Chapter Five #2
"I built this bar by myself," I said. "Solved every problem by myself. Told myself that was strength."
"And now?"
"Now I'm sitting here with a man who put someone through a wall for me, and I'm thinking the foundation was fine the whole time. I was just standing on it alone for no reason."
He was quiet. Then: "That might be the nicest thing you've said to me."
"Don't get used to it."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
I leaned into him. His arm came around my shoulders, easy and natural, and through the wall I could hear someone's stereo playing jazz and through the window the last of the daylight was going.
"I'm glad you were there today," I said.
"I'm always going to be there." A beat. "That came out smoother in my head."
"I know what you meant." I tucked into his shoulder. "Shut up and let me have it."
"Yes ma'am."
"I told you not to call me that."
"You've told me a lot of things. I've been selectively compliant."
"Story of my week."
IT STARTED WITH HIS hand.
On my jaw, turning me toward him. Deliberate. His thumb traced my cheekbone and his expression was one I hadn't seen before: not the morning's heat, not last night's breaking point. Quieter. Steadier. A man who'd made a decision and was acting on it.
"Jenna." Just my name. It slowed everything down.
He kissed me. Careful and thorough, his hand on my jaw, his mouth learning me instead of consuming me. I reached for the pace I knew—the collision, the fierceness that had wrecked us on the bar—and he caught my wrists. Gentle. Firm.
"Slow," he said.
"I don't do slow."
"Tonight you do." His lips moved against my jaw. "Let me."
Let me. The word sat in my chest and pulled at something I wasn't ready for. He wasn't asking permission. He was asking me to trust him. To stop driving, to give him the lead and see where he took us.
I stopped pulling. A tension I hadn't known I was carrying let go.
He stood and held out his hand and I took it and he led me to the bedroom and the ten feet felt longer than the two blocks we walked every night.
He undressed me standing by the bed. His shirt first, the annexed one, then the rest, his hands moving with steady patience.
When I was bare he stepped back and looked at me.
"You're staring," I said.
"I'm aware."
"You've seen me naked."
"I've seen you naked fast. Haven't seen you naked slow." His eyes traveled and I felt it, everywhere, warm and deliberate. "You're stunning."
"Flattery."
"Fact." He pulled his own shirt over his head. I reached for him and he caught my hand and pressed his lips to my palm and the tenderness of it almost undid me worse than anything rough ever had. "Patience."
"I don't have patience. We've established this."
"New lesson."
He laid me down and stretched beside me, propped on one elbow, and kissed me again.
Long, deep, his free hand running the length of my body—shoulder to hip and back, mapping me with his fingertips.
I arched into the touch and he eased me gently back down and the message was clear: his pace, and I was going to let him set it.
I let him.
He kissed down my throat. My chest. Took my nipple into his mouth and worked it with his tongue until my fists clenched in the sheets, then moved to the other and gave it the same devastating focus.
Lower, the flat of my stomach, the jut of my hip.
He kissed a path along the crease of my thigh and I shivered.
His breath ghosted against my skin, his hands anchoring my hips, and the anticipation was doing half the work for him.
He spread my thighs and settled between them and put his mouth to the inside of my knee and I almost told him to stop teasing and then didn't, because the patience was its own kind of heat and he knew exactly what he was doing with it.
His mouth found my pussy and the first stroke of his tongue was long and purposeful and my hips rolled up and his palms pinned them back down.
He ate me with the same patience he'd brought to everything else: measured strokes, his tongue circling my clit, steady and relentless.
I grabbed his hair. His fingers slid inside me, two, curling forward, and his mouth sealed over my clit and sucked.
"Dane—God—"
"I've got you."
The orgasm built in layers. Gathered low, tightened, spread, and when it broke it rolled through me in long waves instead of last night's sharp detonation.
I came with my back arched and my fist in his hair and his mouth still on me, drawing it out, carrying me through it until my thighs stopped shaking and my breath came back in ragged pulls.
He kissed his way back up my body. I pulled him to me and tasted myself on his mouth and the intimacy of it, his tongue, my taste, his hands cradling my face, pulled at a knot behind my ribs that I didn't have a name for yet.
His weight settled over me and I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him closer, wanting the full length of him against me, wanting no space between us at all.
