Chapter 42 Nick #2
"I had her completely refurbished," I continue, watching her face.
"Polished teak, brass fixtures, books in every cabin.
There's even a storage space for an easel and your paints.
" I set the phone aside, needing to see her eyes when I say the rest. "For our honeymoon.
Just you and me, sailing wherever we want to go.
Minimal crew, open water, no entourage. Just us. "
She sets the model down with exquisite care. Her eyes are bright but filled with welling tears. Not sadness. Joy and something else. Something I'm still trying to read.
"Nick, I love it." The words are fierce. Choked with emotion. "I love it, and I love you, and—" She breaks off, a laugh escaping her that sounds almost giddy. "Wait here. Don't move."
She scrambles off the bed and disappears into her own closet. I hear things shifting, being moved aside. Then she emerges carrying a large, wrapped canvas. It's substantial, clearly a major piece.
Her expression has changed. The secret delight has given way to naked vulnerability. She holds the painting against her chest, her teeth catching her lower lip in the tell I know so well.
She's nervous to let me see it.
"I've been working on this for months," she says, her voice small. "I hope you like it."
She places the gift on the bed before me. I unwrap it slowly, giving the moment the weight it deserves.
The canvas emerges.
For a long moment, I simply look. Let my eyes move across the surface the way I'd scan a horizon at sea, reading what the colors and shapes are telling me.
The lower portion churns with deep, saturated blues, the colors of open water before a squall, of depths that swallow light whole.
There's turbulence in those strokes, a sense of weight and pressure and things that test what you're made of.
The kind of sea I've sailed through. She has too.
It's the kind that leaves you changed or leaves you drowning.
But above that darkness, the painting transforms. Pearlescent whites and soft creams emerge, gold bleeding through like dawn breaking after a night passage. Serene. Luminous. The peace that waits when the storm finally passes.
And between them, a horizon line. The place where chaos surrenders to calm. Where survival becomes something that looks a lot like heaven.
It's abstract. Not a seascape I could photograph. A seascape I can feel. It’s our journey rendered in pigment and light, everything we've weathered and everything we've earned painted in a language I recognize at a level below words.
She's painted us.
Emotion fills my chest, my throat. I'm lost in the canvas, in the recognition of what she's created, and I don't realize how long I've been quiet until her voice reaches me—small, anxious, edged with fear.
"Do you… Do you hate it?"
I look up. Whatever she sees in my face makes her breath catch.
"God, no. Avery. I love it." The words are inadequate. Laughably insufficient for what I'm feeling.
She exhales softly, a little smile curving her gorgeous mouth. "Turn it over."
I do. And there on the back, in her handwriting, is a single word. The title of the work.
Elysium.
The world goes still.
I look at the model yacht on the bed beside us. Then at the painting in my hands. Then at my wife, who is watching me with tears streaming down her face and a smile that holds the truth of everything we've survived.
Together.
Her voice breaks on a laugh. "You couldn't have known. And I didn't know what you were naming the boat—"
"Elysium." I say it aloud, testing the shape of it. The meaning. "Both of us. The same word."
She's laughing and crying at once. "We speak the same language, Nick. We always have."
I nod, silent because I’m not sure I could find my voice if I tried.
I've spent my entire adult life believing I was fundamentally unreadable, untouchable.
That the cost of surviving my childhood was an interior no one else would ever fully reach.
Certainly not any of the women before Avery who touched my body without ever touching me.
I built a life and an empire on the premise that no one would ever truly know what I was thinking.
What I was feeling. Or what I was struggling so hard not to feel.
Yet this woman—without a single conversation about it, without any hint or suggestion from me—chose the exact same word for the exact same reason.
The same vision of earned peace. The same understanding of what we've come through to get here.
The probability of it is absurd. Impossible, even. And yet, looking at her amid the flood of emotion pouring into my chest, I realize it couldn’t have been anything else.
Because she’s right.
We’re that connected. We’re that inexorably intertwined, my incredible wife and me.
"Nick?" Her voice is soft. Uncertain.
I set the painting down with a care that borders on reverence. Then I reach for her, pulling her into my arms with a need that goes deeper than desire.
