31. Juliette #4
“This what you needed?” he grits out, lips at my ear. His hand leaves my breast to slide down and rub my clit in tight, slick circles that make my vision spark. “Six years of quiet and now you want the whole fucking island to hear how well you take me?”
“Yes - God, yes. Let them hear.” My head drops forward. “I love you. I love you and it still scares me how much.”
“Good. Be scared with me.” He hauls me upright without pulling out, back to his chest, one arm banded under my breasts, the other hand still working between my legs.
The new angle makes him feel even bigger.
Every upward thrust whites out my thoughts.
I reach back, fist his hair, turn my face toward his. “I’m right here. I’ve got you.”
“Kiss me,” I beg, voice shattering. “I’m done waiting - kiss me while you fuck me. Please, Zachary.”
This time he does.
The kiss is devastating - open and deep and tasting of me.
He swallows every moan I feed him, tongue sliding against mine in the same hungry rhythm as his cock.
The hand between my legs works faster. I am shaking apart again, clenching around him so hard he curses into my mouth and fucks me through it, relentless, until the orgasm crests and crashes and leaves me limp and gasping in his arms.
He isn’t done.
He walks us two steps to the low display table that still holds a stack of opening-night staff picks.
One sweep of his arm sends paperbacks tumbling to the floor.
He bends me over the edge, chest to wood still warm from the shop lights, and drives back in to the hilt.
The new depth wrings a shattered sound from both of us.
He covers me with his body, one hand braced beside my head, fingers lacing loosely with mine, the other gripping my hip hard enough to bruise, and pounds into me until the table legs skid.
“Juliette-” My name comes out wrecked. His forehead drops between my shoulder blades. “Fuck, you feel - I’m not going to last. You make me crazy.”
“Don’t stop.” I push back to meet every thrust, greedy for it, turning my hand so I can thread our fingers tighter. “Come in me. I want to feel it. Want you to fill me up right here where I fell in love with all these words - where I fell in love with you all over again-”
He loses the rhythm. His hips snap once, twice, then grind deep as he comes with a broken groan against my skin, cock pulsing, flooding me in hot spurts I can feel.
I clench around him on purpose, milking every last drop, and he shudders through it, whispering my name over and over like an apology and a vow.
For a long time the only sounds are our breathing and the distant tick of the clock above the register.
He stays inside me, softening slowly, pressing open-mouthed kisses to my shoulder, my spine, the place behind my ear.
His hand strokes lazily along my side, gentle now, as if mapping the proof that I’m still here.
When he finally eases out I feel the warm slide of him leaving me, the trickle of his come down my thigh.
He turns me gently, lifts me to sit on the edge of the table, and steps between my knees, cupping my face in both hands.
This kiss is slower. Softer. His thumbs brush away the single tear that escaped.
“I love you,” he says against my mouth, forehead resting on mine. “Mrs. Dean. Juliette. Every version. I have loved you in every quiet room and I will love you in every loud one we ever make. I’m sorry it took us so long.”
I loop my arms around his neck and rest my forehead harder against his, breathing him in. My body is still humming, marked, deliciously used. Around us the poetry section looks like a beautiful disaster - books on the floor, my dress in a heap, his shirt abandoned over a bust of Shakespeare.
“The whole island’s going to know,” I whisper, smiling even as another shiver runs through me when his fingers trace idle patterns on my bare thigh.
He huffs a quiet laugh and kisses the corner of my mouth, then the other corner, then the tip of my nose. “Good. Let them. I’m done being quiet about you too.”
Somewhere between the Neruda and the Dickinson, between one breath and the next, I stop thinking about anything except this man, this moment, this life we’re building together from the wreckage of the one we almost lost. His hands fit my waist like they were made for it.
My name in his mouth no longer feels like goodbye.
It feels like the first line of everything that comes next.
***
The next morning, I arrive at the shop early to prep for day two.
On the register, exactly where I left his bookmark, there’s another one waiting.
One word, in his terrible handwriting.
Staying.
I stand at my own register in my own shop in the nine o’clock light with his answer in my hand, and I laugh out loud, alone, for the second morning in a row, which is becoming a pattern I can live with.
Then I tuck it into the frame of the register where I’ll see it every sale, every day, and I flip the sign to OPEN, and I let the island in.