17. Theo #2
I climb into his lap. I don't think about it. My body just wants to be closer. He helps me—hands on my hips, guiding me, settling me on him. His hands are steady. Mine are not.
“Bedroom,” he says into my mouth.
“Yeah.”
He stands up with me still on him, which shouldn't work and works, and he carries me through the apartment to the bedroom. He sets me down on the edge of the mattress, and he kneels.
I've never seen him on his knees. I don't even know what to do with my face.
“Hey,” he says, looking up at me. One hand on my thigh, thumb moving slow. “I'm going to take care of you tonight. Not fuck you. Take care of you. I want you to know the difference.”
I nod because my voice is not available.
“You tell me if anything is too much.”
“Okay.”
He holds my gaze.
“Lie back.”
He undresses me slowly. He undresses me like he's unwrapping something he doesn't want to damage.
Shirt up and off. Hands sliding along my ribs, not tickling, not rushing, learning.
He pauses at a bruise on my side I didn't know I had, from nothing, from my body doing stupid things today. Kisses it. Moves on.
Pants. Boxers. Done.
I'm naked and he's still fully dressed, which means he's thought about the order of this, and the thought makes me shiver.
He stands. He strips out of his own clothes without performance, without show. Fast and plain. Shirt. Jeans. Everything else. His body is the same body I've had three times now, and still I look at him and my mouth goes soft.
He comes down over me.
Slow.
So slow.
His mouth on my collarbone. On my sternum.
On my stomach. Lower. He takes me in his mouth and it's not the urgent suck he's given me before.
It's patient, it's thorough, it's a man making sure his person is held.
I cover my eyes with my forearm because the tenderness of it is harder to take than anything rough he's done.
He brings me to the edge and stops. Moves back up. Kisses the inside of my wrist until I move my arm off my face.
“Look at me.”
I look.
“I need you to stay with me. The whole time.”
“Okay.”
He reaches for the nightstand.
He preps me like he has the other times, patient, thorough, but different tonight. Not building me into a frenzy. Building me into calm. Finger. Another. Another. When he pushes into me, it's slow enough that I feel every inch, and I'm looking at him the whole time, and he's looking at me.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
His forehead finds mine. Stays.
He sets a rhythm I've never gotten from him before.
Not a fuck. A rock. Deep, slow, his forehead on mine, his breath in my mouth.
My legs wrap around him. My hands are on his back, on his shoulders, on his face.
I keep touching his face because I can't stop needing to confirm he's here.
His stubble rasps under my fingertips. A pulse ticks under the hinge of his jaw.
His eyes are wide open on mine, closer than faces are supposed to be, and he holds them there.
He's not hiding any of himself tonight. He's letting me see the whole thing.
It is the most exposed I have ever seen another person be, and the fact that he's doing it for me, the fact that he can't do it for anybody else and he's doing it for me, cracks something open in my chest that I didn't know had a lid.
“This,” he says against my mouth. “This is mine. You. This. Us.”
“Yes.”
His hand slides up to cup my jaw.
“Say it.”
“I'm yours. This is yours.”
“Mine.”
My eyes well up and don't spill.
“Yours.”
I'm not going to last. I can feel it building.
Not the hot spike of the clearing. Not the desperate slam of the first night.
Something deeper. Something that starts behind my navel and spreads up through my chest until my throat is full of it.
He's moving slow. He's watching me. He knows exactly what he's doing.
“I want you to come for me,” he says. “Just like this. Look at me.”
“I'm looking.”
“Come.”
I do. I come with his name in my mouth, not Mad Dog, Maddox, because this isn't that, and he watches me through it, every second, holding himself inside me, and then he lets go too, shaking into me with his face pressed to my neck, quiet, the quietest he's ever been.
His arms tighten around me. His breath comes out warm and ragged against my throat.
He says my name once, low, like a prayer he didn't know he knew the words to.
He doesn't pull out right away. He stays.
Holds me. Kisses the side of my face, my jaw, my mouth.
His hand is in my hair, slowly combs through it, the same motion over and over, and I realize at some point that he is soothing me like a thing he plans to keep.
Eventually he moves, slow, careful, and gets a cloth from the bathroom and cleans us up without making it a thing.
He wipes my stomach. My thighs. Himself.
He drops the cloth in the hamper. He doesn't narrate any of it.
He just does it. It's the most quietly domestic set of actions I have ever witnessed, and my throat is thick watching him.
Then he comes back to bed.
Pulls the duvet over us.
Arranges me against his chest like I belong there.
I do. That's the surprise. I belong there. Not in a borrowed way. Not in a lucky way. Like the shape of his ribs and the shape of my cheek were designed to fit and no one told me until tonight.
“Sleep,” he says, low, into my hair. “I've got you.”
I tilt my face up so my mouth is near his throat.
“Maddox?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you for coming to the bench.”
His arms tighten.
“Always,” he says.
And I believe him.
I close my eyes on the gray sheets, on the low hum of the city, on the warm solid fact of his body under mine, and I fall asleep with his heartbeat under my ear like a metronome set to safe.