Chapter 8 #3
The first beat is her hands and her mouth taking their time on me.
She traces every line of the bad ink she's promised to make beautiful, fingertip and lips, working down my chest and my stomach, careful of the wrap on my ribs, until she eases my jeans off and takes my cock in her hand.
She strokes me slow, watching my face the whole time, reading the tension the way she reads a piece she's making, her thumb sliding over the head of me on each pass, and somewhere in the slow attention I stop being able to hold still.
She feels it, and she smiles, and then she bends and takes me in her mouth — warm, wet, unhurried — and the sound that comes out of me is nothing I've ever made before.
She builds it pass after pass, the way I built her up that first night, her hand and her mouth working me together, giving back exactly what I gave, and when I'm shaking and gasping her name through gritted teeth, careful of my own ribs, careful of everything, she takes me right to the edge and holds me there, patient, until I break apart under her, my hips jerking, my whole body locking, spilling into her with a sound torn out of me that she gentles me through, her hand stroking slow until the last of it leaves me wrung out and shuddering.
She holds me through it, her hand stilling, the way I held her hand in the shop. "There," she murmurs. "There. I've got you."
The second beat is slower than the first, somehow, slower than anything, because now there's no rush left in either of us.
When I'm hard again she eases me back against the pillows, straddles me with all her care, and reaches between us to guide me into her, lowering herself onto my cock by degrees, watching my face for the ribs, for any flicker of pain.
I feel every inch of her take me in, the slick heat of her sinking down until she's seated fully, and when she's taken all of me she goes still a moment, both of us breathing it, her hands flat on my chest, my hands on her hips, the lamplight gold across the freckles I drew from memory before I ever saw them.
And then she moves. Slow. Unhurried. She rolls her hips and rides me gentle and deep, doing all the work, keeping her weight off the broken parts of me, taking me at exactly the pace she wants, and I watch her — gold-lit, free, mine, out loud, no door to hide behind — and I've never seen anything more beautiful in my life and I've spent four months learning how to look at beauty.
"Look at me," she says, and I do, and she holds my eyes the whole time, the way she did the first night, yes.
I slide my thumb to where we're joined and find her clit and work it in slow circles in time with the roll of her hips, and her rhythm stutters, her breath going ragged, and I feel her start to climb — the catch in her breath, the tightening of her around me.
She rides me faster, deeper, chasing it, the lamplight on the long line of her throat, and then she breaks, coming around me slow and total, her body clenching tight along the length of me, my name breaking out of her in pieces, Kieran, Kieran.
The pulse of her around me, free and unhidden and saying my name out loud where the whole world could hear, takes me over right behind her.
I press up into her, deep, careful, every muscle locking against the pain and finding only her on the other side of it, and I empty everything I have into her with her name on my mouth and her hands laced through mine, and we crest and break and finally, finally go still.
She lowers herself against my good side, careful, and tucks her head under my chin, and I get my arm around her, and we lie there in the gold light, breathing, the patch hanging off the chair across the room and the door wide open and the secret over and the whole town finally knowing.
"I told you I'd find you," I say, when I can talk. "Clean. On my own. With nothing left for anybody to take."
She traces the bad ink on my arm, the lines she's promised to make beautiful.
"You did," she says. "You walked across that whole clubhouse with a patch on your back and my brother's eyes on you and you didn't flinch once.
" She presses her lips to the guitar-string scar.
"I'm starting on this arm next week. The cover-up.
I've got the whole design done already. I've had it done for a month. "
"What is it?"
"The harbor at dawn." She tips her head up to look at me, the cataloguing eyes gone soft.
"The one you drew on the cell wall. The first beautiful thing you were ever allowed.
I'm putting it on you for good, so nobody can ever make you scrub it off again.
" She settles back down against my chest. "I'm making it permanent. "
And I lie there in the gold light with the woman who picked up the bottle, the patch I bled for hanging on the chair, the storm long past and the town finally knowing and her design already waiting on my skin, and I think about a kid in a holding cell with a smuggled pencil, drawing the only beautiful thing he could reach, and I think: he made it.
He made it all the way here.
"Yeah," I tell her, and I hold her closer, careful of the ribs, careless of everything else. "Make it permanent."
Reversibility was never really our thing.