Epilogue #2
I showered. We ate at the big table, all four of us. Mila told us about the courtyard drawing, the math situation, and the new girl in her class who also liked charcoal. Mamá served the saffron chicken with roasted peppers and rice.
Halfway through the meal, Jasper reached under the table and put his hand on my knee. He left it there for the rest of dinner.
After, Mamá took Mila to the living room to watch something animated. Mila's taste in films ran toward anything with detailed backgrounds she could study for reference.
Jasper cleared the table. I dried. We moved around each other in the kitchen the way we'd learned to move in the months since Morocco, reading each other's trajectories without having to think about it.
"Walk?" I asked.
He grabbed his cigarettes and met me at the back door.
The vineyard started at the back wall of the property and ran in neat rows down the slope toward the river.
My father had planted the first vines when I was small, and they'd gone wild in the years the family spent away.
We'd pruned them back, re-staked the trellises, and the grapes came in thick and dark for the first time in over a decade.
Jasper lit a cigarette and followed me between the rows. The sun had dropped behind the western ridge, leaving the sky streaked orange and purple. The vines came up to our shoulders, heavy with fruit, and the air smelled like warm earth and the green bite of unripe grapes.
"Papá used to walk these rows every evening," I said. "Right around this time. He'd check the leaves, test the soil. He said you could tell everything about a vine's health from the color of the leaves at sunset."
Jasper smoked and walked beside me, keeping pace while I talked.
"He'd be proud of you," Jasper said.
I stopped walking. He stood in my father's vineyard with a cigarette between his fingers and the last of the daylight on his face.
The vines moved in the breeze, and the sky kept bleeding color, and I stood there with my father's dirt under my boots, and I couldn't speak because if I opened my mouth, what came out was going to wreck me.
"Yeah," I said when I could. "I think he would."
We walked the rest of the rows in quiet, checking the vines the way my father taught me.
Jasper asked about the color of the leaves and the weight of the clusters and whether the birds had gotten to the south end again.
He'd learned the questions over months of walking these rows with me.
He'd never be a farmer. But he asked anyway every evening, and he remembered the answers.
By the time we got back to the house, the light in the living room was off. Mamá had taken Mila to bed. The kitchen was clean, the porch light on, the house quiet the way it only got after everyone had settled in.
Jasper caught my wrist in the hallway.
"I have something for you," he said.
"Yeah?"
"In the bedroom."
I raised an eyebrow. "Romantic."
"Practical."
He steered me through the door, closed it behind us, and crossed to his side of the bed where he opened the nightstand drawer and pulled out a matte black case, sleek, about the length of his forearm.
"Happy anniversary," he said.
"Our anniversary was two weeks ago."
"It was on back order." He held it out. "Custom job."
I opened the case. Inside, nestled in black foam like it had its own security detail, lay a vibrator.
Matte black with a subtle curve, a ridged shaft that looked like it had opinions about what it was going to do once it got inside me, and a control panel flush with the base that I already knew he wouldn't let me touch.
I looked at Jasper. He'd already settled into the chair by the window, legs crossed, pulling his cigarette pack from his pocket.
He shook one out, lit it, and exhaled smoke toward the ceiling.
The lamp beside him threw warm light across his face.
He looked like a man about to run an operation, which, knowing Jasper, he absolutely was.
"Custom," I said.
"Mm."
"You had a vibrator custom made."
"I did research." He took a drag. "Extensive research.
" He held up his phone, screen tilted so I could see the app, which had a sleek interface with sliders and pattern curves.
"I control the speed. The pattern. The rotation.
The thrust depth." He scrolled through something. "There are fourteen modes."
"Fourteen." Of course there were fourteen. The man had made spreadsheets for my mother's tile choices. I should have known he'd bring the same energy to taking me apart.
"I narrowed it down to six." He looked at me over the phone. "Take your clothes off."
I pulled my shirt over my head. He tracked the movement from his chair, a cigarette between his fingers, eyes steady.
I kicked off my jeans and boxers and stood there, letting him look.
He swept his gaze down my body and then back up, slowly, the way he surveyed a room before deciding how to take it apart.
