Chapter 34 #2
I slide down his body, pressing my mouth against his stomach just below his navel, and his entire body tenses.
I can feel the muscles lock under my lips, the sharp intake of breath, the way his hands grip the sheets and release.
I kiss lower. Along the ridge of his hip bone.
Across the line where fabric meets skin.
I hook my fingers into the waistband and pull and he’s there, hard and warm, and I take him in my hand and hear the sound he makes it’s the most honest sound I’ve ever heard from him, raw, uncontrolled, the sound of Patrick Aldera without his walls.
I take him in my mouth. Slowly. Watching his reaction even though he can’t see me watching, which is the point, which is what he taught me that night with the scarf, that the dark amplifies everything, that when you can’t see the person touching you every nerve ending becomes a live wire.
His hips shift forward and his hand finds the back of my head, threading into my hair, and I let him because this isn’t about control.
This is about giving. This is about showing him with my mouth and my hands and my body what I couldn’t say in the hallway of a restaurant because I was too busy protecting myself.
I move slowly. I take my time. His breathing fractures into pieces and his grip tightens in my hair.
I feel it everywhere, the power and the tenderness of making this man come undone, of being the one who takes him apart.
I am also, inconveniently, desperately turned on.
The sounds he makes go straight through me.
Every shift of his hips, every involuntary tightening of his hand in my hair, every fractured exhale lands somewhere low in my body and builds.
I am doing this for him and my body is treating it like something being done to me, heat pooling, pulse quickening, a wanting that has no outlet yet and is only getting worse.
I run my tongue along the full length of him, grip him tighter, take him deeper, and the sound he makes when I do it is something I want to record and play on a loop every night before I sleep.
“Stop,” he says. His voice is wrecked. “Elena. Stop or this is going to be over before it starts.”
I pull back. Rise. He’s breathing hard, his chest heaving, the blindfold dark across his eyes.
“Take off your clothes,” he says.
“You can’t even see me.”
“I’ll feel it when you come back.”
I undress. Shirt over my head. Jeans off. Everything off. I stand naked in front of a blindfolded man in my small bedroom and the vulnerability is total and terrifying and exactly right.
I climb back over him, lowering myself slowly until skin meets skin, and the contact is a detonation, slow and full-body, spreading from every point where we touch.
He inhales sharply and his hands find me immediately, running up my sides, my ribs, my breasts.
His thumbs trace circles that make my spine arch.
“Can I take this off now?” he says, reaching for the blindfold.
“No.”
“Elena.”
“I like you like this. Helpless.”
“I am the opposite of helpless.”
His hands are everywhere, my waist, my hips, the small of my back, pulling me against him with an urgency that tells me he has been thinking about this as obsessively as I have.
"Do you have a condom?" I ask.
"In my pocket," he says, already reaching for his pants on the floor.
He finds it, tears the foil open, and hands it to me. I roll it on him slowly, watching his mouth part when my fingers close around him.
Then I sink onto him inch by inch. The sound we both make fills the small room like a prayer.
“Fuck,” he breathes. His hands grip my hips so hard I’ll have bruises tomorrow and I don’t care. I want them. I want evidence.
I move slowly. Rolling my hips, finding the rhythm, feeling him deep inside me where the emptiness used to live.
His head is back against the pillow and the blindfold is dark across his eyes and his mouth is open and I watch him feel me, I want to watch this man, this controlled, disciplined, armored man, feel something he can’t manage or schedule or delegate.
“You feel…” he starts, and doesn’t finish.
“Tell me.”
“Like you were built to ruin me.”
I lean down and kiss him, he kisses me back and I move faster, deeper, grinding against him with each stroke, the pleasure building in waves, cresting and falling and cresting again, each one higher than the last.
He reaches up and pulls the blindfold off. His eyes find mine and the look in them is the thing I’ve been seeing in my sleep, the thing that has no name but a shape, and the shape is us.
“I want to see you,” he says. “When you come. I want to see you.”
I move faster. His hands are on my hips, guiding me, matching my rhythm, his eyes don’t leave mine, watching every shift in my face, every breath, every sound.
The pleasure tightens low in my belly, spiraling inward as I brace my hands on his chest and let it build, let it climb, let it take me where it wants to go.
“Look at me,” he says.
I look at him. Brown eyes, dark with want, holding mine, and the intimacy of it, of being seen, fully seen, while my body comes apart, is the thing that sends me over.
I break. The orgasm hits like a wave that starts at the center of me and radiates outward, through my stomach, my thighs, my chest. I cry out while his hands hold me steady and he watches me the entire time.
He flips us in one controlled, deliberate motion, and suddenly I’m on my back with him above me, his mouth at my neck.
“My turn,” he says.
He moves into me with a slow, deep rhythm that makes me grip the sheets with both hands.
Every thrust is full and precise and hits somewhere inside me that makes my vision blur.
He kisses my mouth. My jaw. The spot below my ear that makes my breath catch.
He whispers something against my skin that I can’t hear.
“What?”
He says it again.
“I love you.”
Three words against my neck, spoken into my skin like a secret he’s been keeping. I can feel the words entering my body, they spread and settle into the place under my ribs where the hole used to be.
“Say it again,” I whisper.
“I love you.” He moves deeper. Slower. “I love you, and I’m not letting you go.” His mouth finds mine. “So you’d better be ready for me, Elena Brown, because this is it. This is the thing. There’s no version of my life that works without you in it.”
I come again. Harder this time, with his words still vibrating against my skin and his body deep inside mine and his eyes on me and the walls down, all of them, mine and his, flat on the ground where they belong.
He follows. His rhythm breaks, his body tenses as he presses his forehead against mine and breathes my name. I hold him while he falls apart, my hands on his back, my legs wrapped around him, my mouth against his temple whispering I love you back.
We lie there. Tangled. Breathing. The small room full of the sound of us coming back to ourselves.
His arm is across my stomach. His face is against my neck. The blindfold, his tie, is somewhere on the floor with his suit and my jeans and every defense we’ve ever built against this exact thing.
He pulls me closer, mouth at my hair. “Stop running, Elena Brown, because I’ll catch you every time. I want you with me day and night, in the bad light and the wrong moments, in the good ones and the highs. I want you in my life.”
“I love you.”
His arm tightens around me, and I know: this is what belonging feels like. Not a lease. Not matching mugs. Not flowers from the bodega.
This.