Chapter Eighteen - Benedict
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Benedict
IT’S FOUR NIGHTS later, and it’s her idea. I’ll deny that to my grave, because she’d kill me, but it matters, so let it stand. Her idea.
She shows up at my door at ten with no preamble, in jeans and one of those soft worn shirts she’d never let the public see her in, and when I open it she doesn’t say hello.
She says, “I’ve thought about it.” Like a deposition.
Like she ran the numbers, weighed the risk, and arrived at a verdict — which, knowing her, she has.
“Thought about what?” I say, although I know, because the air on my side of the threshold has already changed.
“You said there was no clock.” Her chin is up. Her eyes are not as steady as her chin. That’s the tell — the chin holding the line her nerves can’t quite. “I’d like to be the one who starts it.”
It takes everything I have not to reach for the joke.
The joke is right there, something about the clock, the bet, getting it notarized — and I watch myself decline it, which is not a thing I do.
Declining a joke is like declining to breathe.
But she’s just handed me something that clearly cost her, standing in my doorway having plainly rehearsed the sentence in the car, and you don’t meet a thing that brave with a bit.
You meet it with both hands.
I have been handed a great many things in my life without earning one of them.
And I understand, standing in my own doorway looking at Charlotte Astor being brave in soft clothes at ten at night, that I have never been handed anything like this, and that this one I will have to be worthy of, which I have no idea how to do, and intend to spend the rest of my life learning.
“Come here,” I say.
She comes.
***
I thought it would be a war. Everything with us has been a war, the bet, the court, the banter, the eighteen inches, two people firing across a net for a year. I thought, if this ever happened, it would be a competition. Both of us trying to win. Neither giving an inch.
It is not a war. That’s the first thing she undoes in me, the second I get my hands in her hair and feel her go soft against the door I’ve just shut behind her.
She isn’t competing. She came here to lose on purpose, to hand over the one thing she has never handed anyone: the control, the wheel, the whole white-knuckled grip — and the trust in that lands so hard I have to stop, forehead to hers, and just breathe for a second before I can be careful enough to deserve it.
I’ve spent a year learning her tells across a net.
The brightening before the kill. The one quiet point after a missed ball.
The strings she touches twice before a big serve.
I know her in motion, mid-rally, mid-insult, mid-takedown.
I do not know this Charlotte at all, the one with her guard all the way down, and I go slow partly because she needs slow and partly because I am suddenly learning a whole new dialect of a person I was certain I’d studied to the bone, and every new word of it takes the air clean out of me.
“If you make this weird,” she says against my mouth, “I’m leaving.”
“Define weird.”
“Sincere. Slow. Any of the things your face is currently threatening.”
“No promises.” I kiss the corner of her mouth — the clever mouth I’ve been thinking about since September. “But first. One house rule.”
She pulls back an inch, suspicious. “A rule.”
“We need a safe word.”
“A what.”
“A safe word. You say it, everything stops. Instantly. No questions, no sulking — I go make you a sandwich and we never speak of it again. Non-negotiable. It’s the whole deal.”
“‘Stop’ is a perfectly serviceable—”
“Too easy to say by accident. Too easy to not mean. Pick something you would never otherwise say in this bed.”
She considers it with the gravity she brings to everything, and I watch her land on it. Watch her mouth tip.
“Connor.”
“You are not making the safe word the name of the man I nearly drowned in a lake.”
“It’s perfect. Nothing on earth would kill a moment faster, which is the entire function of a safe word. You said pick something I’d never otherwise say.” She’s fighting a smile and losing badly. “Congratulations, Hawthorne. Should I ever need you to stop, I’ll simply summon Connor.”
“I hate it. I hate that it’s perfect. Fine. Connor.”
And we’re both laughing then, foreheads together, and the laughing does the thing sincerity couldn’t have, takes the fear down a notch, makes the bed safe, turns the whole terrifying enterprise into something we’re doing together instead of something happening to her.
Then I pull back, joke off my face, because this part she gets straight.
“Everything else — you set the pace. You say slow, I slow. You say more, you get more. And the second ‘Connor’ leaves your mouth, we stop, wherever we are, no questions. You have all the control here, Charlotte. You always did.”
