13. Scarlett #3
He doesn’t slow down. He fucks me with a relentless, driving pace, his hips slamming against mine.
Every thrust hits my cervix, sending sparks through my vision.
I’m moaning loudly now, the sounds echoing in the room, my voice breaking into small, desperate whimpers as he finds the exact angle that makes my toes curl.
“Look at me,” he commands, his voice thick.
I open my eyes and see the raw hunger in his gaze.
He reaches down, his fingers finding my clit and rubbing it frantically while he continues to hammer into me.
The double stimulation is too much. I feel the orgasm crashing over me in violent waves, my internal muscles clamping tight around his cock.
His name tears out of me, my whole body wracked as the release rolls through.
Feeling me tighten, Reid lets out a guttural roar.
He gives three more deep, punishing thrusts, burying himself as far as he can go, and then he freezes, his body rigid as he cums deep inside me.
I can feel the hot pulses of his seed filling me, and I cling to him, sobbing softly from the sheer sensory overload.
He collapses on top of me, his breath coming in ragged gasps. We don’t move for a long time, tangled in the ruined silk of the gown and the sweat of our bodies. He kisses my forehead, his lips soft and lingering.
“I think,” he breathes, a playful smirk returning to his voice, “that dress is a total loss.”
I let out a weak, breathless laugh and pull him closer, not caring about the wrinkles or the cost, only the heat of him still inside me.
***
Later, I shower first.
By the time the water shuts off again down the hall, I’ve traded the ruined gown for one of Reid’s shirts, soft and worn and long enough to be a dress on me, the sleeves shoved up my forearms.
My things have migrated out here over these past days, the toothbrush, the spare clothes, the little pieces of a life relocating themselves one object at a time. Along with, apparently, a growing percentage of his closet. I pour a glass of wine and carry it to the table where the mail is waiting.
“I’m stealing another one of your shirts,” I call down the hall, over the sound of him still toweling off. “For the record. So you can’t say I snuck it.”
“That’s the third one this week.” His voice comes back easy, amused. “At this rate I’m going to open my drawer one morning and find a single sock and a note.”
“The note would be a courtesy you haven’t earned.” I take a sip. “And in fairness, you keep buying nice things and then leaving them somewhere I can reach. A weaker woman would call that entrapment.”
“Most of them cost more than that gown you just destroyed.”
“Then you should be flattered.” I tug the collar up to my nose. It does smell like him, which is the entire point, which I am absolutely not going to admit. “Consider it a tax. You get the company of a brilliant, devastating woman, and in exchange she slowly absorbs your wardrobe. Everybody wins.”
“I notice I don’t get a vote.”
“You really don’t.”
His laugh carries down the hall, low and easy, and I smile into the glass and turn to the mail.
Most of it is nothing. And then there’s the cream envelope from my attorney, and I open it standing up.
I don’t read the legal language. I’ve read enough of it for one lifetime.
I find the line that matters, the one that says the thing I’ve been waiting to hear, that it’s nearly over, that the last of Vincent’s resistance has collapsed under the weight of his own scandal, that within weeks I will not be his wife in any sense at all.
Free. Almost, close enough to taste.
I set it down and pick up the other envelope. The one I addressed myself.
The invitation to Vincent is already written, the words exactly contrite enough to be irresistible to a man who needs to believe he’s won. I read it over once more, and then I take the wax and the seal and press it down, slow, watching the wax flatten and set.
It’s a small thing. A stupid, theatrical, satisfying thing. I set his envelope apart from all the others, alone at the corner of the table, and I look at it for a long moment.
Come watch me lose, it says. Come gloat. Come explain how clever you’ve been.
Come hang yourself, I think.
Down the hall the water’s gone quiet. I carry my wine to the window, and that’s when I catch myself in the dark glass, lit from behind, his shirt loose around me and my hair down and my face stripped of everything I usually paint on it.
I stop.
For a moment I genuinely don’t know the woman looking back.
She stands too straight for the girl I used to be, the one who learned to fold herself into the smallest possible shape so no one would feel crowded by her wanting things.
She isn’t braced for a blow. She isn’t running the arithmetic of how much she’ll have to give to be allowed to stay in the room.
She’s just there in the dark, taking up exactly as much space as she pleases, holding a glass of wine and a sealed envelope that’s going to end the man who spent ten years convincing her she was nothing.
I lift the glass to her, the stranger in the glass who used to be me, who is me, who is finally going to be me out loud.
“All right,” I tell her, quiet. “Time to really end things.”