Chapter Nineteen #3
He helps her to her feet and she heads off to rustle it up. And then he’s there, next to me, two hands on mine, pulling me to my feet. His eyes are bouncing between mine but I can’t tell if he heard our conversation or not.
Later, the three of us are sitting on the back porch, drinking iced tea and watching dachshunds frolic, when her phone rings. “Hi…Okay…Yes.” She hangs up. (This is where Vin learned his conversation skills, by the way.)
“Your brother is taking the bus in,” she tells Vin. “I’ll go get him from the depot.”
“Oh, he’s coming? What time?” Vin asks. “I’ll get him.”
She waves him off. “He gets in at four. But Loretta lives over there. I’ll stop in for a bit first.”
She heads to the sliding door. “Roz, do something with those tomatoes, will you?” She points to the patch in the corner of the yard. “See you at five.”
By “do something” she means pick them and then turn them into dinner, which, it won’t surprise you, sounds fun to me.
I finish my tea and head down there. I’m just washing a bowl of green and yellow and purple heirloom tomatoes in the sink when I hear Vin walk up behind me in the kitchen.
“I’m thinking linguine alla cecca. Your mom loves it and it’s pretty easy—”
I turn and drop a tomato.
Splat.
Because Vin is standing in the kitchen, hands in his pockets, with a freshly shaven face.
I try to say anything. Anything. But—
Instead, I just fling myself across the kitchen and jump into his arms. He catches me by the butt and laughs.
“It’s Vinny Green Eyes!”
Because here he is. Here he is. My husband.
The one I married. Vin of the jawline, Vin of the firm mouth, Vin of the smile, of the—yes!
Smile lines. Smile lines, I see them now, outside the corners of his mouth and there, mirrored next to his eyes.
He looks older without the beard and his face is fuller than the last time I saw it fully revealed.
And I love it, I love it, I love it. Because he’s gotten older just like me and because he is so right.
The reason we signed on the dotted line with each other was so that we could have the privilege of these faces, only getting line-ier as time speeds on.
His eyes are squeezed closed. “It has been so long since you called me that,” he whispers.
“It has been so long since I’ve seen this face. Why’d you shave it?”
He sits me on the counter and uses his now-free hands to cup my face. “Because we’re growing old together. Changing together. It didn’t seem right to cover it. Besides. You didn’t kiss me on the mouth once since I grew that beard. And I’m really fucking sick of not kissing you on the mouth.”
Well, sometimes joy is so big it hurts.
To ease the passage of this enormous emotion, I do the only thing I can think of.
I tug on his T-shirt and he bends to me.
When our mouths connect, I make a groan so guttural that Vin stops kissing me to chuckle.
But not for long. He presses my jaw, opens my mouth, firmly seeks out my feelings for him.
He’s so warm and tastes like iced tea and him. Like my big, safe man.
He turns the kiss gentle in a bossy way. We’re going his speed, whether I like it or not. And I do. I like everything. Any way he wants to give it to me.
He’s got one hand on the back of my neck, tilting me up to him.
He’s kissing me softly but he’s pushing farther in with each slide.
When I fully yield, he grunts and his forearm slides me forward on the counter.
I wrap my legs around his hips and he grunts again.
We’re twisting, I’m leaning, he’s holding us both up, thank God, because if it were up to me, I’d be free-falling.
He breaks from my lips to kiss at my neck but is almost immediately drawn back to my mouth. He’s warming me, petting me pliant. I’m soft as a fresh bloomed flower, and he’s trying to taste what’s at the center.
Well, maybe not completely soft, considering I’ve just started climbing him.
His shirt is slipping, stretching under my fingers.
I’ve got my arms around him so tight I’m trembling.
Or maybe I’m trembling because he’s just sucked my bottom lip, lifted me off the counter, taken three steps, and pushed me up against the hallway wall.
It’s a high-speed slide show, a delicious rapid-fire, all the times Vin has slid my panties down my legs and pinned me against a wall.
“Do you remember?” I pant as he starts making out with my pulse point. “Do you remember your birthday?”
He lifts his head and I read in his green eyes that he remembers exactly which birthday I’m talking about.
A long time ago, a weekday. He’d come home from work grumpy and tired and I’d dragged him out to dinner and a movie, teasing him the entire time, priming him.
