22. Juliette #2
“It was trust.” His hand comes up, hovers near my face. “You trusted me to save you. After everything I did wrong, after six years of failing you, you trusted me.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“You always have a choice.” His fingers brush my cheek. “You chose me.”
“That’s a generous reading of me being carried.”
“It’s the accurate reading. You’ve corrected my accuracy for six years. Let me have this one.”
“One. You can have one.”
“I’m framing it.”
He says it and then does something worse than saying it - he reaches across the table and moves a strand of hair out of my eyes, easy, proprietary, and puts his hand back around his own bowl like nothing happened, and my whole scalp files a formal report.
I don’t pull away.
His thumb traces my cheekbone, the same way it did on the yacht club terrace. The same way it did in the pantry, the morning after the storm. The same way it did in the library, years ago, when he first touched me like I was precious.
“Tell me to stop.”
“I don’t want you to stop.”
“Then tell me what you want.”
“I don’t know what I want.”
“Yes, you do.” He leans closer. “You’ve always known. You’re just afraid to say it.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“You’re terrified.” His lips are inches from mine. “So am I. But I’m done letting fear win.”
He kisses me.
It’s soft at first, questioning. A question I’ve been avoiding for months, finally answered. His mouth is warm and careful and I hate how careful it is, hate that I can still taste the smoke on both of us, hate that six years of starving ourselves lives in the space between one breath and the next.
Then I grab his shirt and pull him closer, and it stops being soft. My teeth catch his lower lip. He makes a sound I feel more than hear. His tongue finds mine and something in my chest gives way - not gently. Like a door kicked in.
“Jules-”
“Don’t talk.” I’m pulling him toward the couch, toward the nearest horizontal surface, my fists still knotted in cotton. “Don’t say anything romantic. Don’t-”
“You were awake.” He’s laughing against my mouth, wrecked already. “You heard everything.”
“I heard everything.”
“And now you’re dragging me to your couch.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“It’s a fucking observation.” He lets me push him down. The cushions take his weight with a groan. I follow him, knees finding either side of his hips, and the heat of him hits me through two layers of clothes like a brand. “For the record, I stand by everything I said.”
“Shut up.”
“I love you.”
“I said shut up.”
“I’ll spend the rest of my life proving it.”
“Zachary-”
“Whether you let me back in or not.”
I silence him with my mouth. Hard. Open. No more questions in it.
His hands find my waist and then abandon professionalism entirely.
Palms slide under the hem of my shirt, up the bare skin of my back, and I arch into the contact like I’ve been waiting seven years for exactly this temperature of hand.
The couch receives us with a spring-loaded complaint that neither of us dignifies.
Somewhere in the negotiation his elbow finds the quilt, my knee finds the armrest, and his laugh - low, wrecked, against my throat - finds the exact frequency that has been dismantling me since a research desk seven years ago.
“For the record,” he manages, “I take back every polite thing I said about this couch.”
“You’ve never said a polite thing about this couch.”
“Good. Consistency matters.”
I roll my hips once, just once, and feel him hard beneath me. The sound he makes is not polite either.
And then the joking stops.
It stops because I take his face in both hands and hold it still and look at him - really look, the way the fire taught me to, like anything I don’t memorize could be gone by morning - and whatever he sees in my face empties his of everything clever.
“Slow,” I say. “I want to feel all of it.”
“Slow,” he agrees, like a vow. “Fuck. Whatever you want. I’m not going anywhere.”
He undresses me like an apology. Every button gets his full attention.
His mouth follows his fingers - the hollow of my throat, the slope of my collarbone, the upper swell of my breast before the fabric even finishes falling away.
When he bares me, the cold air never quite arrives; his mouth is already there, open and hot, drawing my nipple in with a pull that startles a sound out of me I don’t recognize.
“Oh god-”
His tongue flicks, then flattens, then he uses his teeth just enough that my fingers fist in his hair. “Shit. You taste like smoke and I don’t care. I don’t care.”
My cough interrupts once and he waits it out with his lips at my sternum, patient as a man with nothing left to schedule, until my breath decides to belong to me again.
His hand is already lower by then. Palm skating my stomach.
Fingers hooking the waistband of my underwear and dragging them down my thighs with a slowness that is its own kind of filth.
When the fabric catches at my knees he doesn’t rush. He just looks. His throat works.
“Zachary.”
“I know.” His voice is barely his. “I know. Let me-”
Two fingers slide through me and neither of us moves.
I’m drenched. Obviously, undeniably, six-years-of-this drenched, and he feels it - the way his breath leaves him tells me he feels it - and then he does it again, slower, spreading the wetness, dragging it up over the place that makes my hips jerk.
“Fuck,” he says, almost reverent. “Jules. You’re-”
“Don’t you dare narrate.”
“You’re dripping.” He says it anyway, wrecked and awed, and presses the pad of his finger in a tight circle that makes my head drop forward onto his shoulder. “This is what you do when I talk. This is what you’ve been doing. Christ.”
I peel his shirt off because if I have to listen to him be right I at least get to put my mouth on him while I do it. I find the bruise on his ribs - my elbow, the fire, the price of carrying me out against my will - and I press my mouth to it and feel him shudder all the way down.
“I’m sorry,” I say, to the bruise.
“I’m not.” His hands frame my face, thumbs wet from me. “It’s the best thing I own. Don’t you dare apologize for still being here.”
I get his belt open. The button. The zipper. He lifts his hips to help and I drag everything down far enough that he fills my hand, heavy and hard and wanting, and the sound he makes when I close my fist around him is going to live in me for the rest of my life.
“Shit - Jules-”
“I said slow.” I stroke him once, base to head, slow as promised. “I meant it.”
“I know. I know. Fuck. Your hand. Just - don’t stop. I’m not - I’m not going to last if you keep looking at me like that.”
“Then don’t look.”
“I’m never not looking at you again.”
I shift. Guide him. The head of him settles against me and we both stop breathing. The heat of him there - just there, not in, not yet - is enough to make my thighs shake.
“You sure?” he asks, and the question is all angst, all six years, all the nights he could have had this and chose the long way around instead.
“I’ve been sure.” My voice breaks on it. “That’s the problem. That’s always been the fucking problem.”
He presses in.
Slow. Careful. One long, devastating inch at a time, and I feel every bit of it - the stretch, the burn that isn’t quite pain, the way my body remembers him even when I spent years pretending it didn’t.
He sinks and sinks and when his hips finally meet mine we both go still.
Smoke-sore. Alive. Unbearably here. His eyes are wet.
“Oh god.” It comes out of me ragged. “Zachary. You feel-”
“I know.” He’s shaking. I can feel him shaking inside me. “I know. Fuck. I am never going to forgive myself for how long I made us wait.”
“Don’t.” My hands are in his hair, on his face, anywhere I can reach. “Don’t do that. Not now. Just - move. Please. I need you to move.”
He does.
Slow, the way I asked. A long drag out that makes me clench around him on instinct, a deeper press back in that knocks the air from both of us. Again. Again. His mouth finds my throat, my jaw, the corner of my eye where the first tear is already threatening.