Chapter 8 Tessa #3
He said my name once, near the start, quietly, like a question he already knew the answer to.
After that he did not talk at all. I understood every single thing he was saying.
The way his hips stuttered when I clenched around him.
The way his hand slid under my lower back to tilt me higher so he could go deeper.
The way he watched my face in the dark, eyes open, reading every flicker of pleasure and adjusting the angle of his thrusts accordingly.
I’ve never been able to explain that to Violet. How a man who would not tell anybody one true thing about himself in a lit room could tell me everything he had, at length and in order, without a single word.
At one point he lifted up on one arm as if reaching for a condom or a pillow or anything that might have been there in a normal bed. There was nothing in that room. I put my hand on his face and turned it back to me and said, "It’s fine."
He looked at me for a second, eyes dark and searching.
"Tessa."
"Don’t stop," I said, and he didn’t.
He was over me as we continued, both of us slick with sweat now, the wet sound of his cock sliding in and out of me loud in the quiet. I had both hands in his hair, holding on, saying things, most of them his name broken into pieces.
He watched my face the entire time like a man reading a monitor, changing what he did based on what he saw there. When my breath hitched he slowed. When my mouth opened on a silent moan he thrust harder, grinding against my clit on every inward stroke.
I’ve never in my life been paid attention to like that.
Not by any other body, not in any other dark.
He was mapping me all over again, learning the new routes of pleasure that ten years had carved into me.
He did it without speaking, only with the precise, relentless movement of his hips and the heat of his gaze.
The pressure built low and deep, coiling tighter with every slow thrust. I felt it rising the way a wave rises, inevitable.
My legs tightened around his waist. My nails dug into the muscle of his back.
He felt it too. He kept the same pace, never speeding up, just driving into me with that same deliberate force until the coil snapped.
When I climaxed I came with my mouth against his shoulder, and my hand flat on the scar in the middle of his chest. The orgasm rolled through me in long, hard pulses that squeezed around his cock and made him groan low in his throat.
He said my name again then, once, the sound raw, and then he pulled out of me.
I felt the sudden emptiness, the rush of wetness that followed.
He stroked himself twice, kneeling between my spread thighs, and came all over my breasts in thick, hot ropes that striped across my skin and pooled in the valley between them.
Some of it reached my throat. He kept coming longer than I expected, hips jerking, eyes locked on the mess he was making of me.
Afterward he did not let go of me. He got an arm under my back and rolled us so I was on his chest. He pulled a blanket over both of us without looking. He put his hand on the back of my head and held it there, and that was somehow more than all of it.
The building made its noises. The dachshund resettled. The compressor kicked on. Out back one of the fosters said something in her sleep. Down the hall Margaret jumped off something, because Margaret is always jumping off something. I thought, distantly, well, she's seen worse.
I lay on top of him with my ear over his heart and listened to it go from very fast to slow.
"Your heart rate is disgusting," I said.
"Resting is forty-four."
"It's a thing I have," he said, when I told him that was not a thing a person should have. I felt his chest move under my cheek and realized he was laughing. I've heard that man laugh out loud maybe twice in two lifetimes.
Then it got quiet and neither of us fixed it.
The window in that room faced east, high up. I had never been in there at the hour when that mattered.
It was gray at about five-forty, not light. Just the top of the window going from black to the color of dishwater and the shapes of the shelves coming out of the dark. I watched it happen and felt the whole thing start to arrive.
I could hold two things at once, and the second one always showed up on a schedule.
There were a hundred living creatures in this compound that needed me by seven.
There was a leasing company that called on Tuesdays.
And there was a man asleep under me on a one-year contract with nothing in it to keep him here.
He had left before. He left for a good reason, and I had just learned exactly how good his reasons were.
That was the wound that fit in the hand. He left. He always had a reason. He would have a reason again.
I picked it up in the dark and turned it over and got it comfortable. It fit the way it always fit. I hated myself completely.
Then I put my face back down on his chest and did not move for a while, because it was still dark.
He slept the way he did everything, silently and without any apparent effort, with one enormous hand flat between my shoulder blades holding me exactly where I was.
At six the window went from gray to white.
I gave myself to the end of it, and not one minute past.