She kissed his shoulder, “Don’t ever do that again,” then his collarbone, “you need to be more careful.” She lingered at the side of his neck, not quite sucking; the kiss wet and strong. “I don’t like to see you hurt.”
She dragged her lips to the hollow at the base of his throat and he tipped his head back and groaned—not pain, he was so
turned on by her slow exploration, her sweet tenderness when he’d thought he might’ve lost this. When she climbed onto the daybed, he drew her down so he was lying on the pillow and she was draped over his unbruised side.
He closed his eyes and pointed to his ear and she nuzzled it, teeth gently scraping his lobe, a nibble, a bite. Ah, this was better than drugs, better than sleep and rest. He pointed to his jaw and she moved her lips along the bone to his chin and rested her lips there. She was healing him kiss by kiss. He was breathing quickly, one hand to the back of her head, the other directing her affection to his cheek, to his eyelid, to his forehead. Nothing hurt anymore, she’d taken all the pain away. His head was full of images of her naked and loving him. He pointed to his lips and she didn’t go there, breaking him out of the vision of her loveliness. He pursed and tapped his lips again and she replaced his finger with hers.
“When did it happen, gradually or all at once?”
He captured her hand and held it. How did he say he’d been losing his residual vision since he met her, that it closed out permanently at her place, sometime after they’d first come together, when he was sated and happy, when he’d closed his eyes not knowing it would be the last time he’d see the ghost shape of her. It seemed a bitter thing to tell her. But he didn’t have the energy to lie.
“That first morning I woke with you.” She gasped. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, Damon.”
“I’ve always known it would come. It was dumb to be surprised by it.”
Her hands either side of his face; she’d be looking at him intently. “It’s a huge thing. Don’t brush it off like it’s nothing.”
He cleared his throat. Emotion was like phlegm, a thick plug, hard to talk past. The huge thing was he’d found this woman and fallen in love with her and she wasn’t scared to take him on, despite everything in her past that taught her the stress of living with someone else’s disability.
“I woke up, it was gone. I didn’t know if your bedroom was particularly dark, or what time it was. I told you I was in the bathroom. I was, I tried the light, couldn’t tell if it came on, then I went out on the landing where I knew the sun was.”
“You wanted to talk about the weather, because you didn’t know if it was a sunny day.”
He heard sadness in her voice, but not pity. It acted like a snort of helium, made his voice tight. “I was looking for a loophole.” He coughed it out. “I wanted the day to be grey and dark so the black didn’t have to be in me.”
“Parasailing, on the day you lose your light, oh Damon. And I got stroppy with you.”
“You thought I didn’t want to be with you. But I had to do something to prove I was still the same person. I’m The idiot Voice but I didn’t know how to use it. I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t want you to think me losing my light and making love to you were connected. They’re not, it could’ve happened at any time, and I wasn’t ready to talk about it, with anyone.” But he was talking about it now, and the sun was still going to rise tomorrow without him seeing its light, and he was going to be okay.
She kissed him. The softest press on his lips and then again, delicate, barely there. He lifted his head to chase after her, needing more, and she crashed into him, knocking a grunt of pain iced with delight out of him as she pelting him with kisses, until their lips locked, sealed with sorrow and forgiveness, slick with promise.
Damon folded his arms around her. The word lucky pulsed through the carved out cave in his watermelon head, echoing in his limbs, surely strong enough to clear the colour out of his bruises, the soreness from his limbs, the regret from his soul. He owed some god on a benign astral plane for the luck of having the life he did: the talent, the family, friends, the hope that, despite his loss of vision, he’d continue to build the life he wanted to live, with the woman he wanted tucked inside it.
When Georgia settled against his shoulder he knew he had to use his voice, give her the new score. “I don’t want to specialise in freaking you out, but I love you, Georgia and that is a little crazy quick, but I walked into a truck and I’m concussed so if you need an out, it’s that I’m not right in the head.”
“And if I don’t want an out?”
He laughed and didn’t care that it felt all kinds of unhealthy. He rolled a length of her hair around his finger and tugged it and she lifted her head. He brought her face close so he could whisper in her ear. “Then we’re both fucked, and that sounds perfect to me.”
22: Vulnerable
Georgia was late and Moon Blink was rocking. Loud, crowded, with a make a big night of it vibe going down. They were three deep at the bar. Angus would be pleased. Damon was on stage belting out Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls. She could hear him but not see him. It was standing room only.
She eased her way through to the one spot she knew she could stand and watch him and not be jostled or hassled. Jammed in the corner by the kitchen servery hutch, she got a whiff of bleach that made her blink and her first unobstructed view of the stage. Her mouth dropped open in surprise.
Burn in hell. Damon was some kind of dirty magic tonight. He wasn’t wearing his usual smooth, cool; he was all hot and ruffled. He’d ditched his suit and gone with blue jeans and a white button-up shirt—untucked, unbuttoned. All the way off would’ve been less provocative. He had a beer bottle and a cigarette in his hand.
He had to be illegal; cigarette aside, he was electric. The song, the voice, honey-cured and smoking; the look, the moves he was making, all fluid hip and knee, flash of rippling abs and head flick. He was wet, sweat on his chest, his hair shining in the light, counting them into the next song. He was positively prowling around that stage, saved from walking off it by a new kick plate that replaced the white paint. He no longer wore his sunglasses up there because the footlights didn’t bother him anymore, so she could read the expression around his eyes—sin.
Good Lord, he was gorgeous and dangerous and hers.
He was also, based on the new beer being passed to him, hand to hand over people’s heads, not entirely sober. She’d never known him to drink, other than a glass of wine with dinner and even then only when they were at his place or her flat. He said alcohol mucked with his balance, with his spatial orientation, worse than for a sighted person.
There was no evidence of that, he was totally in command up there and his whole orientation was sex. He could have any woman and a good percentage of the men he wanted with the cut of a dimple.
If there wasn’t a crowd, if he wasn’t mid-song and wrecking himself with enjoyment, she’d drag him off stage and improvise a lap dance worthy of a rock star, because waiting to get him home was too long to wait to have her hands on him. And she’d had her hands on him this morning before work. It was hard to tell which one of them was more insatiable. The only thing saving her from being a bona fide sex addict was her insistence on keeping her own place and spending at least two nights there alone every week.