Free Intrusion by Charlotte Stein

altogether—one that makes me want to clutch at him. I need to clutch at him. My bones and muscles seem to have abandoned me, and if I don’t hold on to something I’m going to end up on the floor. Grabbing him is practically necessary, even though I have no idea where to grab.
    He put his hand in my hair. Does that make it all right to put mine in his? I suspect not, but have no clue where that leaves me. Is an elbow any better? What about his upper arm? His upper arm is hardly suggestive at all, yet I can’t quite bring myself to do it. If I do he might break this kiss, and I’m just not ready for that.
    I probably won’t be ready for that tomorrow . His stubble is burning me just a little and the excitement is making me so shaky I could pass for a cement mixer, but I still want it to carry on. Every new thing he does is just such a revelation—like when he turns a little and just sort of catches my lower lip between his, or caresses my jaw with the side of his thumb.
    I didn’t think he had it in him.
    It could be that he doesn’t. When he finally comes up for air he has to kind of rest his forehead against mine for a second. His breathing comes in erratic bursts, as though he just ran up a hill that isn’t really there. Those hands in my hair are trembling, unable to let go, and his first words to me blunder out in guttural rush.
    â€œI wasn’t expecting that to be so intense,” he says, and I get it then. He didn’t mean for things to go that way. They just got out of control. All of that passion and urgency isn’t who he is, and now he wants to go back to being the real him. He even steps back, and straightens, and breathes long and slow until that man returns.
    Now he is the person he wants to be: stoic and cool. Or at least, that’s what I think until he turns to leave. He tells me good-bye and I accept it; he touches my shoulder and I process this as all I might reasonably expect in the future. And then just as he’s almost gone I happen to glance down, and see something that suggests that the idea of a real him may not be so clear-cut:
    The outline of his erection, hard and heavy against the material of his jeans.

Chapter Five
    I DON’T KNOW how to ask him about the erection. Every time I think up a good question it dies a death in my throat—probably because none of them are good questions at all, really. They have words in them like stiff and arousal, and neither of those seems like a great road to go down. They were barely passable when I tried to dirty talk my last boyfriend.
    How can they be passable here? He’s so traumatized by whatever happened to him that he can hardly touch my hand. Somehow we make dinner side by side without so much as a brush of my elbow against his arm. He dances around me and I dance around him, and in the end I just have to accept that maybe I hallucinated that solid shape.
    It certainly seems like something my imagination wants to make up. Last night I had a dream about him slowly peeling off my clothes in the exact way I saw him taking off the outer casing of a computer the other day, and I didn’t wake up feeling rested and content. I woke up slap bang in the middle of what can only be described as an orgasm.
    I had an orgasm in my sleep while thinking of him piecing together a motherboard. I had a wet dream like a teenage boy, only much more awful than that because Noah doesn’t want to. I am absolutely certain that he doesn’t want to. I wish I could ask him if he ever wants to.
    But the very act of asking seems like a transgression.
    Instead I make do with the tiniest hints of affection, waiting patiently for another moment like the one in the hall. And it does come—even if it’s sort of by accident. He leans past me to get the salt, and I think he’s leaning in for something else, and there it is. My mouth is on his, and his mouth is on mine, and neither one of us is pulling