Chapter Eighteen - Benedict #2
I give her all of it at once, pressure, speed, my thumb on her clit and two fingers curled deep — and she comes apart in my lap so hard she nearly comes up off it, my name and that one please still in her mouth, and I hold her through every wave of it, and kiss her pouting, bitten, gorgeous mouth, and do not let her go.
She’s boneless after — pouty-lipped, kiss-drunk — and she twists around in my lap and looks at me with her control in actual rubble and says, “Bed. Now,” and doesn’t bother with the rest of the sentence, and doesn’t have to.
I lay her back and get the condom from the nightstand.
She watches me roll it on with open, unhidden want.
I push into her, slow, all the way, both of us groaning — and then I have to stop, buried in her, forehead to hers, because the feel of her is going to finish me and I want this to last a year.
“Don’t you dare stop,” she breathes.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Then it’s the other thing — not the slow torture.
This: hot and wet and desperate, the two of us finally moving like one thing with nothing between us, her legs wrapped around me and her nails in my back and her hips rising to meet every stroke.
And I talk her through all of it, because I’ve learned, in the last half hour, that the litigator who hates being told anything loves being told this — “There you go. That’s it.
You’re doing so good, baby. Look at you, taking everything, so good for me—” and she comes apart on the words as much as on anything.
Gasping. Swearing. Gone. Moving the way she has never moved with anyone, and the loosening is hers, and new, and handed to me — the one thing in my whole coasting life I already know I’ll spend years trying to deserve.
She’s climbing again, right at the edge of it, and I feel her start to tense. The old instinct. The bracing. The part of her that fights the fall even now. I get my mouth to her ear.
“Let go,” I say, driving into her, meaning every word of it down to the floor. “I’ve got you, Charlotte. I have never wanted anything in my life the way I want you, and I’m not going anywhere. So let go. Let go for me.”
And she does. She comes with my name in her mouth, clenching around me so hard it drags me straight over the edge with her, and I bury myself deep and let go too, shaking, undone, and the whole white-knuckled world goes quiet and gold.
For a long moment neither of us moves or speaks, just our breathing, and the bad movie still going in the other room, throwing its idiot light down the hall.
I have her heartbeat under my palm and her weight against me and the specific, unrepeatable knowledge that Charlotte Astor just came apart in my arms with my name in her mouth and let me watch every second of it.
And I understand that whatever happens after, whatever the cost she keeps swearing is coming for us, I have already been paid in full.
In advance. More than I will ever manage to earn back.
***
After, she doesn’t put the wall back up.
That’s the thing I keep waiting for that doesn’t come.
I braced for it, the wall, the brisk reassembly, the well, that was a tactical error, the deflection she runs on instinct the second she’s shown anything.
I figure I have about ninety seconds before Charlotte Astor remembers who she’s supposed to be and gets her face back under management.
She doesn’t. She stays soft. She lies there in the wreck of my bed with her head on my chest and her hand flat over my heart, where she can feel exactly what she’s done to it, and she doesn’t take it back, and she doesn’t make a joke to cover it, and she doesn’t run.
“That,” she says eventually, drowsy, “was an extremely poor decision.”
“The worst,” I agree, and kiss the top of her head, and feel her smile against my chest. “Do it again?”
“Give me ten minutes, Hawthorne. I’m not a machine.”
“You kind of are. It’s one of my favorite things about you. Terrifying efficiency. Excellent backhand. Devastating in—”
“If you finish that sentence, you’re sleeping on the floor.”
“Worth it.” I pull the blanket over us. She lets me.
She hums, unconvinced, and tucks herself closer anyway — which is the thing about Charlotte that will be the end of me: she’ll threaten to ruin you and pull herself nearer in the same breath, and mean both completely.
I never once notice the contradiction. She fits against my side like she was meant to be there.
Like the spot was waiting. I lie in the dark holding the unmeltable Charlotte Astor while she goes, slowly, to sleep on my chest — Charlotte Astor, who sleeps less than anyone alive, who keeps a chart of her sleep, who measures it in fifteen-minute blocks — and she just sleeps.
There. On me. Unguarded. Like a person who has finally, for one night, put the whole heavy thing down.
I think about all the empty boxes. The empty box at every match, the audience-of-zero she trained herself to win for.
I think about a nine-year-old in a cold house doing the math wrong on purpose, deciding safe was better than happy, laying the first stone of the wall.
And here she is, twenty-one, finally, for one night, not safe at all.
Wide open and undefended and asleep on the chest of the one person she swore she hated.
And nothing has come to take it away. The cost she’s been braced for her entire life simply hasn’t shown up.
So I lie there and make her a promise she can’t hear, which is the only kind I’ve ever been any good at keeping: as long as it’s up to me, it never will.
I don’t sleep. I stay awake on purpose, because I don’t want to miss it, and because the quiet voice in the back of me, the one that always knows the cost of things, is awake too.
We did it. Crossed the last distance. No more pretending, no operation, no bet that matters, no eighteen inches, no wall. Just the two of us, all in, no exits, the one thing neither of us can afford to lose, now fully, terrifyingly ours.
And somewhere out past the edge of this warm dark room, though I don’t know it yet, and won’t for a while — a man I wronged a long time ago is watching all of it from the cold, and doing math of his own.
But that’s tomorrow’s problem. Tonight there’s a girl asleep on my chest who trusted me with the whole white-knuckled wheel, and I stay awake and keep watch over it, and I have never in my gilded, frictionless, perfectly defended life been so completely undefended.
Or so glad of it.
She sleeps eight hours. I count them, the way she counts hers. In the morning she’ll deny it, and I’ll let her, and I’ll carry the number around for the rest of my life like a trophy I actually, finally earned.