Chapter 23
?
— Handful —
My phone went off at nine while I was standing at the back of the floor watching Fewin upsell a bachelor party into a magnum they did not need.
Austen. She’d sent me a video.
I stepped into the office and opened it.
Some social media thing. A biker in a helmet leaning on a rail with text across the bottom: let’s play a game.
The next shot had the same biker looking back at the camera over his shoulder: run.
The fucker was standing next to his bike in the final shot with IICYIFU.
Under it, one word. From her.
COME.
I watched it ten times.
I’d told her just say the word. Was come the word? Was this a green light? Was she messing with me? I had no idea what IICYIFU meant and I wasn’t about to go kick her door in on a guess and get it wrong.
Glitch was at the end of the bar with a laptop, pulling the week’s camera logs. I walked over and put the phone in front of his face.
“You speak this. What’s this mean?”
He looked at the video. Looked at me. And a filthy grin spread across his face.
“IICYIFU.” He said the letters like he was savoring them. “If I catch you, I fuck you.” He pushed the phone back across the bar. “Your old lady is not being subtle, brother. She is telling you to get on your bike, go find her, and—” He spread his hands. “You want me to draw you a diagram?”
“No.”
“She’s speaking the language. That’s a Wren-level text, that is. I’m a little proud.” He was already turning back to his laptop. “Go. I’ll lock up.”
I was at the door before he finished the sentence.
“Handful.” He didn’t look up from the screen. “Took you long enough. Both of you.”
?
Austen lived twenty minutes across town in a building with a buzzer and a flight of stairs. I did the twenty minutes in fourteen. Hit the buzzer once. Didn’t even get to say my name — she just let me in, like she’d been waiting.
I took the stairs two at a time. She was already in the doorway when I got there.
She was wearing an old t-shirt of mine and nothing else as far as I could tell. Hair down. She leaned in the doorway and looked at me. “You came,” she said.
“You told me to.” I held her eyes. “Told you I’d be waiting for the word.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d understand the meaning.”
“I had to have it translated.” I didn’t move yet. Six weeks I’d spent learning to keep my hands off this woman, and every bit of me was dying to touch her now but I held off. “Glitch says hi. Says he’s proud of you.”
She laughed. Then she reached out, got a fistful of my shirt, and pulled me over the threshold.
“I called you here because I’m done.” She kept walking me backward, her hands still in my shirt, and my hands finally - finally - coming up to her hips.
For half a second my whole world dropped out from under me when she said done. But the playful look in her eyes and that COME summons told me there was more to this.
“I watched you. Every day I told myself I wasn’t looking, but I was. The cameras, the panic buttons, the way you treat those women. I watched you choose, over and over.”
“Austen—”
“You told me that you’d missed this body.
” She glanced down at herself, then back up at me.
She got the door shut behind us with her heel, and there was the dare in her eyes — the one from the wedding, the one from the bar, the one I’d loved before I knew what it was.
“You said it was all mine.” Her eyes dropped, slow, all the way down and back up my body, like she was taking inventory. “Prove it.”
That was all I needed. I pushed her up against the nearest wall and got my mouth on hers, tongue sliding against hers, both hands in her hair.
She started making those little sounds against my mouth — the ones I’d been jerking off to every morning in the shower — only the real thing was so much better than the memory I’d been working from.
I pressed into her so she could feel exactly what she’d done to me, making her gasp.
She arched against it and kissed me harder.
Her hands found the hem of my shirt. She broke the kiss long enough to drag it over my head and throw it somewhere behind her. Then she went quiet.
Still.
Her eyes were on my chest. For one terrible second I thought she’d changed her mind but then she reached out and touched the ink over my heart with two fingers. Light. Like she had the night she’d touched the cut on the back of my door.
I couldn’t help it. I grinned.
“When?” she said.
“Three weeks after the others.” I covered her hand with mine, held it flat against my chest. “Wanted you close to my heart always.”
She looked up from my chest to my face. “You had Ice put my name over your heart?” She stared at me like I’d just told her I’d jumped off a building.
“What if I hadn’t sent you that text tonight?
What if we never got back together? What if some poor woman had to look at my name on your chest every time she saw you naked — every time she fucked you — for the rest of your life? ” She stared at me. “Are you crazy?”
