Chapter Four #3
She went easily — not passively, not as a concession. She let herself be moved and then her hands were at the buttons of my overshirt, working them open, and her mouth was at my jaw and then my throat.
"I want to know where," she said against my neck.
"Right here." I braced one hand against the wall beside her head. "We've got time."
She got the overshirt open and pushed it off my shoulders. Her hands ran up under my thermal and found skin and she pulled back enough to look at me, and the green in her eyes had gone dark.
"I want you to fuck me against that wall," she said. "Right now. Don't be careful about it. And tell me what you're doing to me — right now. I want to know."
My hands went to her hips. I pulled the flannel up and off and her hands went to my belt and she was fast and direct and not wasting any time — and then she went still for exactly one second, her hands at my waistband, her breath going out on something that wasn’t quite a word.
She pressed closer anyway. I lifted her and got the jeans unzipped and down.
"You've been driving me insane for three days," I said. "Since the moment you opened that door."
"Good." Her hands were in my hair. "I want to hear all of it."
I dropped to my knees.
I pulled her underwear aside and found her with my mouth and she was already wet, slick and warm, and she made a sound above me that I intended to hear again.
I took my time. She wasn’t quiet about it — she wasn’t quiet about anything — and the sounds she made ran down my spine and told me exactly what was working and what she wanted more of.
I gave her more of it. My hands held her hips in place and she had one hand in my hair and was directing with a specificity and at a volume that left no room for interpretation, and I followed every instruction she gave me with absolute attention.
She came with her thighs clamped around my face and my name on her mouth.
I gave her ten seconds. She was still breathing hard and her hand was still in my hair when I stood up and she reached for me and then stopped.
"I want—" She met my eyes. Her voice had an edge in it that wasn't authority and wasn't question. "Can I?"
"Yes."
She got me out of my jeans and went to her knees and took me in her hand first — slow, watching my face — and then her mouth closed around the head of my cock and I put my hand flat on the wall above her and breathed through it.
She took her time, learned what worked, stayed with it — the drive-through instinct, I thought, and almost laughed, and then couldn’t think about anything at all.
I was bracing against the wall with both hands after about ninety seconds.
She took me deep, the wet heat of her mouth moving with a rhythm that was exactly wrong for my ability to stay in control of this situation, and I caught her hair in my hand and said her name and she took that as the feedback it was and kept going.
"London." I pulled her up. "Not yet."
She came up and I walked her back to the wall again and she wrapped her leg around me and I drove into her and the breath left her body in a sound I was going to be thinking about for a very long time.
She was slick and tight and every inch of her was pressed against me and I held there for one long second, forehead against the wall above her.
"You feel incredible," I said. "So fucking good."
"Don't stop." Her nails were in my back. "Don't you dare stop."
I didn't stop.
I set a pace that wasn't careful and she took it with everything she had, matching it, her hips moving against mine, her mouth at my ear telling me exactly what she wanted in terms I was happy to follow.
The wall behind her took the impact and she was loud and unself-conscious and completely present, and I'd been in enough situations to know the difference between someone performing and someone actually there, and London Grant was entirely, absolutely there.
"I've been thinking about this for three days," I said. "Every part of it. Exactly this."
"Yeah?" Her voice was breathless and very satisfied and she pulled me harder. "Good."
"Making it impossible to think straight. You've been doing that since Beverly Hills."
She laughed — short, unguarded, real — and then any remaining conversation became logistically complicated.
I moved her to the bed.
She came willingly, pulling me down with her, and I stretched over her and took my time.
The urgency had run itself out against that wall and what was left was something slower, more deliberate — the specific kind of attention that meant something different than what had happened in the last twenty minutes.
I took her wrists and brought them above her head, fingers interlaced with hers, a light hold. She let me.
Her eyes stayed on mine.
I moved inside her at a pace that wasn't about speed and she matched it, her hips rising to meet mine, her breath going uneven in a way that had nothing rushed in it.
The light coming through the window was the late afternoon mountain kind — long and gold and particular — and it ran across her face and I watched her and she watched me back and neither of us looked away.
"You're doing it again," she said.
"What?"
"Looking at me like that." She shifted under me, a small rolling movement that made both of us hold still for a second. "It's very inconvenient."
"Get used to it."
Her breath went out and something in her eyes opened all the way and then she pulled me down and kissed me and I felt her come around me, her whole body going tight and then releasing, and I was right there behind her.
Afterward we lay in the mountain quiet. Her head was on my chest and my hand was in her hair and the light had shifted from gold to something thinner and bluer. Neither of us talked for a while.
She found the fortune slip in the pocket of my jeans, which were on the floor. She held it up and read it without comment.
"The best things in life cannot be planned," she said.
"Apparently not."
She set it on the nightstand. Then, after a moment: "Tell me something true about Montana. Something you haven't told anyone."
I thought about it. "In winter, up here, there are nights where it gets so cold and so quiet that you can hear your own heartbeat.
Just that — nothing else. No wind, no animals, nothing.
Just your heart and the dark." I paused.
"First time it happened I thought something was wrong.
After that I started looking forward to it. "
She was quiet. Then: "That doesn't sound lonely."
"No." I looked at the ceiling. "It doesn't."
I lay in the dark of that and thought about what I was doing.
I knew what it cost, because I’d done it before — let someone get this close against my own rules, watched myself cross the line I’d set, and paid three years for the education.
The prior client — the one whose name I didn’t say out loud anymore, not even in my own head — had been a lesson I’d paid for in full and had not planned to repeat.
I could feel the difference the way you could feel the difference between weather coming and weather gone.
Before, something had been off from the beginning and I’d talked myself past it, all the way to the end of it.
This felt like the opposite of off. This felt like the first honest thing in a long time.
I couldn't find the part of myself that wanted to stop.
London's breathing had gone slow and even against my chest. The mountains outside the window were going to dark shapes in the blue dusk, and I stayed where I was and did not move, and thought about what came next.
It was new information about myself.