25. Dani #2
The charge was different because the room was different.
The charge was different because the I love you had been said.
The charge was different because the man whose hands were in my hair had spent twenty hours not knowing whether he'd get to put his hands in my hair again, and the not-knowing had concentrated the wanting into something fiercer than anything I'd felt from him before.
I felt him in the back of my throat. I gagged. My spittle ran down. I wrapped my arms around his hips and pulled him closer and he made a small noise in the back of his throat I hadn't heard him make before and his leg shook against my shoulder for half a second and stopped.
"That's it," he muttered. "Swallow me down. Hartley, fucking hell. You do this so well. Holy fuck."
He kept moving. My head bobbed against him. I hummed around him because I knew what the humming did, and he cursed under his breath and his hand tightened in my hair and his other hand braced against the back of the couch and his head fell back.
He pulled me off him before he came. He pulled me off him before he came because he wasn't going to finish in my mouth tonight.
The finishing-in-her-mouth version of the night was a version he'd given me on Saturday and wasn't going to give me again twenty hours after I'd told him I loved him.
The version he was going to give me tonight required him inside me, where he could see my face.
He yanked me back to my feet. He kissed me again. Hard. The kiss buckled me at the knees.
"I need a surface," he muttered against my mouth. "Hartley. I need a surface."
I almost laughed.
"There's a whole couch right there," I said.
"Thank god."
He wrapped his arms around me and tossed us over the back of the couch.
I squealed as he caught me. We rolled onto the cushions, and then off them, the way two adults will who are no longer young enough to do it with grace.
We ended up on the plush rug of his living room floor, him on top of me, my jeans still on and his sweats half-down, the wall of glass above us showing the valley going amber.
"Jett."
"Yes."
"You're a mess."
"I know."
He kissed my face. He kissed my neck. He kissed the hollow at the base of my throat.
He cupped my breasts in both hands. He slid his nose along my pulse point.
Goosebumps rose. He latched his mouth around one of my nipples and I gasped, and his other hand snaked down between us and flicked open the button of my jeans without looking, the way a man flicks open the button of jeans he has now flicked open the button of three different times.
His hand slid down. Past my underwear. To the slick wet place he'd been finding by feel for a week.
He bit down softly on my nipple as his finger found my clit.
"Jett."
He growled against my breast as he slipped his finger inside me. He gathered the wetness. He drew it back up. He circled my clit slowly, deliberately, the way he had on Saturday but slower, more attentive, more like a man performing a careful act of devotion than a man performing dominance.
This was the version of the night he hadn't yet given me.
He'd given me Saturday. He'd given me Tuesday on the rug. He was giving me, on a Thursday afternoon at three thirty in the living room of his glass house with the valley burning low behind us, the version where he was slow.
The slow version was the version that wrecked me. The slow version was the version that told me, in language I hadn't been raised to recognize as love language but was beginning to learn, that he'd been waiting for the chance to do it slow.
He took me apart on the floor of his living room.
He took the jeans off me. He took the underwear off me.
He took his time on each, the way you take your time on a thing when you don't want the doing of it to be over.
By the time I was naked on the rug with the late afternoon sun coming through the glass and warming my skin, he hadn't yet finished taking off his own clothes.
I hadn't yet come. I'd stopped caring whether I was going to.
The wanting was its own thing.
The wanting was a gift.
He came down over me. He kissed me again. He pressed himself slowly against me. I felt him slide between my legs without entering me yet, hot and slow and unhurried, dragging the length of himself through the slick of me, and he kissed me until I was the one begging him to move.
"Please."
"Please what."
"Please put yourself inside me."
"I love it when you ask for things, Hartley."
"Jett."
"Yes."
"Please."
He slipped into me.
He went slow.
The slow was the entire scene. The slow was the chapter.
And he did not let it carry me past anything.
He sank in one unhurried inch at a time, watching my face do the thing it did, drawing back just as slow, every drag of him out and back in deliberate enough that I felt the whole length of it register, every nerve I had waking up under the patience of it.
My hands came up and gripped his shoulders.
My heels pressed into the backs of his thighs to keep him close, to keep him from speeding up, because the not-speeding-up was the thing taking me apart.
"That's it," he murmured against my mouth, his forehead dropping to mine, his breath warm and uneven.
"Just like that. You feel that? That's me telling you.
Every single one of these is me telling you.
I'm not going anywhere. You're not getting away from me.
I'm going to do this slow for the rest of your life. "
"Jett."
"Say it back."
"You're not going anywhere."
"That's right."
He reached between us, his fingers finding my clit, circling at the same slow merciless pace as his hips, two rhythms timed to each other, and the pressure built low and wide and unhurried, a wave that took its time arriving because he was taking his time bringing it, and I felt it climb the whole length of me with nowhere to rush to.
"I've got you," he breathed. "Come on. Let me feel it. I want to feel it slow. I want to feel all of it."
I came around him with his forehead against mine and his breath on my mouth and his hand in my hair, and it came slow and total and from somewhere deeper than the fast ones ever reached, and I shook through it with my arms locked around his back and his name coming out of me in pieces.
He didn't stop moving. He worked me all the way through it, slow, watching my face.
When I finally went loose under him, he let himself follow.
He came with my legs around his waist and his face in the side of my neck, a small low sound in the back of his throat that was the closest thing to a sob I'd ever heard him make.
He held me on the rug a long time afterward.
He did not move. He did not get up to get me water.
He did not get up to clean either of us up.
He just lay on top of me, his weight pressing me into the rug.
The way he'd pressed himself into me on Saturday night with the scars.
The way you press yourself into a thing you're determined to keep.
I lay underneath him with my arms around his back, and the late afternoon light came down on us through the glass, and I thought, with the specific small clarity I was learning to recognize as the inside of being loved:
This was the chapter. This was the entire chapter, of the entire book, of the entire life I have not yet lived. This was him telling me he'd heard me on Wednesday. This was him saying yes.
I closed my eyes. I held him.