Chapter 29 #2
I smile and run the corner of the foil package up the inside of her thigh, light as a breath.
She draws up a little. “Bruno.”
“Yeah?”
“Just that,” she says.
I draw the packet back down toward her knee, pin-soft, holding her eyes. Something is happening that I can’t name or categorize. As though looking at each other has opened some kind of channel between us—as though we’re sharing sensations, linked by it.
It stuns me, that looking can be like this. And touching.
I don’t know what to do with all this human interaction. I make watches. My world is sequences and tolerances and tiny mechanical certainties.
She is laughter and movement and whimsy and endless enthusiasm, and she makes things better.
“You’re a little slow.” She snatches the condom from my fingers and tears it open, watching me with that playful look. “How about I do it?” She rolls it on, unhurried, then lifts her eyes to mine as her knuckles drift across my stomach.
I grab her hands and kiss them. Everything feels so new and uncharted. I usually wouldn’t like this.
She bends forward and kisses me on the belly. “You know what I love? That you knocked Cara’s and Madison’s croquet balls so viciously out of bounds.”
“That’s who that was?”
“Yes, and I love that you did that. I thought you were playing a little intensely, but you were being my knight in shining armor.”
I stroke her hair, happy I could do that for her.
She kisses, lower, below my belly button.
I half think she might take me in her mouth, but the condom would taste like latex and chemicals, and I don’t want that for her.
I move onto the bed, bracing myself over her, but not yet touching her.
The laughter in her eyes turns to heat as I push her legs apart and guide myself into her and press in.
Her eyes drift closed and she lets out a breath, like I’ve pushed the air from her lungs. Her heat grips me—I have a hundred similes ready and not one of them is adequate. She clings to me as I thrust into her.
I still. Kiss her lips. Her eyelids. “Open your eyes,” I say.
She opens them and I fuck her slow and sure, watching her, letting it build. She grabs my ass, trying to speed things up. I don’t let her. I want it to last. I want to make her feel better than anything I can put a number on.
“Pull my hair,” she says.
“This isn’t that kind of fuck.”
“I want you to, though.”
“Sorry.”
She sits up and kisses my chest. “Come on,” she whispers. “Please,” she breathes.
I grab her hair, wrap it around my fist, but don’t pull. “I think you’re just using me for my personality.”
“No,” she says. “Not just that.”
“Not just that?” I pull her hair then, lightly. “What else?”
She pants, right on the edge. She likes that. I like it too—more than I have any business liking anything.
The slow fuck is out the window.
I slide a hand around to her ass and grip her hard. “What?” I demand. Just to demand something.
“You’ll never know,” she pants.
My hunger isn’t something I can reason with. Being inside her only makes it worse—makes me want more, makes every careful measurement I’ve ever run on anything feel suddenly, completely beside the point. My strokes turn relentless.
“What else?” I pull her hair harder, tip her head back, drag my jaw across her throat.
I let my strokes go slow and commanding.
She breaks apart under me. I suck in a breath—the way she feels as she comes, pulling at me.
I try to hold on. The need has other plans.
I thrust into her once, twice, and then come apart inside her, holding her.
My orgasm spins out longer than I expected. When it’s over, I stay.
I can’t process it. Just the fact of her—inexplicably, unknowably right in the dim light of the place.
I ease out and drop onto my back beside her and stare at the ceiling of the room I’ve slept in alone for all these years as if I’ve never seen it.
“Wow,” she says. Quiet. For once, not a joke.
“Wow.”
She rolls her head to face me. My flannel is on the floor. Her hair is a wreck. Her eyes are shining.
“Captain Clockwork,” she whispers, “went off duty.”
I put my hand on her cheek. My fingers don’t know what they’re doing.
For the first time in I don’t remember how long, I don’t want them to.
I don’t want any of the slick polished moves I’ve done with women in my past. It’s as if I’m a different person around Kelsey.
Or maybe I’m the same person without armor. Like her.
She traces the line of my cheekbone, sliding a finger over my lips.
When did I become somebody who let a woman touch me freely like this? When did I become somebody who let a woman onto my yacht?
“What would you be doing this week if you weren’t here?” I ask. “Besides your friend’s dinner.”
“Everyday things, I guess. Cleaning and hanging out. Teaching a few classes. Catch up on all the things I let slide when the show is going.”
She sits up, cross-legged on the bed, gazing down at me, breasts, small and pert, nipples like rosebuds. She has a long, graceful neck. Is that a dancer thing? I want to ask. I want to know everything about her.
A patch of pink on the side of her jaw must have come from my whiskers. Something like pleasure twists through me at the idea that I’ve somehow marked her. Possessed her.
Connections with people always seem like a way to be let down, but I like this. I like talking to her and fucking her and driving her enemies’ croquet balls off the field and buying things for her and feeding her.
And I can’t take my eyes off that mark on her jaw. I want to touch it, but I have half a thought that it might vanish if I do that. As though it’s maybe not real.
“That probably sounds boring to you,” she says. “You grew up on some fabulous estate. You went to boarding school and then moved to a yacht. You don’t even do your own laundry. Do you know how?”
I catch her hand in mine. “Of course I’ve done laundry. Our superiors were very strict about that sort of thing in military school.”
She looks serious suddenly. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“You could live anywhere in the world. Why live alone on a yacht?”
“Haven’t we already discussed this? I can be as much of an ogre as I want.”
“Plenty of people are ogres on land.”
“But at sea, there’s nobody to call you out on it. You can be as big of an ogre as you want.”
She searches my face. “Don’t bullshit me.”
“And I like the freedom.”
“That’s your generic magazine answer.”
“It happens to be true.”
“Freedom from what?”
I gaze out the window at the endless blue of the sky and water, but I don’t tell her how the endlessness of it is the only thing that feels right to me, or how being a true fucking island is the one thing I can trust.
“Freedom from everything,” I say.
“But you could have freedom anywhere. Why not a farmhouse in rural Vermont or something?”
“Can you drive the farmhouse away if you don’t like the weather? Or the neighbors?”