Chapter 43
David
The angle has me going deeper, harder. The slap of our skin fills the room, her ass pressing back against me with every thrust, and I reach around to rub her clit, feeling her tighten impossibly around me.
“Like that,” I grit out, pounding into her hard and measured. “You take me so fucking well.”
She’s a vision in the low lamplight. Hair falling down her back, bent over the couch arm as I drive her forward, one ruined heel still hanging off her foot like we forgot how clothes work halfway through the front door.
The sight of her is so fucking hot I’m trying not to lose it before she comes again.
Her head drops, voice breaking. “Don’t slow down.”
“Wasn’t planning to.”
I hook an arm around her waist and haul her up against me so her back is to my chest, one hand still between her legs, the other bracing her under her breast while I keep thrusting. The new angle punches a hoarse cry out of her and I feel it everywhere.
“Fuck,” I breathe into her neck. “There. Right there?”
“Yes.” She’s barely managing words now, her body jerking in little helpless shudders around mine. “Yes, David, exactly there.”
I kiss up the side of her throat, bite lightly where her pulse jumps, and she whimpers.
“You gonna come again for me?” I ask, because I’m cruel apparently. Or desperate. At this point the categories are blending.
She laughs once, shattered and breathless. “Fuck. I don’t know. Yes!”
“Then give it to me,” I say, and my voice barely sounds human.
My hand works her faster. My cock drives into her with a punishing rhythm I can’t seem to stop, can’t even imagine stopping, and Nora comes apart with a cry that scrapes every restraint clean out of me.
She clenches so hard around me my vision whites out at the edges.
I get maybe two more thrusts in before I’m gone too, my forehead dropping between her shoulder blades as I come with a groan that feels ripped out of my spine.
For a few seconds neither of us can do anything except breathe.
Then my knees nearly give out.
I manage to pull us sideways onto the couch before gravity makes the decision for me. Nora ends up half sprawled across me, hair in her face, chest heaving. She finally kicks her heel off.
I brush the hair back from her face and kiss her sweaty forehead.
“You alive?” I ask.
She makes a weak, indignant sound into my chest. “Barely. I think you might have rearranged at least one internal organ.”
“That seems medically unlikely.”
“So did that move you pulled at the end of the couch, and yet here we are.”
I laugh, because I can’t not. My whole body is heavy and pleasantly wrecked, my pulse still thudding low and hard, but the sound of her—dry even now, flattened by orgasm and fatigue but still unmistakably Nora—puts me back together in places sex just broke open.
She lifts her head enough to look at me. Mascara smudged. Mouth swollen. Hair wild. Perfect.
“You’re smiling,” she says suspiciously.
“I’m happy.”
“That’s disgusting. Stop that.”
“No. You make me happy. Disgustingly so.”
She studies me for a second, then her expression softens. “You make me happy, too.”
We lie there for another minute, maybe five. Time has gone viscous. The house hums around us—old pipes, the faint rattle of the furnace kicking on, the distant wash of traffic outside. Inside, it’s just our breathing, skin cooling, and the warm, impossible fact of her.
“I’m tempted to say something sentimental,” she says, her voice muffled against my chest. “Something like, ‘I wish we’d met sooner,’ or ‘I wish we’d started this when we were young.’” She lifts her head so she’s looking at me. “But I don’t wish that.”
“No?” I brush her hair back from her face and wait for her to continue.
“No. Because then we wouldn’t have this now. Wouldn’t be the people we are now. And we wouldn’t have Michaela.”
I trace my thumb over her cheekbone. “No,” I say quietly. “We needed all the damage to get here.”
Her mouth curves, sad and fond at once. “Sometimes it’s the journey.”
“Worth it.”
She smiles softly and settles back down on me, but her eyes stay on my face. Open. Serious.
“I mean it,” she says. “I don’t want some imaginary earlier version of us. I want this one. You. Me. Michaela. Archie shedding on every available textile. The whole inconvenient, messy, complicated thing.”
My chest pulls tight.
I smooth her hair behind her ear. “Good. Because I’m not interested in any version that doesn’t have you in my daughter’s kitchen explaining why dogs can’t eat marshmallows.”
She laughs, then goes soft again. “Your daughter’s kitchen? When did the kitchen become hers?”
“Our daughter’s kitchen then,” I correct before I can stop myself.
She goes still.
I feel it the second the words land. The tiny shift in the air. The awareness. But this time there’s no group chat. No courtroom steps. No place to pretend I didn’t say it.
I said it because it’s true.
Nora lifts herself on one elbow, looking down at me like I’ve just put a live wire in her hands.
“David.”
I should probably say something measured here. Something strategic. Something with qualifiers and a timeline. I don’t.
For maybe the first time in my adult life, strategy feels like cowardice dressed up in a good suit.
So I look at her—flushed and half-naked and braced like the ground under her might give way—and I tell the truth without sanding any of the edges off it.
