Chapter 31 #2
I unhooked my bra and let it drop. His breath changed — that rough sound he makes when need gets ahead of his patience, which is mine, and which I wanted back. “Your jeans. Leave the briefs.”
He did it, then stood at the end of the bed in black underwear and bare feet while I took off the rest of my clothes.
Ryder has always been possessive in bed, happiest with a hand around my ankle or my hair wound through his fingers.
He didn’t reach for me. I sat back against the headboard, opened my knees, and watched him work at waiting.
“Come here,” I said, and pointed at the space between them. “Use your mouth.”
He came onto the mattress from the end, never touching the place beside me that used to be his, and kissed the inside of my knee. “Here?”
“Higher.” I put a hand in his hair and steered the next kiss to the place I wanted it, so he worked from my hand and not from memory.
He moved by inches because I had made him ask, and the control I demanded became its own torment. His mouth followed the line I gave him until his breath reached the part of me that had ached after every night I watched him walk back to the bunkhouse. “Eden?”
“Yes.” I opened my legs wider and watched him take only what I had given.
His tongue touched me and I caught the headboard before my hands could get to him.
He knows what makes me arch, how much pressure I want, when I need his fingers with his mouth, and he used none of it until I asked.
When I told him to put his hand on my thigh he gripped hard enough to hold me open and not hard enough to move me.
When I said two fingers, he did it and watched my face, his own need plain in the way his hips pressed the mattress.
I came with his name caught behind my teeth, because saying it felt too much like giving him something.
He stayed between my legs until I pushed at his shoulder, then sat back on his heels with his mouth wet from me.
I could have dragged him up and kissed the taste off him.
Keeping him there mattered more. Both wants were mine.
“Condoms are in the right nightstand,” I said, and followed his eyes to the drawer before he could move.
He looked at the drawer that used to hold his gun, his spare hearing-aid batteries, and whatever coins came out of his pockets. “May I?”
“Yes. Take one and close it.”
He crossed the bed on his knees, opened the drawer, took one foil packet, and touched nothing else.
After five years of marriage the question should have been ridiculous.
Watching him shut that drawer, I thought about the man who moved ninety-four thousand dollars and arranged my departure without asking me one question.
Here was the changed behavior, in the room where wanting me had always excused everything.
“Take those off,” I said, and watched him push the briefs down.
His cock came free, hard and familiar, and the want hit me so hard the anger came in behind it.
He had slept within sight of my house for seven months and taken nobody.
I had never asked Mia to check, never asked Leah, never put the question to a single woman on this compound who would have told me.
I had no route to that fact at all. I had decided to believe it, and I knew I had decided, and I let myself have it anyway.
I held out my hand. He came to me and I closed my fingers around him before he could open the foil. His eyes shut. “Look at me,” I said, and he did. “Who does this belong to?”
“Me. You don’t own my body.” It came out rough and without a pause anywhere in it. “You can have anything I agree to give you. Right now you’ve got my cock in your hand because I want it there.”
From another man the correction would have made me furious. I stroked him once and took the condom out of his fingers.
“And who chooses whether you use it?”
“You do.”
I put the packet back into his hand. “Put it on.” I leaned into the pillows and let him see that the next move was still mine.
He did, and I lay back and didn’t open my arms. “On top. Keep your weight off me.”
Ryder settled between my legs and braced above me.
He waited with the head of his cock against me until I lifted my hips.
The first push hurt after seven months without him, and I put my hand on his chest. He stopped with barely more than the tip inside me, every muscle in him held still under my palm.
“Out,” I said, and pressed until he withdrew, and he stayed over me and didn’t ask whether I’d changed my mind.
The absence of the question gave me room to work out what had frightened me.
It wasn’t pain. It was the way his face changed when he felt resistance, the attention narrowing to my breathing before I asked him to check it.
I had seen that exact focus aimed at Jess while I stood in the clubhouse with hospital tape on my arm.
He had taught her how to hold her shoulders, where to put her hand, how to let him ask about a baby she wasn’t carrying.
Now the man who knows the first sound my chest makes was watching my mouth, and my own bed was crowded with a woman who had never been in it.
