23. Juliette #2
I take my time with the buttons on his shirt, and his face gives up a little more with each one.
Moonlight through the thin curtains paints silver across his collarbones.
His breath catches on the third button. His hands stay at his sides, letting me set the pace, and the cost of that restraint shows in the way his fingers curl and release against nothing.
“Juliette-”
“Don’t talk.” I push the shirt off his shoulders and let it fall. “Not yet.”
The shirt lands on my mother’s cedar chest with a soft whisper.
I set my palms flat on the warm plane of his chest and simply feel him breathe.
Six years of distance live in the space between each heartbeat.
I lean in and press my mouth to the hollow of his throat, tasting salt and skin, and feel the low sound he makes vibrate against my lips.
I learn him the way I should have learned him years ago.
My hands map the scar on his hip - raised and pale, a thin white ridge I trace with the pad of my thumb until his stomach muscles jump.
I find the freckle on his shoulder I’ve always loved and kiss it like a secret.
When I touch the inside of his wrist his whole body goes still, breath suspended, as if that single soft spot holds every unsaid thing between us.
“Tell me about this one.” My finger finds a thin line below his ribs. I lean down and drag my tongue along it, slow, and goosebumps rise along his ribs.
“Sailing. Fourteen. Nicole’s brother dared me to jump from the boom.” His voice has gone rough. One hand lifts like he wants to touch me, then drops again, obedient.
“And you jumped.”
“I was fourteen and someone was watching. Of course I jumped.” He catches my hand at last, presses it flat over the scar, over his heartbeat underneath it, quick and unguarded. “Ask me about the ones that don’t show.”
“Which ones?” I whisper, turning my hand so our fingers lace. My chest aches with the weight of the question.
“Six years of mornings,” he says, eyes locked on mine, “watching you write a note I was too much of a coward to answer. Every single one left one.”
The confession lands in my throat, in the sudden sting behind my eyes, in the way my stomach pulls tight with old longing and fresh want.
I rise onto my toes and kiss him again - deeper this time, pouring every unanswered morning into it - and finally his hands come up to cradle my face like I’m the last breakable thing in this house.
“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he murmurs against my mouth. “Do you know that? Standing here in your mother’s room like you trust me with the last sacred thing you have. I don’t deserve it.”
“Then earn it.” I step back just far enough to pull my own shirt over my head. The cool air is a shock against my bare skin. His gaze drops, darkens, and the naked hunger there sends heat flooding low in my belly. “Slowly.”
He does.
When he finally touches me back, it’s with the same attention.
The same care. The same undivided focus I’ve been craving since the day we met.
His hands map me like a man committing a coastline to memory - slow at the landmarks, careful at the scars.
He traces the freckles scattered across my shoulders first, then the small mole beneath my left breast, then the faint silver lines at my hips that no one else has ever bothered to notice.
Every time I make a sound he pauses, files it, adjusts course, six years of unanswered notes converted at last into a man who does nothing but read.
“Look at you,” he breathes, voice full of wonder as he eases my bra down my arms and lets it fall.
His thumbs brush over my nipples in feather-light circles that make my back arch and my breath stutter.
“Perfect. Soft here… sensitive here-” He replaces one thumb with his mouth, warm and wet, and the gentle suction pulls a broken whimper from my throat.
“God, the way you respond to me. I’ve dreamed about this sound.
About the way your skin flushes right here when you’re aching. ”
Sensitive. For the first time in six years, the word doesn’t sting.
His fingers skim lower, popping the button on my jeans, sliding the zipper down tooth by tooth.
I am already trembling. When he pushes the denim and lace over my hips I step out of them and stand bare in the quiet room while he looks at me like I’m the answer to every note he never wrote back.
The reverence in his eyes makes my heart twist.
“Zachary-”
“Let me.” He drops to his knees on the braided rug and presses an open-mouthed kiss to the inside of my thigh.
Then higher. His hands span my hips, holding me steady as his breath ghosts over the place where I am already slick and aching.
“I’ve spent years starving for the taste of you. Let me take my time.”
He does not rush. He licks into me with ruinous patience - long, slow strokes that make my knees threaten to buckle, soft flicks against my clit that have me fisting his hair and gasping his name.
Every time my hips try to chase him he eases off, presses a soothing kiss to my hipbone, waits until I stop shaking before starting again.
The teasing is exquisite torture. Praise pours out of him between every lazy pass of his tongue.
“So wet for me already… that’s it, Jules, just like that… I’ve got you… I’ve always got you…”
When two of his fingers finally slide inside me - slow, so slow I feel every knuckle - I cry out.
He curls them gently, stroking that spot in time with the gentle suck of his mouth, and the dual sensation winds me tighter and tighter until I am shaking apart above him, thighs quivering, the room going bright at the edges.
He works me through it with soft sounds of encouragement, drinking down every tremor, and only when I tug weakly at his hair does he rise.
His mouth is shining. I kiss the taste of myself off his lips and reach for his belt with unsteady hands.
“My turn,” I whisper. “I want to feel you. All of you. No more waiting.”
I push his jeans and underwear down together.
His cock springs free - hard and flushed and already leaking at the tip - and the sight of him pulls a sound out of me I’d deny in daylight.
I wrap my hand around him and stroke once, slow, twisting my wrist the way I remember he likes. His head falls back on a broken groan.
“Juliette… Christ-”
“You’re perfect,” I tell him, meaning it with every bruised piece of my heart. I stroke him again, smearing the bead of wetness down his length, and his stomach muscles jump. “So hard for me. So patient. I love the way you look at me like I’m the only thing in the world that matters.”
We move to the bed together. The old quilt is soft beneath my back, still holding the faintest trace of my mother’s perfume.
He settles over me, bracing most of his weight on his forearms, and the heat of his bare skin against mine feels like absolution.
For a long moment we simply breathe each other in, foreheads touching, eyes open.
“I love you,” he says, and the head of his cock nudges through my folds, gathering slick, teasing my entrance without pushing in. The restraint makes me whimper. “I should have said it every day. Every hour. I’m so fucking sorry for every morning I stayed silent.”
“Say it now.” I hook a leg over his hip and pull. “While you take me. While you give us back everything we lost.”
He presses into me in one slow, steady stroke, and neither of us breathes until his hips are flush to mine. The stretch is everything - so deep I feel him everywhere. He holds still once he’s buried to the hilt, trembling with the effort of not moving, and presses his mouth to my forehead.
“I love you.” Another slow roll of his hips, dragging almost all the way out before sliding home again. “I love the way you feel around me… so tight, so warm… like you were made for me.”
“Zachary-”
“I love how brave you are.” Thrust. “How you kept the shop alive.” Thrust. “How you let me back in even after I broke us.” He sets a rhythm that is pure devotion - deep, unhurried strokes that rock the old bedframe and force soft, helpless sounds from my throat.
Every time he bottoms out he grinds in a tight circle that empties my head.
“I love this. Us. The way you look at me when I’m inside you like maybe I haven’t ruined everything after all. ”