Chapter 10 #3
The moment my tongue touched him, he growled—a low, possessive sound that shot straight to my pussy.
I swirled my tongue around the head, savoring the salty tang of him, then sank down further, taking him deeper.
My lips stretched around his girth, and I felt the weight of him pressing against the back of my throat.
His hand tightened in my hair, guiding me, forcing me to take him harder, faster.
I gagged a little, tears pricking the corners of my eyes, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.
“That’s it, babygirl,” he rasped, his voice rough like gravel. “Take it. Take all of it.”
I hollowed my cheeks, sucking hard, my tongue working the underside of his shaft.
I could feel him twitching in my mouth, his cock throbbing with need.
I pulled back slowly, dragging my lips along him, then plunged down again, taking him balls-deep.
My nose pressed into the coarse hair at the base of his dick, and I breathed him in, drowning in the scent of him.
He groaned, his hips bucking involuntarily. “Fuck, you’re so good for me,” he muttered, his fingers tightening in my hair. “Such a good girl.”
The words sent a shiver down my spine, my pussy clenching with want.
I sucked him harder, faster, the wet sounds of my mouth filling the room.
I could feel his balls tightening, knew he was close.
I reached up, cupping them in my hand, rolling them gently as I bobbed my head up and down.
His breath hitched, and he cursed under his breath.
“Don’t stop,” he commanded, his voice thick with need. “Don’t you fucking stop.”
I didn’t. I sucked him like my life depended on it, my jaw aching but I didn’t care.
I wanted him to come. I wanted to feel him explode in my mouth, taste him on my tongue.
My pussy was soaked, my thighs trembling with the effort of staying still, but I kept going, kept sucking, kept swallowing him down until he was fucking my throat with every thrust.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he hissed, his hips jerking uncontrollably. “I’m gonna—“
He cut off with a groan, his cock pulsating as he came, hot spurts of cum flooding my mouth. I swallowed every drop, my tongue milking him for every last bit, until he was shuddering above me, his hand still clenched in my hair.
I pulled back slowly, gasping for air, my lips swollen and slick with his release. He looked down at me, his eyes dark and possessive, and tugged my chin up to meet his gaze.
“Good girl,” he said, his voice low and rough. “You’re fucking perfect.”
And I knew, in that moment, I’d do anything for him. Anything.
He brought me back the way he’d taken me apart—slow, in pieces, one thing at a time, except now he was handing each piece back instead of taking it away.
The binding first. He unwound the soft dark cloth from my wrists, careful, and then he took my hands in both of his and rubbed, thumbs working slow circles into the heels of my palms, up the insides of my wrists, bringing the feeling back, the blood back, and he asked me—low, into the quiet—to make a fist again, to wriggle my fingers, watching even now, even after, that I was all right.
I was all right. I was more all right than I had been in a year and I couldn’t have said a single word about it.
Then the blindfold.
He didn’t pull it off. He eased it up from one eye, a sliver, let the gold of the lamp come in at the edge, let me find the room by degrees the way you let someone wake instead of dragging them up, and when he had it off he kept his hand over my eyes a moment longer, his palm warm, the light coming pink and soft through his fingers, and only then did he take the hand away and let me see him.
His face. Close. Looking at me like I was the only thing in the world worth looking at, the real face, the one under the grin, and I blinked up at him from somewhere very far down and very far away.
“There you are,” he said.
He wrapped me in something soft. A blanket, heavy and warm, and he got it all the way around me, tucked it, made a parcel of me, and then he gathered the whole parcel up against his chest like I weighed nothing, like I was a thing to be carried, and I let him, I let him carry me, and that was new, that was a thing I’d never once let anyone do.
“Water,” he said, and held a glass to my mouth, his other hand at the back of my head. “Drink. All of it. Don’t argue.”
I didn’t argue. I drank. The bossing of it, the don’t argue, went down as easy as the water.
Then he settled back against the headboard and brought me with him, my head on his chest, the blanket around me, and his hand came up into my hair and stayed there, slow, stroking, no hurry, nowhere to be, and somewhere across the room a great gray weight heaved itself up and resettled with a judgmental grumble, the dog choosing the foot of the bed, and Tonio laughed low in his chest under my ear and I felt it more than heard it.
I went down into it now. Small. Held. The blanket and his chest and his hand in my hair and no armor anywhere, none, not a scrap. Nothing to keep. Nothing to measure.
I cried again.
Not the way you cry at a thing. Just—it came up and out, against his chest, soft, shaking, no reason I could’ve given him, and he didn’t ask.
That was the whole of him, that he didn’t ask.
He just held on, his hand steady in my hair, his arm a wall around the parcel of me, and he let it come and let it go and didn’t fill it with words or try to fix it or ask me what was wrong, because nothing was wrong, that was the thing, that was why I was crying.
Nothing was wrong. For once in a whole year, nothing was wrong.
“I’ve got you,” he said, into my hair, when it had passed. “You don’t have to hold anything. Not tonight. Not the loaf. Not anything.”
“I can’t make the loaf,” I said. Small. My voice came out small, younger, a voice I hadn’t used in I didn’t know how long. “I don’t know how.”
“I know.”
“My baba made it every Sunday.”
“I know, my darling.” It felt so good to have him call me that. “We’ll figure the loaf out. Not tonight. Tonight it’s not yours.”
And then—I don’t know where it came from, except that it came from very far down, from a place I’d boarded up so long ago I’d forgotten the room was there—I felt myself go soft and silly and warm, a thing I hadn’t been since I was small enough to ride my father’s shoulders through the old market, his big hands on my ankles, the whole loud world going by under me and me safe up high above all of it, laughing at nothing, at everything, because I was small and held and somebody else was carrying me and the carrying was the whole of the joy.
I burrowed deeper into the blanket. I put my cold feet against his warm leg on purpose, just to be a menace, and he yelped and laughed and didn’t move them away.
“You’re freezing,” he said. “Your feet are ice.”
“Mm,” I said, supremely unbothered, the most unbothered I had ever been about anything in my life, and pressed them closer, and felt him laugh again, and felt the dog grumble, and felt his hand keep moving slow through my hair, and thought, from the warm dark behind my eyes, that if heaven was a place it was probably this—a blanket and a heartbeat and a man who checked twice and a word that stopped everything and a kitchen in your head finally, blessedly, gone quiet.
I was so tired. I was so tired and for once it didn’t frighten me, because I didn’t have to do anything about it, I didn’t have to push through it, I didn’t have to be on my feet at three. Someone had me. Someone had the counter.
I slept.
Right there against his chest. Just down into the dark and held all the way through it.
And he let me. He held the line so I didn’t have to. He held it all night long.