“Move back,” I said. “And don’t ask me whether I can breathe.”
Ryder shifted to his knees at the foot of the bed with his hands on his own thighs. “I won’t ask.”
“You watched me come home from the hospital and then turned to her and acted frightened for the baby.” I pulled the sheet over my legs, not for modesty but because I needed something between us while I said it. “You used the face you make when I can’t breathe. I watched you use it on Jess.”
“Yes.” He didn’t move closer. “I knew you’d recognize it.”
“I invited you into my bed and you brought her in with you.”
“You remembered what I did. That’s mine. Jess isn’t in this room. What I made you watch is.”
Part of me was begging him to say the memory had no place here, to promise that his mouth between my legs had made this ours again. I’d have hated him if he tried. He stayed at the foot of the bed with a condom on and no guarantee I would let him touch me again.
“Take it off,” I said, and pointed at it so he couldn’t guess whether I meant his hands, his body, or the memory.
He removed it, tied it, and set it on the wrapper. “Do you want me dressed?”
“No. I told you not to ask what comes next.”
“Then I’ll wait.” He put both hands on his thighs and gave me nothing else to refuse.
I sat under the sheet and looked at the body I had ached for and the man who had finally learned not to turn his fear into an order.
The lockdown was going to stay in this room.
It would be here after tonight, after another year, probably after every good thing we ever manage to build.
I couldn’t only have sex on the nights I forgot.
Forgetting isn’t available to me. Choosing with it present was.
“The drawer,” I said. “I want another one.”
“May I open it again?”
“Yes.”
He took one and closed the drawer and held it out to me rather than tear it.
“Come to the head of the bed,” I said. “Lie down on your back. Don’t touch me until I put your hands where I want them.”
He crossed the mattress and lay down where he had slept for five years, and he didn’t settle into the pillow or pull the sheet over himself. I climbed over him, opened the foil, and rolled it onto him myself. His hands stayed at his sides until I took one and set it on my hip.
“Keep it there,” I said, and lowered myself onto him at my own pace.
This time the fullness belonged to a choice I controlled.
I stopped when I needed to, leaned forward when the angle got to be too much, took the rest when I wanted it.
His fingers flexed against my hip and didn’t steer.
When I put his other hand on my breast, his thumb moved over my nipple, and pleasure went through me without waiting for the anger to leave first.
It hadn’t left. I rode him while I remembered his mouth saying, It’s mine, about a baby he knew wasn’t his.
I bent over him and told him exactly what I was remembering, and kissed him when the pain crossed his face, because his pain and his mouth were both mine in that moment.
He took every word. He didn’t tell me not to think about Jess, didn’t say her name had no business in our bed, didn’t try to fuck the memory out of me.
When I stopped moving, he stopped touching.
When I started again, he followed the pace I set.
“Tell me where you’re sleeping tonight,” I said as the pressure built.
“Bunkhouse.” He kept his eyes on me while the answer stripped every claim out of what we were doing.
“Tell me whose bed this is.” I put both hands on his chest and held him under me.
“Yours.” His hips lifted only when I moved with him.
“Whose house?” I asked, needing it from the man who once told me the club owned it.
“Yours.” His hand tightened only after I covered it with mine. “I’m here because you invited me. I leave when you tell me.”
That put me over. I came with my hand braced over his, looking down at the man I loved enough to ache for and hated for what he had done, and he followed only when I told him he could, his head going back into the pillow and my name leaving him in a broken curse.
I stayed above him until his body let go under mine.
I moved off first. He put the condom in the bathroom bin only after I sent him there, then dressed beside the chair. I stripped the bed, unwilling to sleep on sheets we had used, and he reached for a corner and stopped himself.
“May I help?”
“No.” When I came back from the hall he was by the bedroom door and hadn’t touched the chessboard, the nightstand, or the pillow his head had been on. “Go back to the bunkhouse.”
His eyes moved over my face, and I knew he wanted to ask whether I regretted it, whether he had hurt me, whether there would be another night. “Thank you for telling me what you wanted.”
“Don’t thank me for sex as if I donated it to your rehabilitation.”