Our kiss starts tender. But tenderness shifts the way it always does with us, igniting into heat and hunger and the overwhelming need to be inside her—not just physically but in every way a person can belong to another.
Her hands fist the fabric of my shirt. My fingers thread through her hair, cradling the back of her head, tilting her mouth to give me better access.
We undress each other slowly. No urgency. We've earned the right to savor each other today. Her T-shirt goes first, lifted over her head, dropped somewhere I don't bother to track. My hands skim the warmth of her skin, the familiar terrain of her curves and delicate hollows.
My shirt goes next, her fingers working the buttons then spreading the fabric apart, her palms pressing flat against my chest. I watch her face as she touches me.
The way her eyes track the path of her own hands.
The softness that enters her expression when her fingers find the scars on my right hand and forearm, skating tenderly over the raised, gnarled tissue.
She lifts my hand to her mouth. Presses her lips to the worst of the scarring.
The warmth of her mouth on my skin sends need radiating through my chest. My breath shudders out of me. I've let her touch these scars before. Let her see them, kiss them, fold them into her understanding of who I am.
But here, after Elysium, after everything, her reverence wrecks me. It settles deeper than ever before, as if some final, stubborn resistance I'd been carrying dissolves under the pressure of her mouth on my broken hand.
We shed the rest of our clothes with the same unhurried attention. Her yoga pants. My jeans. The cotton of her bra, unhooked and discarded. I ease her back onto the sheets, following her down, covering her body with mine.
"My wife." The words are rough, thick with feeling.
"My husband," she says, her voice soft with emotion. Her hands cradle my face, thumbs tracing my cheekbones, her eyes holding mine. "We made it."
"We made it."
I kiss her again, claiming and surrendering at once.
Then I begin to move down her body, my mouth tracing the path my hands have already memorized.
The hollow of her throat, where her pulse jumps against my lips.
The swell of her breasts, fuller now with the early pregnancy, the nipples darker, more sensitive.
I take one into my mouth, sucking gently, and the sound she makes goes straight to my cock.
"Nick—"
I keep going. Down the soft plane of her stomach. I pause where it's still flat, pressing my lips to the warm skin just below her navel. The life growing beneath my mouth. Our future.
"I've got you," I murmur against her belly. "Both of you."
Her fingers thread through my hair, holding me there for a moment. Then I move lower.
I settle between her thighs and she opens for me, her legs falling apart as my hands press them wider. She's wet for me. Slick and swollen and so responsive that the first stroke of my tongue pulls a moan from her that makes my cock even harder.
"So beautiful like this," I murmur against her. "Spread open for me. My sexy wife."
I take my time. Slow, deliberate strokes of my tongue over her clit, learning her rhythm all over again.
Not because I've forgotten how to please her, but because each time is different.
Each time carries the weight of wherever we've been, and right now, after everything, I want to give her something patient and thorough.
I want her to feel worshipped without having to say the words.
Her hips rock against my mouth. Her breath comes in sharp little gasps that fracture into moans when I push two fingers inside her, stroking, seeking, finding the spot that makes her back arch off the mattress.
"Oh God. Nick, please—"
"Not yet." I give her one long, slow lick that makes her thighs tremble around my head. "I want to feel you come on my mouth first."
I build her up with patient, relentless attention, my tongue circling her clit while my fingers work inside her, reading every tremor, every hitch in her breathing.
She's close. I can feel it in the way her pussy clenches around my fingers, the way her hand fists in my hair.
The way her sounds lose their coherence and become pure need.
"Look at me," I tell her, lifting my eyes to find hers. "I want to see your eyes when you come."
She looks down. Green eyes glazed, lips parted, cheeks flushed. The sight of her—this incredible woman who could have any man and chose me anyway—wrecks me in the best possible way.
I suck her pussy gently, then harder, tonguing the tight bud of nerves while my fingers drive deep, thrusting to meet the frantic pistoning of her hips. She draws in a short breath, then she shatters.
Her back bows. My name tears from her throat, jagged and broken, gorgeous. Her thighs clamp around my head and I hold her through it, my mouth gentling but not stopping, drawing out every pulse and aftershock until she's shaking and pushing weakly at my shoulders.