"My turn," I said.
I pushed him onto his back and took my time with him.
Kissed his chest, the scar from the fence in El Paso, the hard plane of his stomach.
His breathing changed under my lips, deeper, rougher, the control he'd held all night fraying at the edges.
He was hard, his cock straining, and I wrapped my fingers around him and stroked, watching his face while I worked him.
"Jenna—"
"Patience," I said, and the look he gave me was worth every second of buildup.
I lowered my mouth to his cock. Took him in with a long, wet drag of my tongue flat on the underside, and his whole body went taut.
His hand found my hair, not guiding, just holding on.
I worked him the way he'd worked me: deliberate, thorough, no rush.
Took him deeper and hollowed my cheeks and his hips bucked and the groan that tore out of him was raw and involuntary and I felt it between my own thighs.
I kept going, pulling back to trace the head with my tongue, then taking him deep again until his fingers tightened in my hair and his breathing was ragged.
"Come here," he said. Rough. "I need to be inside you."
I crawled up his body. He gripped my hips and I straddled him and reached between us and guided his cock inside me and we both went still.
Face-to-face. His grip on my hips, my palms on his chest, and for a second neither of us moved.
The fullness of him and the openness of his expression were almost too much and exactly enough at the same time.
His thumbs traced circles on my hip bones, featherlight, and the tenderness in it after everything rough and fast we'd already done to each other made my breath catch.
"Hi," I whispered. Which was ridiculous, and intimate, and exactly right.
"Hi." His voice was wrecked. "Move when you're ready."
I started to move.
A rolling rhythm, unhurried. His grip guided my hips but didn't control them, and his eyes held mine and the eye contact was more intimate than any of the rest of it, more exposed than I'd ever been with anyone.
His thumb found my clit and traced easy circles and I rode him with my palms flat on his chest and felt his heartbeat under my fingers, steady and strong.
"You feel incredible," he said.
"So do you." I rolled my hips and he groaned and I did it again because that sound was becoming my favorite thing in this city. "Don't hold back."
He sat up. Changed the angle. His arms wrapped around me, pulling me flush against his chest, and I was in his lap with my legs around his waist and we moved together in a rhythm that was just ours.
His forehead against mine. His breath mixing with mine.
His palms spread wide on my back. I could feel his heartbeat against my own, both of them running hard, and the closeness of it was almost unbearable.
I could feel every inch of him, the shift of muscle in his thighs, the tension in his arms, the way his breathing fractured when I tightened around him.
He thrust up into me and I gasped and his grip on my back tightened and we found it again, that rhythm, deeper now, the kind that built from the inside out.
"Look at me," he said. "Stay with me."
I looked at him. And whatever I'd been holding—the control, the stubbornness, the thirty years of doing it alone—I let it go. Not because he took it. Because I put it down, and I put it down for him.
I came quietly. A deep pulse that started where we were joined and radiated out, my body tightening around him, my face against his. The breath I'd been holding broke, and I shuddered, and his arms held me through it, steady and sure while the rest of me came apart.
He followed. His arms pulling me closer, a low sound against my mouth, his hips driving up once more and holding while he spilled inside me and his whole body shuddered.
We stayed. His arms around me, my face in his neck, both breathing hard. He put his lips to my shoulder. No joke, no charm, no deflection. I pressed mine to his throat and didn't crack wise, and for the first time all week, neither of us reached for a joke to cover it.
HIS CHEST UNDER MY cheek. His hand tracing slow lines on my back. The sheet pulled up because the apartment had cooled, and through the window the streetlights were on and the brass bands were starting up again, the Quarter shaking off its nap for one last push before Tuesday.
Thursday. Four days.
His breathing changed. I felt it before I understood it, a tightening in his shoulders, the smallest shift under my cheek. He was awake. He was doing math. I didn't need to ask what kind.
I should have said something. Stay. Or don't go. Or the really dangerous one—what happens after Thursday? But I'd never been the woman who said those things, and one good Sunday wasn't going to rewire thirty years of keeping my mouth shut when it counted.
His arm tightened around me. Neither of us spoke.
I closed my eyes and pressed closer and told myself I'd figure it out tomorrow, which was a lie I'd gotten very good at over the years.