Chapter Text
Night came down fast while the two of you were otherwise occupied, and now the only light in the room is the moonlight--that and the lights of the city, pouring in over the floorboards.
Lying on your side, you watch Sameen sit up in bed. In a second or two, you expect her to reach for a tank top on the floor and order you to get out--though you have no intention of moving an inch until she makes you. For now, it feels good to stay like this, smelling her pillow, watching her shift, wondering what side she sleeps on.
The seconds tick by, a minute, maybe. She’s still sitting there, silent, just looking out her window, her expression flickering with unreadable thoughts.
You’ve never been much of a romantic, but looking at her like this, her face alight with intention, bare back in three-quarter profile, partially silhouetted by the glow of the city and the moonlight, makes you melt even deeper into her warm bed.
Sameen doesn’t say a word as she lifts her hands to her hair, pulls down the band, and shakes her loose hair over her shoulders. She clearly put it back wet; the scent of her shampoo is fresh and sweet as she pulls her fingers through from roots to ends. Her hair is long, maybe longer than yours, and impossibly dark; as it falls through her fingers, she looks like she’s weaving ribbons of light from the window into its strands.
This is the first time you’ve watched her let her hair down. It feels somehow more intimate than kissing, more intimate than undressing. The wet scent of her hair, the looseness of its mass spread over her shoulders and back, is like a new, a deeper kind of nakedness. You watch her carefully, the way you’d watch an animal in a clearing, in the moonlight: not a stray movement, not so much as a deep breath.
Her hands drop to her lap; she stares out the window a little while longer. You will her to keep looking, keep looking out at the world, so you can keep looking at her.
The first time Sameen lets you take her hair down--a while later--it feels like like kissing her for the first time all over again.
You don’t know what made you ask, or what made her say yes. It’s the middle of the night after a mission and she’s gotten what she brought you here for and you’re both exhausted, but she hasn’t told you to go, and something in you tells you she won’t tonight.
She turns her back to you hesitantly--not as if she doesn’t want you to do this, but as if she doesn’t know how to let you. It strikes you again how new this is to both of you, this radical closeness: sharing a bed every now and then, waking up tousled and soft and new with someone else after a perfectly contented lifetime of sleeping alone. Over time, little by little, you’ve been unfolding each other’s private rituals, and it’s strange and terrifying and beautiful--at least to you.
Trembling a little, your fingers trace the nape of her neck and twine around the mass of her hair. With the other hand, you slide off the elastic band--and ring it around your own wrist. It might still smell like her, later.
Sameen sighs when you release her hair from your hand, as you comb down the length of it with your fingers. You coil and uncoil it in your hands; you dig your fingers into her scalp and draw them slowly down the length of her hair, past the section still damp from under the elastic, all the way to the ends. Your fingertips trace her shoulder blades, her collarbone, the length of her arms.
Her lips are parted and her eyes are closed. You’re surprised she’s still letting you touch her like this, so gently, without pushing you away--or grabbing your wrists and turning it into her own game.
Because you can’t help pushing your luck, you lean in and smell her hair, smell the warmth of her neck, and when she doesn’t bat you away, kiss her ears and the soft patches behind them, the joining of her jaw, her temples, through the damp curtain of her hair.
When she finally gets tired of it and shakes you off to get some water, you fall back onto the bed, more contented than you think you’ve ever been in your life--that is, until she comes back to bed and begins to kiss you, thirstily and tenderly.
The next morning, when you’re across the city, you still feel the pressure of her hair tie around your wrist like a memory, like a promise.