25. Kevin #2
She settled her weight over my mouth and I stopped thinking in full sentences.
She was already slick from before, swollen and hot against my lips, and the first slow drag of my tongue pulled a sound out of her I felt in my own chest. I gripped the backs of her thighs to hold her exactly where I wanted her and worked her open with the flat of my tongue, then the point of it, learning the rhythm that made her spine curl forward until she had to brace a hand against the headboard.
Her thighs had started to shake on either side of my head, gripping and trembling, and I hummed against her just to feel her buck.
There was a part of me that kept whispering underneath all of it that I had no right to this, that a better man had lost the privilege of her three years ago in a restaurant with his phone face down.
I let it whisper. Then I closed my lips around the spot that undid her and sucked, slow and deliberate, and drove two fingers up into her at the same time, curling them the way she’d taught me a lifetime ago, and she came apart with a cry that bounced off the bare walls.
I held her hips through every pulse and kept my mouth on her, greedy, drinking down each aftershock, until her legs gave out and she sagged forward over me.
If there was a heaven it couldn’t possibly improve on the weight of her coming on my tongue.
She sagged onto the bed beside me, boneless, breathing hard.
I rolled over her. Settled between her legs. Looked down at her flushed face and glazed eyes.
“You’re not tired already, are you, my gorgeous wife?”
“Not your wife,” she mumbled.
“I’m not calling you my ex anything. You’re my present. You were never my past.”
She bit her lip. Her hips lifted, seeking friction. “Fuck me, Kev.”
I smiled. “That’s my girl.”
“Don’t get smug,” she panted. “You’ve still got three years of blue balls to make up for.”
“Then stop talking and let me,” I said, and I lined myself up and rubbed the head of my cock through how wet she was, slow, just to watch her fall apart at the mouth. “God, listen to you. You’re soaked. You’ve been soaked since the clinic.”
“Whose fault is that?” she gasped.
“Mine,” I said. “All mine. Say it.”
“Yours,” she breathed, and it undid me.
I kissed her deep and slow, tasting her on my own mouth, and then I pushed in, one long unhurried stroke, and had to stop halfway and breathe because the heat and the tight clutch of her nearly finished me right there.
She was so wet I slid the rest of the way on a groan neither of us tried to muffle.
I watched her face the whole time. The flush had climbed from her chest up her throat and into her cheeks, her lips were parted, and when I bottomed out her whole body arched up off the mattress and her eyes rolled closed.
Every fear I’d carried into this room went quiet at once.
There was only this, only us, only the way her breath caught on the same syllable it always had, the small broken oh she’d been making under me for thirteen years.
This time I took my time. Long, slow strokes that made her whimper.
I built her up gradually, watching her face, reading every gasp and moan.
I’d wasted years not paying attention. I made up for a few of those minutes now, cataloguing her, the flutter of her lashes, the way her mouth fell open when I dragged out slow, the pink burning high on her cheeks.
Attention was the only currency I had left that hadn’t been spent badly.
Money she didn’t want from me. Grand gestures she’d see coming a mile off and rightly distrust. But this, the simple act of watching her and letting what I saw change what I did, this was the thing I’d never actually given her when I had every chance.
So I gave it now. I read her the way I should have read every unanswered message, every quiet stretch at a dinner table, every time she’d said she was fine in a voice that plainly wasn’t.
I’d spend the rest of my life reading her. It was the least a man could do.
“Please,” she begged. “Kevin, please.”
“Please what?”
“I need to come. Please let me come.”
“Not yet.” I slowed down even more. “I want to feel you. I want to remember this.”
I edged her for what felt like hours. Brought her to the brink over and over, then pulled back.
Her nails raked down my back. Her pleas became increasingly creative curses.
I laughed against her throat and she called me a name that would have scandalized my mother, and I loved her so much right then I could barely breathe around it.
Every time I slowed, she chased me, hips rolling up to meet nothing, and the sight of it wrecked me.
Her hands were everywhere, fisting in my hair, dragging down the flex of my back, gripping to pull me deeper.
There was a bead of sweat tracking down the notch between her collarbones and I bent and licked it away just to feel her shudder.
Mine, some animal part of me kept saying with every stroke, a word I had no right to and used anyway in the privacy of my own skull.
Mine, mine, and under it the older, colder thought I couldn’t fully drown even now, that I’d thrown this away once, that a man could be handed a miracle twice and there was no version of the universe generous enough to hand it to him a third time.
So I memorized her instead. The clutch of her around me, the sweat at her temples, the way her heels dug into the backs of my thighs to keep me exactly where she needed me.
Finally, when neither of us could take it anymore, I pulled out and slid down her body and closed my mouth over her.
“Let go for me, Steph.”
She broke apart on my tongue, thighs clamping around my head, one hand fisted so tight in my hair it stung.
I stayed on her through every tremor, reverent, drinking down each one, learning the taste of her all over again after three years of starving.
Only when she was still shaking did I move back up and push inside her.
I let go almost at once, the release tearing up my spine hard enough to gray out my vision.
I buried myself deep and spilled inside her while she clenched around me.
I collapsed onto her, then rolled to the side, pulling her with me so we stayed connected. She moaned at the sensation, her body still trembling with aftershocks. I tucked her under my chin and felt her heartbeat slow against mine, and for the first time since she’d left I felt whole again.
“Your tits are so damn comfortable,” she mumbled against my chest, biting one of my pecs before settling in.
I laughed. “They’re all yours.”
“Dreamy pillow. I’m never using another one again.”
“That’s the idea, gorgeous.” I kissed her forehead. “I’ll be your human pillow for all eternity. I swear it on my life.”
She was already asleep.
It didn’t matter. It was a promise I planned on keeping. I lay awake a long time, listening to her breathe, watching the crooked lamplight move on the ceiling, wanting nothing.
I thought about the men who’d say I was a fool.
I’d built a real thing out here, a clinic that would outlive me, work that would keep saving people long after my name meant nothing to anyone.
And I’d have burned all of it, every brick, every headline, to have been in one waiting room on one night three years ago.
That was the arithmetic I lived by now. It was the only arithmetic that had ever mattered, and it had taken losing everything to learn how to do the sum.
So I made her a promise in the dark, with her hair against my mouth and her heartbeat slow under my hand.
Whatever came for us, and the world was never short of things to send, I’d choose her first this time.
Every time. I pressed my mouth to her hair and felt her breathe, in and out, slow and trusting, and I stayed awake to guard it as long as I could.