Chapter 30
Jeannie
What Bliss
The way my oxytocin-addled brain figured it, I had two options. One was to cuddle with Remy and pass out in a sweaty, sticky mess of post-orgasmic bliss. The other was to rally and get that deliciously thick cock of his inside me.
I’d always assumed that I had a low sex drive, which was how I got through a decade with only a vibrator and no prospects without much struggle, but no. It turned out I just needed to feel safe and taken care of. I just needed a partner who was down bad for what I had.
Go figure.
“What do you want, sweetheart?” Remy crooned into my ear, sending goosebumps over my skin.
“You,” I answered unapologetically. Despite what I might have been taught on the commune, there was nothing to apologize for when the two of us wanted each other. We shared our pleasure, and we shared our tears, both of which was vital to our relationship. “Always you.”
“You have me, baby,” he rumbled, resting his cock against me, but not moving it to penetrate. Such an ugly word for an amazing sensation. The pleasure, the pain, the slight burn of stretching to accommodate him, deserved something a bit more elegant. A bit more visceral.
But it wasn’t like I was in the right mind to be coining new verbiage, so I moaned and tried to push my hips up to grind against him. But Remy was in another one of his teasing moods, and he moved away from me every time I made contact.
“Remy…” For someone who worked with words for a living, I sure did lose my grasp on them whenever we were in the thick of things.
But Remy never seemed to mind. In fact, he seemed to revel in the fact that he had such an effect on me.
I liked it too. After years of having my head full to bursting, being responsible for everything from sweeping all the way to budgeting, I could finally let go.
No thoughts. No responsibilities. Just being and feeling.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ll give you what you deserve. Just gotta admire my gorgeous girl a bit.”
When we weren’t in the thick of things, I was pretty sure that sex was fairly unflattering for me, at least looks-wise.
Face sweaty and red, body scrunched up into strange positions and making new rolls, and all the funny sounds that came along with it.
But when he was looking at me like that, when I could feel the long line of his erection straining for me, it was impossible not to feel like a masterpiece spread out on his sheets.
I hadn’t gotten used to it yet, but I reveled in it. No matter how much the world might holler that I needed to be taller, blonder, and skinnier, those voices couldn’t reach the sanctum that Remy and I made together.
“Please?” I murmured, and as usual, it was like kryptonite to my love. He let out a shudder, before grinning and gripping his cock. Anticipation fluttered in my belly as he lined himself up with my entrance, then slowly pushed in.
The part of me that liked pain a little too much longed for him to bury himself inside me with one hard thrust, but that would be way too much at one time for me. Maybe after we’d had several years for my body to get used to him, we could play out that fantasy. But for now, patience ruled us.
Well, it ruled Remy.
What was great about being the bottom was that I could moan, whimper, plead, and beg all while being an impatient brat, and Remy had to be the responsible one to set the pace.
Which he was quite excellent at, in my opinion.
And yeah, mine may have not been the most expert or experienced opinion, but that didn’t matter, because it was mine.
The minutes ticked by as he encouraged my body to adjust to his length, until finally, finally, he was fully seated in me.
God, it was like I could feel him all the way into my stomach.
Logically, I knew anatomy didn’t work that way.
But what the fuck did logic matter when the man I loved was filling me to the brim?
It was funny to think that only six weeks earlier, he hadn’t been sure if I considered us to be a real couple, while I had been moving through life as if it were just a matter of course that we were in a de facto relationship.
Now that we’d actually talked it out, I got that there was a difference between casual dating, dating, and a full-fledged relationship with titles. It seemed so obvious in retrospect.
I was still a little embarrassed that I hadn’t told him I loved him during that entire time.
I’d grown up in a household that didn’t exactly encourage sharing emotions, let alone big ones like love, but that wasn’t an excuse.
I should have been telling him every day after our first month together, because I fell in love with him even before the kids tricked us.
I’d let my worries about everything being too much, too fast, influence me.
What better time to make up for it than right now?
“I love you,” I murmured, breathing deeply through my nose and slowly out of my mouth. I loved the desperate lilt it gave to my tone, communicating just how much I needed it. Needed him. “I love you so much.”
