Chapter 26 Ronan
RONAN
She tastes exactly the way I remember.
That is the first coherent thought I have upon licking my finger as we exit the alleyway. Over eleven months of remembering, and I was right about every detail, which is not always the case with memories I have examined too closely.
“I’m not sure I’ll make it the whole walk if you don’t do that to me again.”
“Two blocks,” I confirm, smiling at her eagerness. “You can survive two blocks.”
We make it one before she pulls me into a doorway and kisses me again, and I let her, because I’ve been waiting over eleven months, and two blocks is a perfectly manageable distance to cover in stages.
She laughs against my mouth when I walk her backward into the door, low and delighted, and I file that sound away with the same thoroughness I have been filing everything about her since the plane. The cold doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I’m not sure I am registering the cold at all.
We stand there in the doorway for longer than is strictly efficient. I find I have no objection to this. We make it to my building eventually, with more groping than is suitable for polite society.
The older I get, the less I care for polite society.
My penthouse is a significant departure from the warm, cluttered cottage she has been living in for the past two months.
It’s large and clean and precisely ordered, the home of a man who has been alone in it for a long time and has organized it accordingly.
I watch her take it in. The floor-to-ceiling windows with the city below, the bookshelves that run the length of one wall, the kitchen that is significantly better equipped than hers, which is to say it contains things other than eggs and butter and a subscription to a meal kit service she never opens.
“It’s very you,” she says.
“Is that good or bad?”
She turns and looks at me with that direct, considering look. “Very good. Come here.”
I come there.
She moves with the particular physical confidence of someone who has spent years living very consciously in her body. She knows it the way an athlete knows their instrument, its capacities and its preferences, and she has opinions about both that she communicates without apology.
I find this arresting in the best possible way. I find everything about Sage arresting.
The dress comes off first, and she makes a sound when my mouth finds her collarbone, then her shoulder, then the curve of her throat, and her fingers move into my hair with an impatience that is extremely gratifying.
Her bra and panties match—both satin and nude to her skin tone.
The moment I took to stare at her was not long enough, but I am unable to break free of her long enough to appreciate her body the way it should be appreciated.
I walk her to my bedroom. “Take those off and lie on the bed for me.”
She does so without hesitation, and the results are exquisite. Every inch of her, now amplified by pregnancy, is a delight. This is the moment to take my time, no matter how much of me screams otherwise. Slowly, I remove my clothes, eyes locked on her face. Watching her watch me.
Watching her frustration build.
“You’re doing this on purpose.”
“Yes,” I agree.
“I want to be annoyed about it.”
“I know. You’re not, though.”
“No,” she admits, pulling me closer. “I’m enjoying the show.”
I step between her legs, which are draped over the edge of my bed. “Should I take more time?”
“Don’t you dare,” she says just as pulls me down to her mouth, and for a while neither of us says anything that requires words.
She makes a sound against my jaw when I find the place below her ear that I remembered correctly and have been thinking about with embarrassing frequency. Her hands tighten in my hair, and I think with a satisfaction that is probably excessive, Yes. That.
“Ronan.” The way she says my name when she is running low on patience is a specific thing. It’s lower, more deliberate, with an edge to it that makes concentration difficult.
“I’m getting there.”
“Get there faster.”
“No.”
The sound she makes in response to this is not one she’d make in any other context, and I feel it everywhere at once, and I continue not hurrying because I’m not going to let all this time of thinking about this be resolved in under an hour if I can help it.
She’s not actually as impatient as she’s performing.
She is, in reality, entirely with me in this, meeting me with the focused attention she brings to everything, and the performance of impatience is itself a kind of participation, a pushing back against my control that tells me she finds it at least as interesting as I do.
But I like this. Her desperation. Her yearning for me.
“Insufferable,” she says at one point, pouting against my shoulder.
But then I move down to take her nipple in my mouth, and she arches herself against me for more. When I reach between her thighs, she curves to meet me. And the moment I settle my cock against her there, she tries to take me into herself.
“Patience, love—”
“I am out of patience, sir.”
An involuntary growl comes from me upon hearing that, and I begin to enter her as gently as I can manage, which is saying very little. She’s so wet and so hot and so tight that I could lose myself in this moment like a teenage boy in the back seat of his parents’ car.
But I clear the fear and the worry with another kiss. Her soft lips bring me back to myself like nothing else. As much as I want to play games with Sage, now is not the time. Instead, I hold her closer, wrapping her in my arms as she does the same to me with her legs.
I pump into her, feeling every perfect curve of her body, both inside and out.
The way she claws at my shoulders, the shake of her bottom lip when she’s close, how she moans my name, it all adds up to the woman I haven’t stopped thinking about since I met her.
I am lost in Sage, and I never want to be found.
When she cries out, throbbing on me, I join her, too enamored not to. We lie in the dark afterward and she traces an idle pattern on my chest and doesn’t say anything for a while, which I appreciate. She is not, I have learned, a person who fills silences she doesn’t need to fill.
“This is nicer than the plane,” she says, eventually.
My laugh is a disorganized thing, because that is what I have become. That is what she made me. “The plane had significant limitations.”
She props herself up and looks at me in the low light.
Her dark hair is entirely undone from whatever she’d done with it earlier and she looks, if it’s possible, even more herself like this than she does clothed.
This version of her is private in a way that I understand is not given easily, and I am aware that I’m lucky to be in the room for it.
“The babies,” she says.
“Leigh has them. They’re fine.”
“I know. I just…” She looks at me. “I’ve never been away from them overnight.”
“Do you want to go back?”
She considers this honestly, which is what I’ve come to expect from her. “No. I want to call and check in, and then I want to stay.”
Leigh’s voice comes through the phone bright and entirely unbothered.
All three sleeping, everything fine, she is watching something on television and eating my biscuits, which she says is not technically stealing.
Sage tells her that it is technically stealing and hangs up, and I watch the tension in her shoulders release fully for the first time all evening.
“Better?”
“Yeah,” she agrees, and settles back against me, and I reach over and turn off the lamp. The perfect end to the perfect date.
But then morning comes.
I wake before she does and lie still for a while in the gray early light, which is something I haven’t done in longer than I can precisely recall.
She is asleep with the absolute conviction of someone who has been running on minimal sleep for two months and has finally found a safe place to properly stop, and I don’t wake her.
I make coffee quietly and stand at the window and look at the city and feel something so uncomplicated I almost don’t recognize it.
Content. I feel content. I’m standing in my kitchen in the morning, and I am content in a way that has nothing to do with achievement, productivity, or the management of difficult situations. It is, I find, an excellent feeling.
Things have finally come together in a way I want them to be. Forever.
She appears eventually, in one of my shirts which she has apparently decided is hers now, and sits at the kitchen counter with her coffee and looks out at the city with the particular quality of stillness she gets when she’s thinking something she hasn’t decided to say yet.
I give her the space. I make eggs. I know how she likes them.
Eventually, she says, “Your place is very quiet.”
“Yes. It is.”
“Does that bother you?”
“The quiet never bothered me until I knew what joy the noise could be.”
“What do you mean?”
I set down the spatula and look at her directly.
“My flat is missing something it should have. Stay. Not just today. Move in. Bring the babies and Bossy’s commentary, Boy’s surveillance operation, and Baldy’s philosophical ceiling investigations.
I want to wake up next to you. I want our family in one place rather than halfway across the city. Stay.”
Sage looks at me for a long moment. “Okay.”
I turn back to the eggs before she can see me smile like an absolute fool. I’ve taken a long and winding path to end up at exactly the right place. I intend to stay here as long as I can.