Something happens in her face when I say it, you have all the control here, something cracks and reassembles, because I’ve handed back the exact thing she’s terrified of losing, and in handing it back I’ve made it safe enough to let go of.
“I don’t want it tonight,” she says, very quietly. The bravest sentence I have ever heard her say. “That’s the whole — Ben. I’m so tired of running everything. Take it. Borrow all of it. I want to find out what I am when I’m not the one holding the wheel.”
So I take it.
***
There’s a moment, the first time, after the clothes and the logistics and the laughing at a stuck button (if you tear that shirt you’re replacing it, she informs me, and then, minutes later, does not care about the shirt at all) — where the joking runs out and there’s just the other person.
Finally. All of them. Looking back at you.
She looks back at me in the low light. No wall, no guard, nothing held in reserve. Just Charlotte, undefended, letting herself be seen. I forget every clever thing I have ever known how to say.
I take my time, because she’s never been given time. I’ve been imagining this for the better part of a year and have no intention of rushing the one thing I actually wanted to earn.
I’ll cop to having pictured it. A man pictures things.
But every version I ever managed had her in command, Charlotte running the encounter the way she runs everything, setting the terms, keeping the score.
I never once managed to picture this: Charlotte handing me the terms. Charlotte watching me with her guard gone and her breath already uneven before I’ve done anything but look at her.
It rewrites the whole fantasy in real time, and the rewrite is better, because the rewrite is true, and nothing I have ever invented comes close to a real thing she decided to give me.
I get her out of the soft worn shirt, and then the bra, and take a moment to just look — because I’ve earned that much — until she flushes and says “don’t,” and I say “not a chance.”
Then I sit back on the edge of the bed and pull her into my lap, her back against my chest, and hook my hands under her knees and spread her legs over the outside of mine, opening her up, leaving her bare to the cool air of the room and nothing else, because there is no one else.
Just my chest at her back and my mouth at her ear.
“Ben—” Already unsteady.
“I’ve got you. Just feel it.” I bring my hands up and palm her breasts, slow, rolling her nipples between my fingers until she arches back against me with a sound she’d deny under oath.
“You have no idea,” I say into her ear, low, “how long I’ve wanted you exactly like this. Spread open in my lap.” I roll her nipples again and feel the gasp move through her whole body. “You’re so beautiful and so fucking wet.”
She shivers. Her thighs tense over mine. I feel the precise moment the dirty talk stops embarrassing her and starts wrecking her.
Then I drag one hand down her stomach, slow, and finally touch her where she’s been aching for it, and she gasps and bucks in my lap. I smile against her ear and get to work.
Here’s the thing about giving Charlotte Astor what she wants: I have no intention of giving it to her on her schedule.
The second she pushes her hips up for more, Ben, please, faster — I slow down.
Deliberately. Maddeningly. Two fingers circling her clit at a pace that gives her nowhere near enough.
And the second she tries to take the wheel back, tries to direct me, not like that, harder, do it — I go slower still.
Patient. Punishing. Holding her right at the edge and refusing to let her over it.
Because she does not get to run this. That’s the entire point.
That’s the thing she came here to hand over, and I intend to make her actually hand it over.
“You,” she gasps, furious, ruined, “are doing this on purpose—”
“Obviously.” I kiss the side of her neck. “You said you wanted to find out what you are when you’re not in charge. I’m finding out. You’re exquisite.”
She swears at me, and I turn her head with my free hand and kiss her, open, sloppy, all tongue, swallowing the curse whole — and keep my fingers moving at the exact unhurried pace that’s driving her out of her mind.
She makes a broken sound into my mouth, half a sob, tears standing in her eyes from the sheer overwhelm of being held at the edge by someone who will not, will not, let her control the fall.
It’s a battle of wills. Everything with us is a battle of wills. And there’s only one way to win this one: make her surrender on purpose.
“Say it,” I murmur against her wet, open mouth. “Not the safe word. The other one.”
She holds out. Of course she holds out, until she’s shaking, until she’s crying into my mouth, until every furious clever thing in her has burned down to a single syllable.
And then Charlotte Astor, who has never asked anyone for anything in her life, breaks, and says it against my lips, wrecked and desperate:
“Please.”
“Good girl.”