3. Stellan
STELLAN
She’s quiet in the car.
Not afraid quiet. Not stunned quiet. She’s working something out. Her cheek is on my shoulder. Her hands are in my lapels. She hasn’t lifted off my cock. She hasn’t asked where we’re going.
I’ve spent six months around her quiet. The quiet behind the counter when she’s pulling a fresh tray and pretending she doesn’t know I’m watching.
The quiet when she’s making change for Mrs. Petrosyan.
The quiet I caught her in once at three forty-five AM when I drove past the shop—Clementine alone in the kitchen with her hands in dough, headphones in, not knowing anyone was watching.
This quiet is new.
This quiet is what did I just agree to.
My driver—Antonin, eyes forward, partition closed—is taking us up the West Side. I’ve put him on the long route. I want her body to settle, and it’s settling. I can feel her doing it on my cock—small clenches she can’t help, more wetness gathering around me.
And I’m hard again already. I came in her back at the bakery, harder than I have in years, and my cock hasn’t gotten the message that it’s done.
I can feel my cum in her, warm and high up where I put it, the car working it deeper.
It’s thickening again against the wet grip of her, and every time the car rocks her down onto me my hands want to clamp on her hips and move her. I make them stay.
The only thing stopping me from fucking a second load into her is that I told her to hold still—and if I move, she doesn’t have to.
That’s barely a reason and we both know it.
Here’s the one thing I know all the way down: I’m not slipping out of her tonight.
Not in this car. Not in my bed. Not while she’ll have me.
Twenty minutes ago she said yes. That’s the word running in my head. Not yes I’m yours, although she said that too. The earlier yes. The one she said when I asked if she was sure she wanted me to fuck her without being gentle. That’s the yes I’ve been waiting for since April.
She lifts her head off my shoulder. Her eyes find mine. They’re very dark. There’s a flush in them she gets right before she asks a question she thinks she shouldn’t ask.
“I’m still on your cock,” she says.
“Mm.”
“In a moving car.”
I tighten my arm around her.
She tips her head against my shoulder.
“Is this—is this normal for you?”
“No.”
“Is it normal for me?”
“You’ll have to tell me, Clementine.”
She makes a small sound that might be a laugh. It’s the first time she’s smiled since I locked the door of her shop—small, disbelieving—and it goes through me like a struck match.
“I think it might be,” she says.
“Good.”
“Where are we going?”
“My apartment. Tribeca.”
“Tribeca.” She says it carefully, like she’s checking it for sharp edges.
“Mm-hm.”
“You’re a killer who lives in Tribeca.”
“Yes.”
She looks at me. I look at her. The silence holds. She clenches on me three times before she can help it, small and helpless, her cheeks going pink in patches. Every shift of feeling shows on her face like it’s been written there.
“Stellan.”
I turn my mouth into her hair.
“I was supposed to be afraid of you by now.”
“I know.”
She tightens around me once when she says it, small, and I feel the question land in my body before I answer it.
“Why am I not?”
“You can ask me that question whenever you want.”
“What’s the answer right now?”
“You decided in April. You decided when you said yes to a man you knew would handle it. You’re already mine. Some part of you knew. The rest of you is catching up.”
She thinks about that. She doesn’t disagree.
“Did you decide in April too?”
“Earlier.”
“How early?”
“The morning you put a smiley face on my cup.”
Her cheek is warm against my throat, her breath catching where I’m still buried in her.
“That was the first day.”
“I know.”
“You decided the first day.”
“Yes.”
She breathes in. Breathes out. Fits her cheek back against my shoulder and closes her eyes, and her body goes slack on me—that weight a tired person finds when they’ve decided they’re safe. The car rolls north. I keep my hand on her back. I don’t move.
We pull into the underground garage at eight twenty-five.
Antonin parks. He doesn’t come around. He knows. I open the door myself, lift her in my lap so she’s still on me, and step out holding her—her dress falling over us, my coat covering most of what shouldn’t be seen. I carry her to the private elevator and key in the floor.
“You’re carrying me on your cock through your parking garage,” she says into my throat.
I tighten my grip under her. Every step jostles her down onto me, and she’s so wet I can feel it where we’re joined.
“This shouldn’t be—this shouldn’t be hot.”
“It’s hot.”
“Yes.”
The elevator opens directly into my apartment.
I carry her through the front foyer, past the kitchen on the right, into the open main room.
Floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls. The Hudson off to the west. The city to the north.
Black floors, low furniture, almost nothing on the walls.
I don’t collect things. There’s a long oak table in the open kitchen where I work.
A leather chair by the window where I read.
A bed at the back through a sliding door I’ve never closed because there’s never been anyone here to close it for.
She lifts her head. She looks. She doesn’t comment.
No one has ever been in this room but me.
I’ve owned it four years and kept it empty the way I keep everything—clean, controlled, nobody’s business.
She takes in the bare walls, the unmade bed through the door I never close, the one chair by the window, and I watch her measure exactly how alone I’ve lived.
I wait for her to flinch. She doesn’t. She looks back at me like the emptiness is something she’s already decided to stay and fill.
Something turns over in my chest that I don’t have a name for and am not going to go looking for one tonight.
I take her to the kitchen. I sit on the edge of the bench, legs braced, and lower her onto me, her thighs around my hips. The angle changes. Deeper. She makes a soft sound, her forehead dropping to mine.
“Stay,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You can move your hands. Don’t move your hips.”
“Yes.”
She’s soaked around me, clenching every time she breathes.
I take her dress down off both shoulders, pull the cups of her bra under her breasts so they sit up for me, and fill both hands with her.