“Crazy for you.”
“Be serious.”
“I am serious.” I kept her hand pressed over my heart so she could feel it hammering.
“I never doubted for a second we’d get here.
Not once. But I wasn’t just waiting you out, and I want that clear.
After what you watched me do at that party, you had no reason to take my word for anything.
So the space wasn’t only about you missing me.
It was so you could see for yourself — every day, in that bar — that the man whose hands ended up on a stranger was gone.
That I could stand next to you wanting you like hell and still keep my hands to myself.
You had to watch me be that man long enough to believe he was real.
That was the part I couldn’t rush.” I held her eyes.
“Once you’d seen it, I knew you’d come back.
Back in my arms. Back in my bed. Only this time for good.
” I paused. “Although I’ll be honest — it was getting harder.
Was giving Fewin’s plan some serious thought. ”
“You absolute bastard,” she said, and pulled me back down to her.
I got her t-shirt over her head in the hallway and she was bare underneath, exactly as I’d suspected.
I picked her up. She giggled as I carried her into the bedroom and laid her down on her bed where I just — stopped.
Looked at her. All of her. It’d been weeks since I’d had her and I was going to take a goddamn second.
“You’re staring,” she said. Same as the first time.
“Yeah.” Same as the first time. “Worth staring at.” And this time she didn’t call it a line, because she knew.
I kissed my way down her. In no hurry at all, the way I’d told her I dreamed about taking my time, no clock, nowhere to be.
I dragged my mouth down her throat and across her chest and over her stomach and felt her start to come up off the bed before I’d even gotten where I was going.
When I finally settled between her thighs and put my mouth on her she said my name — Tyler.
Not Handful. Tyler. I’d felt the lack of it every day for weeks. Hearing it now, soft and wrecked, with my mouth on her, it damn near took me apart. I had to stop and breathe against her thigh.
Then I got my mouth back on her, and everything else went quiet — the heat of her against my face, the smell of her skin, the taste I’d missed worse than I’d admitted even at the bar. I’d told her the truth that day. I took my time proving it.
I worked her slow, the way she likes, reading every sound, every shift of her hips, paying attention.
Flattened my tongue and dragged it up the length of her and then circled her clit, slow, then fast, then slow again, two fingers sliding inside her while my mouth kept its rhythm.
After a while she let go of the sheets and put both hands in my hair and held on.
I felt her go tight and trembling around my fingers.
“Not yet.” I said it against her, didn’t lift my head. “You summoned me. You don’t get to run the whole thing.” I slowed right down. “You come when I say.” Playing her own word back at her — the COME she’d sent me.
“Tyler—”
“Not yet.”
“Bastard.”
I grinned against her and gave her what she needed and took it away again, twice, until she was shaking and her thighs were locked around my head. Then I lifted my head just long enough to say the one word she’d sent me.
“Come.”
And sealed my mouth back over her. She broke, her whole body shaking, thighs still clamped around my head, fingers pulling my hair. I worked her through every second of it until she shoved me away, gasping, half-laughing, swearing at the ceiling.
“I hate you.”
“No you don’t.” I kissed the inside of her thigh, the soft curve of her stomach, came up her body. “You summoned me here for exactly this. You don’t get to hate me now I’ve delivered.”
She got her breath back faster than I expected and then she got her hands on me and flipped us.
She pushed me flat on my back and looked down at me, hair wrecked, hands spread flat on my chest. I looked up at her and went for a nipple — I knew exactly what sounds she’d make if I got my mouth on it — but she shoved me back down with a smirk.
“My turn,” she said. “And you don’t get to tell me when.”
She took her time. Started with her mouth on the heart tattoo — just held it there a second, which nearly did me in before she’d even gotten going — then worked her way down, slow, until she had her mouth on my cock.
One long, lazy lick, like she was testing how much I had left.
Not much, was the answer. She knew it too.
She reached for the drawer by the bed, then stopped with her hand on the handle and looked back at me. “I’m on the pill,” she said. Simple. Certain. “And you’re mine now. I don’t want anything between us tonight.”
“Nothing between us,” I confirmed. It came out rough.
She sat up, climbed over me, and took me inside her slow — inch by inch, watching my face.
“There he is,” she said, when she had all of me. “My Tyler.”