I kiss my way back up her body. Settle over her, bracing my weight on my forearms. Her eyes are dazed, her chest heaving, and I can't help the slow, possessive smile that crosses my face.
"Oh," she breathes. "That was so good."
"I’m not done with you yet." I reach between us, my cock heavy and aching. I notch myself at her entrance. She’s slick and hot around the head of my shaft, impossibly tight.
I hold there for a moment, relishing the tease of her body straining for mine.
Her hips tilt, trying to take me. "Easy, angel. We've got all morning."
I push inside her. Slowly. Inch by inch, watching her face as she takes me, the way her mouth falls open, the way her eyes flutter shut and then force themselves open again because she knows I want to see her. The tight heat of her around my cock is like a furnace.
Christ. I shudder, barely resisting the urge to slam home.
"You feel so fucking good," I breathe against her mouth. "Every time. I'll never get enough of this."
I set a deliberate pace. Deep, long thrusts that let me feel every inch of her, that let her feel every inch of me. Her legs wrap around my waist, her heels pressing into the small of my back. I lower my forehead to hers, our breath mingling.
"This is ours," I tell her, my hips rolling slow and deep. "All of this. You. Me. That baby." I punctuate each word with a thrust that makes her gasp. "Everything we're building."
She answers with a sound that's half moan, half sob—the good kind, the kind that urges me to keep going, to make it last—and her nails rake down my back hard enough to sting.
The pressure of my release builds low in my spine, gathering like a slow tide.
Her pussy tightens around me with each thrust, her body giving and taking, matching my pace.
I groan in pleasure, sinking into the rhythm of it.
The slick heat. The sound of our bodies together.
Her breath catching on every downstroke.
"Stay with me," I murmur. "Right there. Feel that?"
"Yes. God, yes."
I angle my hips, changing the intensity of my thrusts, and her whole body jolts beneath me. She gasps sharply, her fingertips digging into my shoulders.
“That’s my girl. You’re taking me so good.” I hold that angle, driving into her steadily, watching her unravel.
"Nick. Nick, I'm—"
"I know. Me too. Come for me, angel. Let me feel it."
Her orgasm rolls over her, tight, pulsing, her body clenching around my cock so hard that every coherent thought I have whites out. Her cry fills the room and I'm right there too.
Pleasure races through my veins. My vision narrows to her face, her mouth, the sound of my name on her lips.
Every muscle in my body locks as I bury myself deep and come inside her with a groan that feels wrenched from somewhere deeper than my soul.
I grind out her name, barely resisting the urge to roar with the ferocity of my release.
Holy. Fuck.
I don't move for a long time. My face stays pressed against her neck. Her fingers stroke through my hair. The weight of my body presses down on hers, both of us too spent and too content to separate.
Finally I shift, easing onto my side and pulling her with me. She fits against my chest, her head tucked under my chin, her breath warm against my collarbone. I draw the sheets over us both.
My hand seeks her belly. "Hi, little one," I murmur. “Sorry about the bumpy ride.”
Avery laughs softly. Her hand covers mine, fingers lacing together over the life we made.
Her painting leans against the wall where we propped it. Elysium watching over us. Storm and peace rendered by my wife's hand. From the bed, the pearlescent upper portion catches the light streaming in through the windows, and for a moment the whole canvas seems to glow.
"Elysium," Avery murmurs, already drifting toward sleep. “That’s what this is.”
“Yeah.” I kiss the top of her blonde head. "Paradise."
"Mm." Her voice is soft, fading. "I always thought of it as the place where you finally get to stop fighting. Where you can just… be. With the person you love."
"I like your version better." I hold her closer. Neither of us moving, even after the daylight begins to shift across our room, warm and slow, when time is in no hurry.
Our wedding waits two days from now. The yacht where we’ll spend a month—or longer—sailing under peaceful blue skies waits for us in the Mediterranean. And our child waits in the shelter of Avery’s body.
I'm done thinking about what I nearly lost. I'd rather count what's here.
This moment. Her. Us.
Home.
And in two more days, our forever will finally begin.