26. Az #2
He gets me fully bare with patience that feels like worship braided to urgency, kissing the underside of each heavy breast, lingering on the drum-tight curve where June lives, nosing along the soft inside of each thigh until I’m twitching and swearing.
When his tongue finally finds my clit I fist the quilt Grandma June stitched in 1987 and moan without muffling it.
Let the house hear. Let Wren invent catastrophic cat futures.
Let this lavender room fill with evidence that we chose each other again with our whole stupid hearts.
“Louder,” he murmurs into me, filthy and fond, the words buzzing against swollen flesh. “I want the rafters to know I got my wife back. I want you slick and clenching on my tongue while you say my name like you mean the porch speech. Give me volume, Az. Give me proof.”
“Eli, fuck, your tongue is criminal. Don’t you dare stop, right there, yes-”
He sucks harder, two thick fingers pumping into me, and I come hard enough that my heels drum the bedframe in a tacky rhythm, a broken shout punching into the lavender dark without shame.
He climbs up wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, grinning like a man reprieved from a sentence he earned, and stretches out beside me so I can climb on without fighting gravity and a basketball belly alone.
“Help me,” I pant, already swinging a leg over.
“Always, forever, immediately.” He steadies my hips, guides me over him, and I close my hand around his cock just to feel him kick against my palm before I notch him and sink.
We share a long groan that absolutely travels through plaster and into neighboring dreams. He’s deep like this, so deep I have to breathe through the stretch, and he keeps his thrusts careful and upward to meet my downward rolls, both hands supporting my belly as if he’s holding the whole future steady while I take what reconciliation tastes like.
“I love you,” I tell him again, because I can, because the porch unlocked it and the lock on the door made it safe to repeat like a chorus.
“I love you and I hate how long I waited and I love your stupid earnest face and your stupid perfect cock and the way you look at me like you see me, even when nobody else is watching.”
“I love you.” He thrusts up, controlled, wrecked, eyes wet. “I love your mean mouth. I love this pussy wrapping me up like forgiveness with a pulse. Harder, softer, the angle? Talk to me. Give me the syllabus again.”
“Harder. Stay under me. Call me yours while I bounce on you. Don’t you dare be quiet.
I want Wren traumatized in the best way.
” I flatten both palms over his sternum, ink hot under them, heart slamming, and set a rhythm that makes the headboard beat a filthy tempo against the wall.
Thump, thump, thump. Somewhere down the hall a floorboard answer-creaks like an audience member shifting in their seat, and I laugh into the next moan because joy has always been louder than dignity in this family.
“Mine,” he pants, matching my pace without stealing it. “My wife. My home. My filthy miracle at thirty-six weeks riding me in her grandmother’s bed like the harvest wasn’t enough celebration, like dahlias and potato salad were only the opening act-”
“Don’t you dare bring mayonnaise salad into this bed-”
“Too late, ah, fuck, Az, squeeze me like that again, do that flutter thing. Christ-”
I do. I grind down so my clit rubs his pubic bone on every roll, belly heavy and alive between us, stretch marks silver in the moonlight, and the second orgasm builds meaner and brighter than the first, fed by love said out loud and hips that remember the choreography.
When it hits I shout, no fist, no palm, no rain to hide behind, just raw sound pouring out of me while I clamp around him in greedy waves that drag him under with me.
He comes on a groan that is definitely going to feature in Wren’s monologue, hips jerking up, spilling deep while he chants love you, love you, love you into my collarbone like a man making up for lost repetitions.
We collapse sideways in a careful tangle, still joined for a few heartbeats, laughing breathlessly into each other’s shoulders.
The headboard settles against the wall with one last guilty tap.
The house listens. Old pipes tick. Lavender holds the smell of sex like a secret it’s kept for generations of Moore women who chose loudly.
“Worth the plaster,” I murmur into his throat.
“I’ll patch it. I’ll write Wren an apology sonnet in iambic embarrassment. I’ll do every chore on the farm for a month as penance and celebration.”
“You’ll stay.” I find his hand and lace our fingers over the belly so June can kick us both at once. “That’s the only penance I want and the only prize that counts.”
“I’ll stay.” He kisses my sweaty temple, then my eyelid, then the corner of my smiling mouth. “Forever’s still not long enough. But tonight’s a hell of a down payment on the debt I owe this room.”
He reaches eventually and drags Grandma June’s quilt over our cooling skin, then fumbles the key on the nightstand like he’s double-checking fortress integrity. “Still locked.”
“Good. I’m not done looking at you.” I trace the tattoo on his ribs, the one from the first tour, the one I hated in a motel and loved in a greenhouse and claimed again tonight. “Say it again.”
“I love you.”
“Again.”