stepping between my knees where I’m perched on the counter. “Same as before? Ask, answer, ‘pause’ to breathe, ‘stop’ for stop?”

“Yes,” I say, throat still cold from the water. “And I want you greedy.”

“Good.” She smiles with her whole mouth. “Can I kiss you like I intend to keep you?”

“Yes.”

The kiss starts soft and then decides softness can be a weapon. She brackets my hips and pulls me to the edge, presses in, slow, deliberate. The counter hums under me, tiny vibrations from the old fridge churning in the corner. When she breaks the kiss, it’s just to speak against my mouth. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want your hands,” I say, honest like we practiced. “On me. Guiding me.”

“Specific,” she whispers, pleased. “Can I show you how I like you to touch me while I touch you?”

“Yes.”

We match each other—pressure, pace, breath—like mirroring in a dance studio, except the mirrors are our eyes and the lesson is heat. Her fingers teach me where to be firmer, where to be patient; mine learn fast, rewarded by the way her breath trips, by the way she tips her head and gives me her throat like a promise. She tastes faintly of orange and salt; I taste like wanting and her.

“Okay?” she checks, thumb stroking an idle line that makes my spine go bright.

“More,” I say.

She laughs, low and wicked, and slides me fully to the edge of the counter, standing closer, the kind of close that reorganizes your priorities. “Feet on my hips,” she says, guiding, and when I do, her hands travel—confident, attuned—until my whole body leans into her like home.

“Please,” I say, and feel the word land in her.

She answers by deepening everything: mouth, hands, rhythm. The kitchen becomes complicit—the way the cabinet door bumps my calf, the way the faucet drips like a metronome, the way the night air from the window cools sweat just enough to make heat sharper when it returns. I anchor on her shoulders, on the strength under skin, on the way she meets and meets and meets me, never taking more than I give, always offering more if I ask.

“Greedy,” she reminds, voice a warm scrape, and I take it literally—pull her closer, guide her faster, then slow her with a grip that says wait, right there. She listens. She always listens. When it crests—when the world shrinks to breath and pulse and the sound I make without meaning to—she holds me together with both hands, kisses my jaw like a benediction, and says my name in a way that feels like being found.

We laugh after, the helpless kind, forehead to forehead, while the counter cools my thighs and the air decides to be kind. She reaches for the sink sprayer and wets a dish towel, wrings it out, and touches me with it—care disguised as mischief. I hiss and then sigh. She kisses that sound too.

“My turn,” she says, and I slide down gladly, hands at her waist, kneeling because worship feels like the right verb. She leans back on the counter and opens for me like the night did earlier—no drama, just certainty. I take my time, attentive and hungry, letting her show me what makes her breath catch and what makes it leave her entirely. When she reaches that edge, I stay with her, pressure steady, pacing tuned to her body’s yes. Her hands come down, clasping my hair, not to push, only to hold. She says “pause” once to savor, then “again,” and I do, and when she breaks open she doesn’t hide, she rides it, and the sound she makes lives in the kitchen tiles now, a secret sealed into grout.

When we can stand without swaying, we rinse glasses, laugh at nothing, and decide the counter deserves a medal. She lifts my wrist to her mouth and kisses the pulse there, then turns my hand over and kisses the palm like she’s signing a receipt for delivery.

“Okay?” she asks, even though we both know the answer.

“Better than okay,” I say. “I want—”

“Say it.”

“I want to take you to bed and fall apart again,” I say. “And then sleep with your hair on my face so I dream in your smell.”

She grins, feral and tender. “Yes to both.”

We leave the kitchen light on like a lighthouse, just in case we need it again. In the bedroom, the fan keeps its slow blessing. She pulls me down beside her, bodies still humming. We don’t rush to noise. We touch hands, trade small kisses, let language come back in little pieces.

“Confession?” she says.

“Always.”

“I almost set another rule,” she says, pushing hair from my forehead, “but it felt like a fear, not a boundary.”

“What was it?”

Don’t fall. That’s what her eyes say. Her mouth says something braver. “No pretending this is casual if it stops feeling casual.”

I consider. “Then my confession: it already doesn’t.”

“Good.”

We make love again, slower, less about chase than about staying. It’s the kind of intimacy that makes time elastic—where a minute holds an hour, where a touch holds a paragraph of meaning. I learn the places she blushes when she’s praised. She learns the words that make me shiver just by arriving. When the end comes, it’s quiet and total, like rain starting—inevitable, right.

We drift under the sheet, legs tangled, air cooling on our skin. Outside, a late train speaks in steel. Inside, the fan murmurs vows we’re not ready to name.

“Tomorrow?” I ask, because the ritual feels like sealing wax.

“Tomorrow,” she says, eyes heavy, mouth soft. “And if you’re brave—breakfast.”

“I can do brave.”

“I know,” she says, and falls asleep with her hand on my chest, her fingers counting something I can’t see but feel anyway.