Little touches, pretending to brush something off the back of his neck, pressing my chest into him when someone was trying to move past me.
Eye contact at dinner, drawing my toe up and down his leg during the movie.
I wound him up so tight that he started undoing his belt in the hallway outside our apartment.
The door was still swinging closed when he lifted me up and made me pay for working him up so badly.
“Rob’s wedding,” he grunts in reply. And I moan remembering going down on him in a hotel room, and afterward him putting my palms against the cold glass of a window.
“New Year’s three years ago,” I counter.
One of Raff’s friends had mistaken me for single and hit on me so aggressively that Vin took me home and kept me on the edge for an hour and a half.
I literally begged him to fuck me and when he finally did, I came about forty times in about forty different ways.
Well, that precious memory has him pulling me off the wall and striding down the hallway toward the bedroom. We’re making out like this might be our last kiss. We’re using our greatest hits as foreplay.
He kicks the door shut behind us and the slam feels final. Like nothing is allowed in this room but him and me. We’re hashing this out one way or another.
This isn’t his actual childhood bedroom, but it might as well be.
There are old family photos lining the walls, a row of yearbooks on one shelf, a faded poster of Yankee Stadium.
Now that me and my scar are in this room, everything that has made him into Vin is present and accounted for.
I’m surrounded by him in every way possible.
Brick by brick, this room and its contents are a scale model of his heart.
Bright sunshine and a little dust. It’s all so, humblingly, seeable.
Here he is, lit from the side, clean-shaven and drawn in clear, expansive lines. Loving the absolute hell out of me.
Also, he’s extremely turned on. He’s just given me a hickey, I can feel it burning on my neck, and now he’s tugging on my shirt, biting at the little heart that holds my two bra cups together.
My shirt is slipping against my skin and I’m gasping his name.
The button on my jeans slides like velvet and then his hand is under my panties, finding me.
“Fuck.” His voice is harsh and unforgiving, like he’s mad that I’ve been this wet for him and didn’t tell him. His big middle finger slides into me and I arch up into him. He bites my lip and moves his thumb in circles while his middle finger gives me the old come-hither.
This motherfucker knows all the magic tricks that work on me. He’s everywhere, kissing my mouth, nuzzling my ear.
“More,” I cry, and he gets what I mean. He puts his mouth at my ear.
“The first time we came out to this house I fucked you in the back seat of our car so we wouldn’t wake anyone up.”
A spike of pleasure rockets through me. I’m very, very close. “More.”
“Fucking you on the floor when I get home from work.” His words are getting choppy and his hips are pushing into my thigh. I’m almost there.
“More.”
“The first time I put you on your hands and knees you said nobody’d ever hit it like that before.”
And that’s the one that gets me. Because I wasn’t lying back then and I’m not lying now. I’m screaming through clenched teeth, arching and gasping. Even though the only words I can say are fuck and Vin over and over again, it’s pretty much the truest thing I’ve ever said in my life.
He teases every last little jump out of me before he pulls back and stands, ripping off his belt and undoing his pants. “You got hopes and dreams for this, baby?”
He’s always pretty dominant, but every once in a while he really hulks out and I am here. For. The. Ride. “Anything you want,” I gasp.
“Good.”
He pulls me by the ankles, yanks my jeans and panties down to my knees, and flips me onto my stomach. My ass gets a friendly slap and then he finds me with his fingers again.
But not for long because holy shit that’s a lot bigger than his fingers and he’s pushing, pushing, pushing into me. His hands plant on either side of my shoulders and his hips start working me inch by inch up the bed.
I’m sensitive and soft and still electrified by fireworks and every slap of his hips against mine is multiplied by a thousand. For a moment I can feel it. Everything he’s held inside this year. Every second that he’s wanted me, needed me, and couldn’t have me. I fist the sheets and take it all.
“Give it, Vin.”
I can’t fix his pain, not really. But anything he needs to let free into me right now, that I can take.
Yearning, I can fix for him. It’s absurd to think that this could be an answer for us, but also, of course it is.
We’re one thing, Vin and I, a unit. We’re best when we’re on top of each other, in rhythm, taking charge of the other’s needs.
And right now his needs are feral. He collapses down, gives me his weight, slides his arms around me, he couldn’t be closer if he tried. His breath is hot on my neck, my name is on his lips. He’s holding me in place. I’m so his I know he’s about to come before he does.