Chapter 17 Jude #3
Her whole body shudders. Not an orgasm. Deeper.
A tremor that starts in her chest and radiates outward through the way her pussy clenches around me, the way her spine presses back against my chest, the way her hand on my hip tightens until her nails pierce skin.
Her head drops back against my shoulder and a sound escapes her that is not a moan and not a cry and not a word.
It is the sound a woman makes when a man she is letting inside her body tells her he wants to put a child there.
I press my mouth to the curve between her neck and shoulder. Her pulse hammers against my lips. Racing. Wild.
“That is not a power move.” My voice is raw. Stripped. The flatness gone. “That is a vow.”
I pick up the pace.
She grips the tile with both hands. I plant one palm flat on the wall beside her head and the other stays on her belly and I give her everything.
Everything I have held back. Every year of silence.
Every night of empty beds and hands that could not stop shaking and the cold surgical distance I used to keep the world out.
I pour all of it into the way I move inside her, deep and hard and relentless, and she takes every stroke like she was built for this, for me, for the specific way I need to claim her.
The sound of our bodies meeting is obscured by the water, by the steam, by the playlist still cycling its muffled melody through the closed door.
But I can hear it. The wet slap of skin on skin.
The rhythmic impact of my hips against her ass.
The choked, strangled sounds she is making behind her teeth because she is trying so hard to be quiet and she is failing and the failure is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.
She bites her own wrist. Teeth marks will be visible tomorrow. I want to see them. I want to trace them with my thumb over morning coffee. I want to see the evidence of what she had to do to stay quiet while I was inside her making promises about children.
Her orgasm hits like a detonation.
Silent. Devastating. Her entire body locks rigid against mine, every muscle from her calves to her shoulders seizing at once.
Her walls clamp down on my cock so hard the pressure borders on pain and it is the best thing I have ever felt.
She shakes. Trembles. Her knees give and I wrap my arm around her waist and hold her up and keep moving, driving into the contractions, extending them, because I am not done.
I come inside her.
Not with a roar. Not with a declaration.
With a low, raw sound pressed against the back of her shoulder that comes from the bottom of my chest, dragged out of me by the force of her body clenching around mine.
I spill into her in long, pulsing waves, my hips stuttering against her ass, my arm locked around her waist, my hand still pressed flat against her lower belly.
Every pulse fills her. Marks her. Claims the space I put my mouth on and my hands on and my vow into.
The release is not an ending. It is a seal on a promise I made while buried inside the only woman who has made me want to be alive in five years.
And it does not stop. It keeps coming, wave after wave, and I hold her against me through all of it because my legs are shaking and her legs are gone and the only thing keeping either of us upright is the tile wall and each other.
She takes all of it.
Takes me. Takes the vow and the weight and the years of silence and the grief and the steady hands and the scarred knuckles and every broken piece of a man who stopped believing he was allowed to hold things.
She takes all of it and she does not buckle.
I hold her.
Through the last tremors. Through the way her breathing fractures and reforms. Through the gradual softening of her grip on the tile and the slow unclenching of muscles that were wound past their limit.
I hold every piece.
We stand under the cooling water until she turns in my arms and presses her face against my chest and her hands come up to rest flat against my ribs and she holds on to me the way you hold on to something you are afraid will disappear if you let go.
I do not disappear.
The water shifts from hot to warm. I reach behind me without letting go of her and turn the faucet off.
Silence fills the bathroom except for the steady drip from the showerhead and the soft music still drifting from beyond the door.
Tyra is still under. No small footsteps. No sleepy calls for Mama.
I step out of the shower first. Pull the towel from the rack.
When I turn back she is standing in the stall with water dripping from her hair and her body and the overhead light catching the gold in her skin and she looks like a reason to kill.
A reason to die. A reason to rebuild an entire life if she let you.
I wrap the towel around her shoulders. Tuck the edges together at her collarbone the way I used to close a patient, each fold deliberate, each tuck placed so the scar would be invisible.
She leans into me. Forehead against my chest. The smell of her, clean and wet and still carrying traces of sex underneath the soap, fills the small space between us.
I smooth her wet hair back from her face. Tuck the damp strands behind her ear.
My hands are steady.
Completely, absolutely steady.
For the first time in five years, the micro-tremor that has lived in my fingers since I walked away from medicine is gone.
The ghost tremor that made me put down the scalpel.
That ended my career. That told me every morning when I reached for the coffee pot that I was a man who had killed a child and my body would never let me forget it.
Gone.
I hold my right hand in front of me, fingers extended, the way I used to test myself every morning at the hospital. Rock steady. Not a flicker. The hand that could not be trusted to hold a scalpel is now the hand that held this woman upright while she came apart.
I do not say it. But it is on my face. It must be, because Lucia looks up at me and her expression shifts. A crack opens behind her eyes and whatever she sees in mine makes her reach up and press her palm flat against my chest, directly over my heart.
I exhale.
The first full, unguarded exhale since the day I stopped being whole.
She rests there. Hand on my heart. Forehead tilted up toward mine. I turn, angling my shoulder to pull the towel tighter around her, and the movement shifts her line of sight.
She goes rigid.
One second she is soft and warm and pressed against my chest. The next every muscle in her body has turned to stone. Her hand on my heart stops being tender and becomes an anchor.
Her breath stops.
“Lucia.”
She does not respond. She is staring at my back. At the reflection in the mirror, or at the direct line of sight the angle has given her. I cannot see what she is seeing but the moment her world rearranges itself is a vibration that passes through her hand into my skin.
“Jude.” Her voice is barely a whisper. No tremor. No hesitation. Costa women do not shake when the ground opens beneath them. They name the abyss. “Were you on the flight from Chicago to Montana. Five years ago.”
Not a question. The period at the end of it is audible.
Every cell in my body goes still.
The birthmark. Irregular. Dark. A shape I have carried on the left side of my back for thirty-four years, a shape I have never thought twice about because it is mine, it has always been mine, unremarkable as the knuckle scars and the surgical calluses and every other marking my body has accumulated across a lifetime of use.
A shape identical to the one on a four-year-old girl sleeping ten feet away with a grey wolf under her chin.
The lullaby plays on.
I do not move.