12. Dean #2
“I’m yours.” She says it on a breath, her eyes blown dark, dragging me in by the collar until there’s no space left between us at all. “I’ve been yours since a balcony and an ugly swan, you slow, stubborn, gorgeous idiot. Now stop talking and prove you mean a single word of it.”
So I do.
I lift her off the counter and lower her onto the drop cloths spread across the floor, following her down, bracing over her so the bare concrete never once gets to be unkind to her.
It isn’t romantic, the canvas thin over the cold floor, the whole place reeking of fresh paint and sawdust, and neither of us cares even slightly.
She drags my shirt up and I lose it somewhere behind me, and then it’s skin and gold afternoon light and the small impatient sound she makes when I take too long getting the rest of her out of my way.
I take my time anyway. I waited three years. I am not about to rush the one thing I waited three years for.
I kiss down the center of her, learning the places that make her breath stutter, the dip below her ribs, the jut of her hip, then lower, until I’ve got her thighs hooked over my shoulders and my mouth on her cunt and she’s fisting the drop cloth for something to hold on to.
She’s already soaked, already saying my name like it’s a complaint and a prayer in the same breath.
I lick into her slow and work her clit until her spine leaves the floor and her fingers twist hard enough in my hair to sting, and only when she’s right at the edge do I pull back and leave her there.
“Dean.” Half warning, half beg. “If you make me wait the way you did at the courthouse, I will end you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” I absolutely would. I just want to be inside her too badly tonight to torture either of us with it.
I line up and push into her in one slow stroke, and we both groan, low and helpless, the feel of her clenching tight around me almost more than I can take. Her face fills with wonder and want and what I’m half afraid is love, the thing I want to stop time and live inside.
Slow, at first. Learning the sounds. Learning the way her nails rake down my back when I find the angle that arches her clean off the floor, the way her breath climbs every time I bottom out in her, the way her heel hooks behind my thigh to drag me deeper like she’s scared I’ll change my mind.
I won’t. I couldn’t. There is nowhere on this earth I would rather be than balls-deep in this woman on the floor of the one place that was ever only mine, fucking her slow and turning it into ours instead.
Then harder, because she asks, because her hips rise to meet every thrust and her voice breaks around please and more and right there.
I give her exactly what she wants the second she wants it, driving up into her until the sounds she makes go ragged.
I pin her hand above her head and lace my fingers through hers, and the thing in my chest I’ve kept chained for three years finally slips the leash and pours into all of it.
Mine, my body says with every stroke. Mine, after three years of his.
Mine, after a thousand dinners I sat across from her and said nothing.
“Say it,” I bite out against her mouth. “Whose are you.”
“Yours.” She says it like she’s been dying to. “God, Dean, I’m yours, don’t you dare stop.”
“Then come on my cock. Let me feel it.”
She does. I feel the exact second she goes over, the clutch and pull of her around me, her cry breaking apart into a sound with no consonants left in it at all.
It drags me right over with her, and I bury myself to the hilt and spill into her with her name in my teeth, the only word I ever learned, the only one that was ever going to matter, every silent wasted year of wanting her pouring out at once into the place where we’re joined.
After, we lie tangled on the drop cloths, breathing hard, staring up at the bones of the ceiling I plan to spend the rest of my life standing under, hopefully with her beside me.
“We christened the restaurant,” she says.
“Before the soft opening. Very avant-garde. The critics will write about the energy.”
She laughs, and it startles both of us, free and unguarded, a laugh from a place that’s been boarded up too long.
My phone rings, killing it. I check the screen, frown at the name, silence it.
“Who?”
“Tyler. I’ll call him back.”
Then her phone goes off too. Same name.
She answers, still flushed, still wrapped in nothing but a drop cloth and me. “Tyler? What’s.”
I watch the color drain from her face. Watch the laugh curdle into something cold and afraid.
“Eve?” I sit up. “What is it?”
She hands me the phone, her hand shaking.
Tyler’s voice comes through, tight and fast. “Dean? Where are you two? Somebody broke into Eve’s apartment. The whole place is trashed. Furniture flipped, windows broken. Cops are here now, I came by to drop off Mom’s casserole and the door was hanging open.”
“Jesus. Is anyone.”
“Nobody was home, thank God.” A pause, and then his voice drops, rough with something I’ve never heard from Tyler. “But Dean. They left a message. On the living room wall. In red paint.”
“What does it say?”
“WHORE DIES NEXT.”