Her nipples go tight against my palms, and the sound she makes when I drag my thumbs across them goes straight down to where I’m buried in her.
“Hands wherever you want,” I tell her, low. “Hips stay.”
“Stellan—“
“I know. Stay still and let me.”
So I play with her. I don’t move under her, not an inch, but I work her breasts slow and thorough, roll her nipples between my fingers, put my mouth on her throat and the soft top of one breast—while she sits there full of me, not allowed to do a thing about it.
She gets wetter every minute, her pussy clenching helplessly around my cock every time my mouth finds somewhere new.
“You’re soaking me,” I tell her against her skin. It isn’t a complaint, and she knows it.
“I can’t stay still if you keep—Stellan?—“
“You can. You are. Good girl.”
She drops her forehead to my collarbone and breathes.
Her hands are fisted in my shirt. She’s holding still so hard she’s shaking with it, and so am I—jaw locked, every muscle in me straining to drive up into her and not doing it—because the wanting is better right before it breaks, and I want her to feel how close I am to breaking too.
Somewhere in the middle of it she finds words.
“You’re a killer,” she says into my throat. Not a question.
“Mm.”
“You’ve been one a long time.”
“Yes.” I thumb her nipple and she gasps. “Ask me the rest.”
“Are you good at it?”
“Yes.”
She goes tight around me when I answer, helpless, like the truth of it goes straight through her.
“Do you like it?”
“No.” I lift my mouth off her breast and look at her. “I’m good at it, so I did it right, because the men who aren’t good at it do it anyway and make it worse. I’m doing less of it now. Almost none.”
“Why.”
“Because of you.” I watch it land on her face. “I wasn’t going to tell you that yet. You asked while I had my mouth on you. Bad time to ask me anything you don’t want a straight answer to.”
She makes a sound that’s half a laugh and half something coming apart. I get a hand down and find her clit—swollen, wet, so worked up she jolts against me. I rub it slow, watching her whole body try not to ride my thumb.
“Don’t move your hips,” I say again, watching her fight it.
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t. You’re dripping on me, you’ve got your nails in my shirt, and you haven’t once told me to stop.” I press harder. “Tell me what you want.”
“You. To move. Please. I’ve been good, I’ve been so good—please?—“
“You have.” I take my thumb off her before she can come, and she makes a furious, wrecked sound I’m going to think about for a week. “You’ve been perfect. I’m done being patient.”
I stand, lifting her up off my lap with me, and lay her back on the edge of the table, my cock still in her.
I shove her dress up out of the way. Her shoes are still on, her hair half out of its pin, and I pull it the rest of the way out.
Then I look at her—spread on my kitchen table, flushed, stuffed full of my cock—and I want to draw this out until she can’t remember her own name.
I move once, slow, all the way out and all the way back in. She arches.
“Stellan. Please.”
“I know. I’m going to.”
I fuck her on the table.
Slow and long, all of me in every stroke—out until just the head holds her open, then back to the root.
She’s wet enough that I can see it on me every time I draw back, my cock shining with her.
I keep one hand low on her belly, where she can feel her own body stretched around me, and I watch where I disappear into her.
“Look at you take me,” I say. “You’re soaking my table.”
Her hands grip the far edge above her head, her back arching at every stroke. I don’t speed up. I don’t soften.
“Stellan.”
“That’s it. You take my cock so well, Clementine. Tell me when.”
“Now. Now.”
“On me. Soak my cock.”
She comes with a sound she hasn’t made before—open-mouthed, surprised—her pussy clamping down so tight I have to breathe through it. I keep moving. She comes again before the first one is done, thighs shaking, the wet of her running down to where we’re joined.
“Stellan—“
“One more. Look at me.”
I get my thumb on her clit and circle it light while I work deep and slow.
Three strokes and she breaks again, harder, clenching down the whole length of me.
I follow her—both hands gripping her hips, buried to the root, watching my cock work into her one last slow time, the wet sound of her taking what I give her the only thing in the room.
She tells me, wrecked, that she can feel each pulse.
I don’t pull out. I wait until she opens her eyes.
“There you are,” I say.
“Stellan.”
I kiss her temple.
She’s still fluttering around me in slow aftershocks, wet, every pulse of her felt the length of my cock.
“I think I’m yours.”
“I know.”
“That should scare me more than it does.”
“It will, sometimes. Tell me when it does.”
“Okay.”
I pick her up off the table without letting her slip off me and carry her—still on me, still wet—to the bed. I lay her on her side, lie down behind her, fit myself against her back, still buried.
The light is low. The Hudson is grey through the window, the snow old and dirty the way January snow gets. She fits her back against my chest. I spread my hand low over her hip.
“Sleep,” I say.
“It’s morning.”
“You were up at four-thirty. I know your schedule. Sleep.”
“Are you going to?—“
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying in you. I’m going to make calls in an hour. You can sleep through them.”
She fits her head into the curve of my shoulder.
“Stellan.”
“Yes.”
“Did you sleep last night?”
“No.”
She fits her back tighter to my chest, and the small shift of her around my cock pulls a breath out of me.
“Why not?”
“I was waiting.”
“For what?”
“For you to tell me.”
She’s quiet. She breathes against my arm. Her hand finds mine on her belly and holds it.
“Stellan.”
“Yes.”
“My name.”
“Clementine.”
She lets out a breath. Her hand tightens on mine.
“Say it again.”
“Clementine.”
“And again.”
“Clementine.”
She sleeps.
I don’t. I lie behind her with my cock buried in her and my hand on her belly and the snow coming down on the river and the city beyond it, and I don’t sleep, and I don’t move, and for the first time in twelve years I don’t want to.