I undressed slowly just for his breath

I walked into that suite like I always do carrying nothing except the silence between my heels and the velvet in my voice because sometimes the softest sound in a room is a woman who knows she has already been chosen before the door even closed behind her and this time I felt it in the way his shoulders didn’t shift when I entered as if my presence wasn’t new or shocking but inevitable like a memory coming home and he didn’t ask me anything he didn’t try to touch or talk or even smile he just watched and I stood there longer than I needed to tracing the lines of the Persian rug beneath my feet as if I had to decide which thread I would step on next but really I was just listening to his breath and how it rose ever so slightly when I moved my hand to the clasp of my silk dress that I wore without reason other than it felt like water and I knew water was the only thing that could quiet the fire I had already lit in his eyes and when the fabric finally loosened it did not fall but floated like something sacred and his breath deepened just enough for me to know that he was not admiring my skin but surrendering to it as if the air between us had become an offering and with each inch revealed I was not unveiling a body I was unwrapping an emotion he had never dared name in any of the languages he spoke fluently but never intimately because this kind of silence is its own language one spoken through collarbones and the inside of wrists and the part of the back that arches before it asks permission and he remained still entirely still as I let the dress slip below my knees not for him to see but for me to feel the cool air remind me that I still belonged to myself even when I was giving something away and he let out one breath that reached me like music and I let it cover me like a gown spun from restraint and hunger both.

He did not move but I could feel how every inch of his body wanted to which is always more powerful than when they do because restraint is the most intimate form of attention and I stood there in front of him wearing nothing but the ache between us and I waited for his eyes to trace the shadows on my skin like a cartographer searching for lost treasure not because he wanted to own anything but because he wanted to understand the terrain of a woman who never gave the same map twice and I stepped forward with the grace of someone who had never learned to run only to float and I sat beside him not on him not over him but beside because closeness is not about distance it is about intention and his fingers twitched ever so slightly not because he was eager but because he was trying not to be and in that effort he told me more than any moan could ever translate and I let my fingertips brush the edge of his jaw just once not as an invitation but as a revelation and he inhaled as if that small touch pulled the air from every room he had ever been in that did not have me in it and when I leaned in I did not kiss him I let my breath kiss the space between us the way dusk kisses the sea just enough to know it was there but never enough to be held and he exhaled with the reverence of someone who had finally found something worth worshipping quietly and I could feel it in his posture in his pulse in the way he whispered my name with the kind of ache reserved for memories that never really ended and when I finally let him touch me it wasn’t my body he touched first it was the silence I had dressed in when I walked in and he peeled it away with every look not every word and I melted not because he made me but because he allowed me to keep all the pieces that mattered while giving him the ones that begged to be seen.

There was no rush not in our breathing not in our becoming because some nights are not meant for climax they are meant for unraveling and I let myself be undone in his presence like a poem shedding its final rhyme like a violin string breaking not from force but from a note held too long and I laid back not as surrender but as expansion and he leaned in as if gravity had decided we no longer belonged apart and his hands mapped me with a reverence that made me forget the difference between desire and devotion and we moved in that quiet rhythm that only the moon understands the kind of rhythm where no one leads but everyone arrives and I didn’t speak because my mouth had already given him more than words and when he finally kissed me it wasn’t on my lips but on my shoulder as if to thank me for being real in a world that rewards illusion and I knew right then that he would remember this not as a night of pleasure but as a night he almost found himself and maybe that is what I give more than anything not the illusion of love but the reflection of it and when I left I did not look back not because I didn’t want to but because I had already given him the only part of me that travels without needing to pack the moment.