Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
HAPPILY EVER DURING
Will
One day I know I’ll be nostalgic for mornings like these. The way life changes overnight. It did for us. The night we met. The night we fought. The night she loved me. The night we moved in. We make decisions at night. We cling to each other at night. We plan our future at night.
All of our boxes are long since unpacked. We’ve set up the spare room as an office that we share, and there’s a perfect nook off the living room that she said looks like it could have been made for an upright piano. So I had one delivered for her a week after we moved in.
I walk back through the space coming back from our run. Mine and Titian’s, though despite his collie-esque mix, he’s not as much of a runner as the shelter implied he might be. So some days, like today, it's more of a compromise. I slow my pace, he occasionally breaks into an enthusiastic trot, and we both pretend this counts as exercise until we reward ourselves with a treat from the coffee shop. I unclip his leash where he runs laps around until he lands himself on the couch until it’s time for lunch.
Through the archway of our kitchen, I spot Arden on her toes, reaching for something from a high cabinet. A pair of pajama shorts and my old college sweatshirt barely covering her ass can't be keeping her warm in the crisp morning air seeping through the window she always cracks open. I’m behind her and she’s wrapped in my arms, the soft roundness of her butt pressed against my torso as I lift her a couple extra feet in the air to reach whatever it is she was struggling for. It flutters down around us and the powder forming a crown on the top of her head, as the bag of flour remains toppled over where it was and it’s snowing in the kitchen. I slide her down to her feet and she spins around to face me, and our bodies move in the way they’ve come to know each other. The remnants of the breakfast she was trying to make, at our feet.
Her hands are in mine and I see the glint in her eye as I stretch my arms away from her, only to pull her into me in a spin. The dusting of flour falling around us as she’s in my arms will one day be the snow globe I shake to remember this moment. We’re dancing to the same song that is only playing on the shared line between us. Half dressed in the kitchen as the first snow flurry of the season picks up outside and she laughs at the powder on her cheeks.
I take steps and back her into the cabinet, caging her in directly where I found her moments ago. My hands pressed to the counter behind her leaving handprints in the flour, I lean down and kiss her in a way that’s full of greed. Not in what I can take from her, but greed for moments like this. There’s no limit to how many of them I can consume, how many I want. All of her, always. I’ve known it for a while. A lot longer than has made any sense, but I know it, despite my lack of understanding it.
When I stood there that night and challenged her to love me back, I knew then what I know now. She loves me wholly in a way I don’t think I deserve, but I will crave until the day I die.
Her cheeks are flushed, and our noses brush. The dusting of flour from her face being picked up in the scruff of my facial hair and she laughs into my mouth as she blinks it away. My tongue slips into her mouth as her fingers reach for the waistband of my sweatpants and dips her hand in to grab me. I can’t control the sound that reverberates from deep within me. Thinking about how deep in her I could be. As her hand wraps around me tightly my breathing quickens. Being near her everything has always quickened. Her hair sits atop her head in the messy morning bun and as she drops to her knees, taking my pants with her, foregoing any plan for pancakes.
My fingers claw at the counter as she takes me in her mouth, that magical, argumentative, fiery, fucking mouth. The movements are tight and wet and I’m shattering with each hum of her lips as her fingernails dig into my thigh. Leaving the most glorious half moons deep within the ink.
"You’re perfect" I grunt out in a voice that only she would know. The tone is so different that it’s only ever been used in moments like this where she has me so completely lost to her. She picks up speed and I brush the hair that’s fallen in her eyes, the flour leaving fingerprints across her forehead as I frantically try to find her eyes.
She knows this is what does it, everytime fucking time, she can hear it between the breaths and groans in desperate hunger and as she tightens her lips around me and takes me as deeply as she can, using her hands to hold the rest of me. She looks up, her eyes wide but far from doe like. There’s nothing simple and confused about them, and when I fall, those are the pools I fall into. And I come as she pulls me deep to the back of her throat.
She sits back against the kitchen cabinets and I join her on the floor. We are sitting side by side, and I feel like my legs have given out. She sucked the blood out of my entire lower half, and now, here we are. Her head on my shoulder as our breathing syncs up, as it always does, and always has. From this vantage point our kitchen is a disaster. The tornado that’s gone through it leaving the type of destruction that can only come from two people so wildly in love.
"Come here, come closer…" I whisper into the crown of her head.
We’re close, in all the ways that matter and all the ways that don’t, but she doesn’t mistake my meaning as I pull her onto my bare lap and my hands find themselves pulling off her sweatshirt and I know she can feel me hardening again beneath her, the flimsy fabric of the cotton shorts not any kind of meaningful barrier between us.
The winds of us pick up, whirling in a way things crash around to the ground as she’s flipped on her back and she begs, writhing beneath me, this game we play as I tease her. I’d never deny her a fucking thing and like most things, she knows. The idea that I have any control here when I finally slide into her and her back bows from the ground, is ridiculous. My arm catches her beneath me as I keep us pressed together, her entire body responds as mine does. Her teeth sink into my skin to muffle the sound and I lean into her ear, "Scream for me, darling."
Her leg locks around my back and I bury my face in her neck, the taste of sweat on my lips and tongue. Her hands are clawing at my back as her breathing picks up and so does my speed. She lets out a panting cry of pleasure and I release mine before we collapse into the ecstasy of this morning in a pile of sweaty limbs. Her skin is pinked from me and her eyes look weighted in the way of sated contentment that comes only from this type of obsessive intimacy.
There’s never going to be enough of this.
Never enough of her.