“I love you too, Jeannie, always and forever.”
Neither of us were much for words after that, mostly just curses and pleasure-soaked sounds escaping our lips as he began to move.
I loved the raw power of him as he fucked me.
Heat, and desire, and all sorts of raw, primal things that lit my brain up like the Fourth of July.
Or, apparently, like Christmas in July. Which was now most definitely a thing our families would be celebrating.
There was no sense of time in my head as we moved against each other, everything coated in ecstasy.
Remy tensed, heading toward his climax, but the man was too stubborn to let go without making me orgasm at least twice.
It had never been like that with Jacob, and certainly not with the one-night stand, which was probably a good thing.
If I had known sex could be so rapturous, so completing, I probably would have craved it a lot more in my decade-long dry spell.
“Remy,” I sighed as his teeth found the side of my neck and one of his hands slid between us.
In the few times that we’d managed to sneak away and be intimate, Remy had unlocked the combination to have me coming on his cock within minutes.
And this time was no exception. I felt the telltale fluttering in my hips, and the white-hot pleasure beginning to steal through my veins like lava.
Then there was the tightening in my chest like I couldn’t breathe, followed by the colors at the edge of my vision all melting together, before I exploded.
We’d started out slow and sweet, but this particular climax had nothing in common with those two adjectives. It was all-consuming, making every muscle in my body tighten almost painfully before relaxing all at once.
Good God. I finally understood why it was so common for people to say they’d seen stars after they came. I thought it was just a common metaphor that the writers I edited used, but boy was it real.
The only real thing that kept me clinging to reality was that I wanted to feel when Remy came. I loved looking at him, loved feeling it, loved hearing it. It was the most simplistic yet tacit proof that I made him feel as good as he made me.
“Fuck, Jeannie, God!”
Just three words, but they were the perfect declaration as he spilled into me. Heat and pleasure, primal and eternal. I wouldn’t ever get tired of it.
Eventually, we ended up entangled in a boneless mess on the mattress, our breathing slowly settling. I was happier than I ever thought I could be, and we still had the rest of our lives together.
Boyfriend and girlfriend. Jeannie and Remy. Whatever titles we might grow into. Although I looked forward to them all, I was happy to stay in this moment for as long as I could.
“All clear.”
I tried to keep my tone level as Dr. Byrne finished reading off the test results from Max’s latest round. “All clear?”
The doctor hit me with a look that was simultaneously incredibly frank, but also seemed to understand the exact depth of everything I was feeling.
“All clear. Max, sir, you are now over a year in remission, and more than six months past your last scare. We will continue to monitor things, but instead of check-ins every other month, we can move to quarterly. Should you continue to show positive trends, we’ll be down to bi-annually.”
“Did you hear that, Mama? Everything’s all clear!”
Of course I heard that. How could I not? But unfettered joy was rolling through me, occupying so much of my brain that my speech centers failed for a moment.
I couldn’t believe it. I was happy to believe it, and it was everything that I had hoped for and more, but it was hard to wrap my mind around the fact that it was actually happening.
After so much pain, after so many sleepless nights, my boy was on the path to being completely cancer-free.
I had longed for it, and while we technically had about four more years to go before he was officially declared out of the woods, this was a huge step.
“I heard!” I managed to say. I had no doubt that both the doctor and Max could hear the emotion clogging my voice, but I didn’t care. I had earned a good cry. I was just glad that they would be tears of happiness instead of pain. I’d had my fill of those. “We should go celebrate.”
“Let’s go get ice cream! It’s late enough that we can drive by Addy and Eva’s school and grab them too, right?”
“Let me text their dad. The line is long enough that he might already be on the way, so we can just have them meet us at your favorite ice cream parlor.”
“Our favorite ice cream parlor,” Max corrected. “Addy and Eva both said that it’s the best in the entire city.”
“And goodness knows an eleven-year-old and eight-year-old are experts on all of the dairy establishments around here.”
“Mama, Eva turned nine last month, remember?”