“I know,” I say quietly. “I know what I said.”
Her throat works. “Did you mean it?”
“Yes.”
The word lands between us and doesn’t break.
Nora just stares at me. I can feel my own pulse in my neck, in my wrists, in the stupid, overworked muscle of my heart. There is no courtroom in the world that makes me feel as exposed as this woman looking at me from six inches away.
“Marry me, Nora. Make everything we are official. Marry us.”
Her eyes get glassy so fast it nearly undoes me.
“David—”
I push myself up a little on the couch, one hand coming to her waist.
“I realize,” I say, voice rougher than I’d prefer, “that this might not be the ideal sequencing.”
A laugh escapes her. Wet, startled, half a sob.
“Sequencing?” she repeats.
“I cope through jargon.”
“You just proposed to me naked on my couch.”
“Technically I’m mostly under you, so I’d argue this is a joint-couch proposal.”
She makes another sound—somewhere between laughing and crying—and covers her mouth with her hand. God, I love her. Even like this. Especially like this.
I reach up and gently pull her hand away. “Nora.”
Her gaze locks on mine. “You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not drunk.”
“No.”
“You’re not high on post-orgasmic brain damage.”
“I’m sure that’s a factor, but not a determinative one.”
That gets a real laugh out of her, brief and trembling. Then she just looks at me again, and there’s no joke left to hide behind.
“I didn’t plan it like this,” I say. “Not here. Not tonight. I had every intention of doing it properly.”
Her brows lift through the tears. “Properly?”
“Yes. I even have a ring. It’s hidden in the back of my closet because apparently I’m a cliché with delayed execution.”
Nora stares at me.
Then she starts crying.
Not delicately. Not one elegant tear. Full, helpless, overwhelmed tears spilling down her flushed cheeks while she laughs at the same time, and the sight of it punches straight through the center of me.
“Hey.” I cup her face immediately. “Hey, is this good crying or catastrophic crying? I need classification.”
She tries to talk and can’t, not at first. The sound is half-hiccup, half-inhale. She wipes at her eyes with both hands, mascara etching streaks down her cheeks.
“You are such an absolute bastard,” she finally manages, and the way she says it is so affectionate, so stricken with happiness and awe, that a wave of pure, wild relief rolls over me.
She pulls away a little, legs straddling me, fumbling for words that don’t come.
“You—” She waves a hand at the room, at the two of us, at the universe. “How is this real?”
I catch her hands, guide them to my mouth, and kiss her knuckles. “I’ve asked myself that every day since I met you.”
She lets out a breathy laugh and buries her face in her hands again. “You’re not allowed to do this. To propose to me completely naked, no warning, while I’m leaking tears and god knows what else all over you.”
“I can put on pants first?” I offer.
She groans, laughing. “No. Absolutely not. I want to remember this precisely as it is.” Her hands are shaking now. “I can’t say yes like this. I can’t even access the part of my brain where major life decisions are made.”
I frame her face with my hands and make her look at me. “You don’t have to say yes. You don’t have to say anything. I just needed you to know.”
She stares at me for a long second. The tears come slower now, pooling in her eyes. She shakes her head, then wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Ask me again,” she says, voice hoarse and trembling.
I blink. “Now?”
She nods. “Now. But this time, do it how you wanted to.”
My heart stammers, then careens into a shivering run. I take her hand, stand, and pull her gently to her feet. Then I drop to one knee right there, bare on her rug, and take both her hands in mine.
I try to make my voice work. Eventually it does.
“Eleanor Harrison,” I say, and she snorts at my use of her full name.
“I spent most of my adult life assuming I could only have one good thing, and that every other hope was a fantasy to be managed or outgrown. But then I met you. And here is the terrible, beautiful, completely unfixable fact: you fixed everything else by simply existing in my life. You made my daughter braver and my whole life more worth living. You made me want to come home again, and you made me want to never leave. You made me want things I stopped believing I could have. I want you, always. I want you to be my partner. My family. My future. I want to wake up every morning with you and Michaela and Archie and whatever new disaster we invite into our home, and I want to go to sleep every night knowing you’re beside me, making tomorrow possible.
So—I am asking, officially. Will you marry me? ”
Nora stares down at me. Her hand comes up to her mouth, her shoulders shake with another wave of silent tears, and then she throws her arms around my neck and drags me up off my knees and into her.
“Yes,” she says into my ear, her voice breaking so hard it nearly splits me in two. “God, David, yes.”
I catch her around the waist and hold on, both of us trembling, her face buried against my throat while she laughs and cries and tries to get every part of the word yes out of her body.
I lift her up into my arms and spin her, legs wrapped around my hips, her mouth on mine, both of us sobbing, laughing, hopelessly, stupidly in love.
I laugh into her mouth, taste the salt of her tears and the ocean of every goddamn thing I ever thought I couldn’t have, and the two of us crash down together onto the couch. It’s the best fucking yes of my life.