Chapter 33 Sage
SAGE
I wake up in the morning already wanting Ronan, which is not new but is still something I notice every time—a small, pleased surprise, the way you might notice the quality of light on a morning that turns out to be beautiful.
His body is pressed against me from behind, and he’s hard. He’s awake before me. He always is, some internal clock I can’t compete with. He’s lying on his side looking at me with his trademark particular expression. “Good morning.” He grinds against my bare ass.
“Good morning.” I close the lack of distance, and that’s how the morning starts.
He pulls my leg over his to spread me open, and his hand cups my pussy in the most delicate way imaginable. “Not too sore, are you? Given last night—”
“The time in the living room, the time when you bent me over the counter in the kitchen, or later on the washing machine?”
His next breath is long and unhurried. “The day ended better than it began.” His fingertips stir over me there until they settle around my clit, making my body jerk. “Thought I should ask before I assume a standing invitation. Don’t want to overstay my welcome.”
I giggle until his touch gets serious. “You are always welcome.” I think for a moment. “Unless I say otherwise.”
“I’d have it no other way.” His fingers slide around me, ensuring my wetness before he goes further. “I love how slick I make you.”
“Me too,” I pant.
He grinds against my ass, that hard cock driving against my cheek. “So fucking soft.”
“I hope not. I’ve worked hard to have a firm ass.”
He laughs once, then turns me onto my stomach. “I spoke of your skin, not your musculature, smart-ass.” Then, he swats me there.
Which I like, and we haven’t really gotten back to since the airplane. I moan for it and wiggle to encourage him.
He takes the invitation. “Is that what you want, love? A touch of pain with your pleasure?”
“If you like.”
“I like seeing you like this.” He rearranges himself until he’s on his knees between my legs. “Wanting and needing and yearning for whatever I choose to give you. My plaything.”
I look over my shoulder back at him. “I am more than a plaything, sir.”
“You are many, many things.” He grabs my hips and guides his cock into me. “You are my plaything, as established.” Thrust. “My wicked brat.” Another thrust. “The woman who drives me occasionally mad with jealousy.” Harder thrust.
“Unwarranted jealousy,” I weakly argue.
“Yes. Unwarranted, but there, all the same.” This time, he doesn’t stop to speak. He slams into me over and over, hitting my G-spot with each pass, vibrating our bodies each time we crash hard enough that it stimulates my clit too. He growls out, “Mine. This body. Your heart. I want it all.”
“I’m yours!”
He hammers into me harder until he’s as deep as he can get. Then he flattens, lying on top of me until I lower to the mattress. “Say it again.”
“I’m yours!”
He digs deeper. “Again!”
I lift my head from the mattress. “You’re mine!”
A primal growl pours from his lips as he takes over, drilling me deeper and deeper until I’m coming and he’s coming and I’m coming again.
Can’t breathe, can’t stop. He’s leaking out of me, but his body is possessed by something raw and new.
He doesn’t stop until I’m coming one final time, and only then does he slow down enough to let me breathe.
Afterward he lies with his hand in my hair and looks at the ceiling and says, out of nowhere, “Your grandmother’s name was Pearl.”
“How do you know that?”
“You told me. The first week. You said she made eggs in top hats.”
I look at him. He has remembered, without effort, a detail from a conversation we had when I was three days postpartum and running on hospital food and adrenaline.
This is who he is. The person who was actually listening when I spoke, who filed it, who still has it.
How many guys in the world would remember this kind of thing, months after? None I’ve ever been with.
He continues, “I’ve always been fond of that name. What would you think of it with Morrigan, as in Morrigan Pearl Henley?”
“I like it, but for Baldy or Bossy?”
“Baldy. I think it rather suits her demeanor.”
“And Fiona Rose for Bossy,” I say, because it has been sitting with me since I was looking at Irish baby names on a random website.
He chuckles. “Yes.”
“And Liam Cedric. Liam for your brother. Cedric for my grandfather, who I never met but whose name my mother said with love even when she said very little else with love.”
He is quiet for a moment. “Yes. All of that, yes.”
I lie back against him, satisfied, with the names settled in me the way right things settle, without effort, without the need for further examination.
Afterward, we lie in the gray morning light, and I trace a pattern on his chest, and he has his hand in my hair, and neither of us says anything. The silence is the good kind, the full kind, the kind that doesn’t need filling.