Except the room was me. And I was going to let him.
"On the bed," he said. "On your back."
I stretched out on the sheets. The cotton was cool against my skin, and the ceiling fan turned slow above me, pushing warm air across my chest. Jasper stayed in his chair like he planned to run this whole thing from across the room, which was either the hottest thing he'd ever done or the most infuriating. Both. Definitely both.
He tapped something on his phone.
"Lube's in the drawer. Get yourself ready and then put it inside you."
I reached over, found the bottle, and slicked the toy.
The silicone was dense, heavier than I expected, body-warm from the foam lining.
I spread my legs, pressed the tip against my hole, and worked it in slow.
The curve hit the front wall of me on the way in, and I sucked air through my teeth.
The ridges dragged against the rim, and the full length of it settled inside me, the base flush against my skin.
I lay there, breathing, adjusting to the weight and the stretch and the fact that my man was sitting fully dressed in a chair six feet away looking at his phone like he was checking stock prices.
Jasper tapped his phone.
The vibration started low. A deep, rolling pulse that radiated out from the curve pressed against my prostate and spread through my pelvis in a slow wave that made my toes curl against the sheets. I gripped the mattress.
"That's mode one," he said. "Just vibration. I want you to get used to the feel before I give you anything else."
"I'm used to it."
"No, you're not. Your breathing just changed." Another drag of the cigarette. "Stay still."
I stayed still because Jasper told me to stay still, and my body had learned a long time ago that when Jasper used that voice, you did what he said and thanked him for the privilege.
The pulse rolled through me in slow waves, and my cock thickened against my stomach, untouched, heavy.
He studied every twitch and shift from across the room, the cigarette burning low between his fingers.
Jasper was doing surveillance on my dick. Dios mío, this was my life now.
"Mode two," he said, and tapped.
The vibration shifted. The steady pulse broke into a pattern, a climb-and-drop rhythm that crested right against my prostate and then backed off before I could push into it. My hips jerked against the sheets.
"Jasper."
"Stay still." His voice had dropped into the register that meant he was running the operation and I was the objective. "This one builds. Give it a minute."
The pattern climbed again. The crest lasted longer this time, the vibration pressing deep and holding before it dropped, and when it dropped my whole body chased it, my muscles clenching around the shaft to keep the pressure where I needed it.
Pre-come slicked the crease of my hip. Whatever smartass observation I'd been building in my head dissolved because the second crest hit harder and I forgot how sentences worked.
"Good," Jasper said. "You're leaking."
"I'm aware." Barely. The awareness was leaving fast.
"Don't touch yourself."
"Wasn't planning on it."
"You were thinking about it. I can see your hand." He tapped the phone again. "Mode three. This one rotates."
The shaft moved inside me. A slow, grinding rotation that pressed the curved head in a circle against my prostate, changing the angle with every pass.
I stopped breathing. The rotation combined with the pulse pattern and the sensation went from pressure to something molten, something that spread through my groin and up my spine and ripped a sound out of my throat that I had no say in.
"There it is," Jasper said, quiet. He leaned forward in the chair. "That's the one I wanted to hear."
"Dios." I grabbed the headboard. The rotation kept going without mercy, and every pass over that spot drove the heat higher.
My thighs shook. My cock leaked a steady line down the side of the shaft, and I couldn't do anything about it because I had a death grip on the headboard and Jasper hadn't given me permission to let go.
Six feet away. He was six feet away, and he was destroying me with his thumb on a screen.
"You can touch your chest," he said. "Nothing below the waist."
I dragged my hand down my sternum. My skin was damp, oversensitive, every nerve lit up from the vibration radiating through my pelvis. I scraped my nails across my own nipple, and the spike of sensation on top of the rotation arched me off the bed.
Jasper stubbed out his cigarette. He gripped the armrests and his knuckles went white.
I could see him hard against the inseam of his jeans, the outline of his cock pressed tight against the denim.
He made no move to touch himself, porque por supuesto que no, because the man would rather white-knuckle an armchair than admit he was as wrecked as I was.
"One more mode," he said. "This one thrusts."
"Jasper, if you turn that on right now, I'm going to come."