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T’Challa sets her on the edge of their bed and kneels and noses his way down her leg, starting just midway up her inner thigh. Nakia watches him take his time kissing every inch of skin between her thigh and her ankle and, as he looks up at her with his lips on her knee and his eyes hot, she takes his right hand and laces her fingers with his. His nose and beard on her skin feels like river grasses on the banks, the kind that whisper secrets to your ankles as you pass.
He presses his mouth slowly, deliberately, to her shin, his left hand on her calf. Nakia shivers. Her breath in her throat shudders on her next exhale; T’Challa smiles in such a way that tells her he knows well what he’s doing to her.
“I like you here,” he says. He traces a circle around her ankle with his finger. “You are strong here.”
Nakia’s leg twitches and he trails his fingers back up to her thigh, being sure to chart paler scars with his mouth. She likes him here, too. She reaches over his head and spreads her fingers down his bare back.
T’Challa laughs against her thigh. She shudders again. This laugh of his, she thinks, sounds like waters at high tide. Full and wanting.
“I like you here,” Nakia tells him. She knows every scar that’s disappeared from his back; she taps the spot where a spear once stuck through him months ago, the day she’d lost him. His left hand finds her waist and squeezes briefly, then rests there as if to say he would never leave her. His thumb teases the hem of her shirt. “You are lovely, here.”
She straightens, feeling rather than seeing him move beneath her. He sits back on his heels and looks at her between her knees.
“Everywhere I am, I am lovelier,” he says, his eyes somehow both serious and smiling, “because everywhere I am, I am in love with you.”
Oh.
“Then,” she says, “I am stronger everywhere as well, because everywhere I know you feel for me as I do for you.”
T’Challa just looks at her and her heart aches to see him like this, so beautiful and bare before her. Nakia kisses the back of his hand, and he smiles like she’s handed him all the rivers contained in the entire world. He shines brilliant under their weight.
And — oh.
Nakia slowly runs her hands along his shoulders, taking her own time mapping the dips and gives and pulls of his muscles, learning the way his tributaries bring her fingers to his neck and to his face and to his lips. T’Challa’s gaze on her is so much; she watches her own hands until her thumbs press on his eyebrows. He covers her hands with his own, then gently reaches to turn her face toward him. She tracked the movement before he touched her, though, so she is already looking when he does.
She wants so much tonight. She wants to feel the way his eyes tell her he feels, and would like her to feel, and by his hands if she’ll let him.
Nakia lifts his hand from her waist and places it along the side of her face, and as she does, he stands. She shifts backward on the bed and he follows, sinking again to his knees before her. The headboard is hard behind her shoulders. T’Challa taps her knees and she opens them for him to sit between.
<<Will you tell me again?>> he asks. She lightly pulls on his shoulder and he gives in to her, leaning down until their foreheads are a hand’s breadth away. He plants his hand on the headboard for balance.
Nakia wonders a moment what it would mean to fall instead. <<Tell you what?>> she asks him, hooking her heels on his lower back.
Even as she asks, the moment between them seems to stretch so full that it nearly feels like the moment when diving when you’re caught between land and the water. T’Challa’s breath breaks on her lips when he speaks. It tastes like oranges.
<<What it is you feel for me?>>
<<I do not have words for it,>> she whispers. He ghosts his lips over hers, and this time it is he who shudders. She feels it move the bed and the earth beneath them. <<It is too great for me to name.>>
He looks at her like he’s landed in the water. <<Nakia,>> he says, and it is as if water droplets rolled off his tongue instead.
She says, <<T’Challa,>> and he gasps as if just coming up for air.
Nakia covers the leftmost part of his chest with her palm. Beneath her hand and his own skin, his heart beats like a steady tide.
The way he looks at her tells her he knows his name is her answer to his question, her way to tell him how much she feels for him.
He is so close to her now. She wants him closer, and his heart beneath her hand whispers the same want.
<<T’Challa.>>
His heart beats faster. Nakia says his name and says his name until she reaches up and pulls him down, and his lips crash against hers like two rivers meeting. She gasps into his mouth and he deepens the kiss, sliding one hand among her hair knots and the other skimming the length of her body again until it hooks under her knee and T’Challa resituates himself, breaking apart to look at her. She touches his lips, and he smiles. He smooths his thumb beneath her eye as if he’s found both an eyelash and an excuse to touch her there.
Nakia wants. She says his name again and T’Challa hears, his expression suddenly shifting to something that makes her toes curl in a most pleasant way. He rubs the hem of her shirt between his thumb and forefinger, just barely brushing his knuckles on the sensitive part of her stomach.
She has already said yes to the question he’s forming. T’Challa laughs once, ducking his head, and then she lifts her arms to help him bring her shirt over her head. He lets it fall off the side of the bed.
Nakia sees him watching her face closely even as he slowly rubs her breasts, running his fingers over her nipples to make her breath hitch the way he knows it will. Apparently satisfied she’s well pleased with his actions, he takes one of her nipples in his mouth. She gasps again when she feels his tongue.
“I like you here,” he whispers against her skin. He draws back, taking her hands as he does so. <<You are so beautiful here.>>
<<T’Challa,>> Nakia says. Sitting here with her, her skin tingling from his lips and his beard, he may well have brought the oceans into being. <<My love.>>
She tries to put everything into those words. Her hopes for them, her worries for them; her fear when she lost him and her joys when he woke up in her arms. This moment, too, heavy and yet light like it wants to break to the surface and greet the sun. She touches his nose, his ears, his lips. The very fact of him, alive, she tried to put this into those two words too. Her king. Her love.
<<Nakia,>> he says, <<my heart.>>
Oh.
His heart. Nakia presses her palm to his heart again and it beats and beats steadily. She feels it when their pulses match tempos.
She says, <<I love you.>>
T’Challa kisses his way to her mouth and her heart feels as though it has fallen, deeply and truly. He says this against her lips: <<I like you here. You are so much of everything, here.>>
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Later, when she is fluttery after his attentions and his heart is pounding from hers, Nakia buries her nose against T’Challa’s shoulder, breathing in the smell of him. She knows he does the same. The knowledge makes something beneath her ribs grow wings.
<<I am so enamored of you,>> he whispers into her hair.
<<I like you here,>> she tells him, and she kisses his shoulder. <<You are so beautiful here.>>
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