Chapter 13
thirteen
Remy
Darcy yawns wide enough to crack her jaw, not bothering to cover her mouth. "I'm going to fall asleep right here. Oh my God, why am I so tired? It's literally nine thirty."
"You walked six miles today." I stack her plate on mine and carry them to the sink. "You tracked it on your phone and announced every half mile."
"Okay, first of all, I was sharing my fitness journey, and second of all, mile four was uphill and I deserve recognition." She pushes back from the table, her chair scraping against the floor.
She rounds the counter and drops a kiss on the top of my head, her hand squeezing my shoulder. "Night, Tripp. Don't do the dishes, I'll get them tomorrow."
"You won't."
"I might. You don't know my life." She waves without turning around, already halfway to the stairs. "NIGHT."
"Night."
Her footsteps on the stairs. The second-floor landing. Her bedroom door, the latch clicking shut, and then the muffled thump of her throwing herself onto the mattress because Darcy doesn't lie down. She collapses.
I wash the dishes.
The water runs hot over my hands and I scrub each plate with more attention than it requires.
The sponge. The soap. The cast iron I seasoned last year that's already getting more use than it saw in three years of living here.
I dry everything. Put it away. Wipe down the counter, the stove, the table where three people sat and ate dinner like that's what they do. Like that's what they are.
The kitchen is clean. The house is still. I turn off the light.
Upstairs. The hallway is dark except for the thin line of light under Darcy's door. I step over the third stair from the landing, right side, weight on the ball of my foot.
The guest room door is open. Not cracked to two inches. Open against the wall, and something in my chest goes still.
I stand at the threshold.
The streetlight through the curtain she keeps cracked throws a pale stripe across the bed, and the first thing I see is wrong.
Not the t-shirt. Not the worn cotton I've memorized over two weeks, soft from a hundred washes, the one she stole from my laundry and never gave back.
Silk.
Champagne-colored, thin straps that barely hold to her shoulders, the fabric so light it moves with her breathing.
The hem has ridden up past her navel and the silk pools against her ribs and I can see everything through it.
The dark of her nipples. The rise and fall of her chest. The way the fabric shifts with each exhale like it's alive against her skin.
She bought that. She put it on. She opened the door.
She's comfortable. Darcy probably talked her into it at some boutique. Women buy things like this for themselves. It doesn't mean anything.
I file it and step inside. The carpet absorbs my weight. I hate that my body has a protocol for this. My hands know what they're doing before my brain authorizes it. I've turned this into a procedure with steps and timing and expected outcomes.
The medic who programs a woman in her sleep. That's what you are now. Add it to the file.
Respiratory rate: ten breaths per minute. Slow. Consistent. Stage two sleep, deep enough that voluntary motor control is suppressed. Her lips are parted. Her left hand rests palm-up on the pillow beside her head, fingers loosely curled.
I kneel beside the bed. Her breathing doesn't change. The streetlight falls across the curve of her throat, the small hollow above her collarbone where her heartbeat runs slow and even. Sixty-two beats per minute. Her resting rate. I've charted it.
The silk strap on her right shoulder has slipped down her arm and the fabric gaps away from her breast and I'm looking at bare skin I haven't seen since Louisiana and my mouth goes dry.
She's asleep. She doesn't know the strap slipped. She doesn't know you're here.
The same thing I tell myself every night. Except the door was cracked two inches last week and tonight it was open against the wall. Except she's been sleeping in my shirts for weeks and tonight she's in silk that is unlike anything else in that closet.
Coincidence. Comfort. It doesn't mean anything.
My hand finds the hem of her shorts. Cotton, black, the ones from the bodega that are too small and expose the skin I've mapped over fourteen nights until I know the topography better than she does. I ease the fabric up, two inches.
The inside of her thigh is warm and soft. The thin white scars catch the light like threads of silver, and my fingers trace past them with the care of a man who knows where they end and where the unmarked skin begins.