Morrigan Pearl makes herself known at six forty-seven, right on schedule.
“Your daughter,” he says.
“She has your timing. Everything on the dot.”
“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”
“You should. It’s an excellent quality.” I stretch and get up. “Stay. I’ve got her.”
He does not stay. He follows me in because that’s what he does. The babies are his favorite thing in the room after me, and sometimes I think the order might be reversed, which I do not mind in the slightest.
We get all three up and changed and fed in the smooth, coordinated way we’ve developed over months. There’s no discussion required. Each of us knows where the other is going to be, the wordless efficiency of two people who have spent enough time in the same space.
He takes Liam, I take the girls in rotation, and by seven forty we’re all at the kitchen table and everyone is fed and Morrigan Pearl is issuing her morning commentary and Fiona Rose is examining the ceiling fan with her usual philosophical engagement and Liam is watching his father eat toast with the focused admiration of a person who has decided that toast is a worthwhile ambition.
Someday, little guy.
I love this hour. The forty-five minutes after the first feeding, when everyone is fed, and no one is yet ready for a nap, and the apartment has the warm, inhabited feeling of a space that is being fully used.
Ronan drinks his tea standing at the counter because he always stands at the counter for his first cup.
It’s some habit from decades of pre-rounds mornings, I think, the body remembering the shape of urgency even when there’s no urgency.
I have stopped trying to make him sit down for it.
Some things are just true about a person.
“I’ve been thinking about a nanny,” he says.
“Does that mean you’ve already put out a call?”
He smirks, because I know him well enough to know that if he’s doing something for me, he’s already arranged it. “And the agency called back. Three candidates, all with strong references. I thought we could interview them together this week.”
“Good.” I feed Bossy—Fiona Rose—her next spoonful. I’ll get used to the names eventually. “I also want Rosemary to come. Before classes start.”
He smiles, and I think for approximately the thousandth time, That smile. That is the thing I will never get tired of. The one that escapes before he decides to let it out, that surprises him slightly, that is his most unguarded self arriving without announcement.
The morning continues in the full, unhurried way of mornings that don’t have anywhere to be. He washes up while I settle the babies for their nap, and then we swap. I make more coffee while he puts Liam down, and when he comes back, I’m sitting on the sofa with my class list and a highlighter.
He sits next to me and looks at the list. “You’ve already color-coded it.”
“I color-code things when I’m excited about them.”
“I know,” he says, with a dry, particular warmth that means something.
I lean into his shoulder, and he puts his arm around me in the easy, automatic way he has, and we sit there in the morning quiet with the class list between us and the city doing its thing below the windows.
I used to be afraid of exactly this. Of the ordinary. Of a life that wasn’t going anywhere dramatic, that was just being. I thought for a long time that still meant stuck, that quiet meant empty.
I have been very wrong about a lot of things, and this was the biggest. Still is not stuck. Quiet is not empty. This Tuesday morning is the fullest thing I have ever been inside of, and it just keeps being more full.
“Tell me something,” I say.
“What would you like to know?”
“Something I don’t know yet.”
He thinks about this with the genuine seriousness he brings to questions that don’t require it, which is one of my favorite things about him.
“When I was twelve, I wanted to be an astronaut. I told my father, who told me that was very fine but I should perhaps also have a second option. I chose medicine entirely as a secondary option and then found out I was rather good at it.”
I laugh. “You became a world-class cardiologist as your backup plan?”
“In my defense, the astronaut plan was also quite solid. I had very good spatial reasoning.”
“I’m sure you did.”
He presses a kiss to my hair, unhurried, easy, in the way he does everything. I close my eyes for a moment and just exist in the morning with him. The coffee smell and the sleeping babies and the color-coded folder and this man, this specific, unlikely, completely right man.
Morrigan Pearl is making sounds from her crib. I can hear her escalating toward a full complaint with the methodical efficiency of someone who does everything with full commitment.
“That’s you,” I tell Ronan.
“I believe she woke up on your side,” he says, which is not how any of this works, and we both know it.
“Callahan,” I say, because I like saying it, “go get your daughter.”
He goes. I lie in the warm morning for another thirty seconds and listen to him in the next room, talking to her in that low, unhurried voice, the same voice he uses for everything, and Morrigan Pearl’s escalation resolves immediately into the sound she makes when she is satisfied.
He has the same effect on all of us.
I am so glad I got on the plane.