She shifts. Micro-movement, hips tilting toward my hand by a degree, maybe two. Unconscious. Responsive. The same pattern I've documented every night, her body recognizing the stimulus before her brain processes it.
My fingers find her through the silk of her underwear.
Wet. Already wet, the fabric damp against my fingertips, and the clinical part of my brain notes that arousal response during stage two sleep indicates conditioned association with this time, this touch, this presence.
The rest of my brain shuts up because my cock is hard and my breathing is wrong and clinical vocabulary doesn't survive contact with her body, it never has, it's a frame I build and she melts through it every single time.
I push the silk aside. My fingers slide against her, slick and swollen, and I find her clit with the pad of my middle finger and press.
Not hard. The pressure she needs, the exact amount I've calibrated over days of repetition, slow circles that start wide and tighten as her breathing shifts from ten breaths per minute to twelve, then fourteen.
Her hips rock against my hand, a rhythm her sleeping body has learned, and the sound she makes is barely there, a soft exhale that vibrates in her throat.
I increase pressure. Tighter circles. Her back arches into a curve that lifts her ribs off the mattress.
The silk rides higher and the streetlight finds the underside of her breast, bare now where the strap fell, and the champagne fabric is bunched against her collarbone like something she's shedding.
She dressed for this. She opened the door for this.
I kill the thought. Bury it under respiration counts and stimulus patterns and the clinical structure that keeps this a procedure instead of what it actually is.
Her breathing hits sixteen. Thighs tense.
The flush crawls up her chest, pink spreading across bare skin above the silk, and I've seen this enough times to know she's close.
Thirty seconds, maybe less. Her fingers curling against the pillow and her lips parting wider and the sound building in her throat shifting from exhale to something with edges.
I lean in. My mouth at her ear, close enough that my lips brush the shell of cartilage, and I time it to the crest.
"Stay."
One syllable. Barely voiced. More breath than word.
Her back arches hard and her thighs clamp around my hand and she comes with a sound like she's been punched, sharp and involuntary and raw, and her whole body shudders against the sheets and her hips grind against my fingers and the wetness coats my hand.
I hold the pressure steady through every pulse because that's the protocol, consistent stimulus through the full orgasmic response, and she's beautiful, she's devastating, she's the worst thing I've ever done and I can't stop.
Her breathing starts to slow. Fifteen. Thirteen.
Her body softens against the mattress and her thighs relax and my hand is still between her legs, still wet, still pressed against her.
This is where the protocol ends. I stand and leave and go to my room and deal with what my body is doing on my own time.
Her hand moves.
Not the involuntary twitch of a sleeping body resettling. Her left hand, the one that's been palm-up on the pillow, reaches down and finds my wrist. Her fingers close around it. Not gripping. Holding. The way you hold what you're afraid will leave.
The clinical frame collapses.
Her thumb presses against my pulse point and she has to feel it, the rate that betrays everything the medical vocabulary tries to hide.
My hand is still between her legs and her fingers are on my wrist, and this isn't in the protocol because it doesn't account for her choosing this, choosing me, reaching through sleep or whatever state she's in to anchor me here.
And the silk wasn't coincidence. And the door wasn't comfort. And I knew that when I walked in and I knelt anyway.
Chère.
The word doesn't make it past my teeth. But my forehead drops to her hair and I breathe her in, vanilla and that same unnamed herbal undertone, and my hand curves around her hip and my thumb traces the bone and I'm shaking.
My hand on her hip is shaking and I can't stop it because my hands are always steady and these aren't those hands anymore.
I stay for three breaths. Four. Her fingers on my wrist, loose now, her grip softening as sleep pulls her back under. Her thumb still resting where my blood beats.
I pull back. Ease my wrist from her hand, and her fingers trail across my skin and fall to the sheet and she makes a small sound, not a word, not a name, just the sound of something gone.
The hallway is cold. I brace my forearms against the wall and let my head drop between them. My cock aches against my jeans. My hands are wet and shaking. The door is still open behind me. The door is always open behind me. I can still hear her breathing.
The kitchen smells like coffee.