Chapter 38 #2
My mouth moves from the tattoo to her hip, to the crease where her thigh meets her body, and I can smell her, sweet and unmistakable, and my cock is so hard it hurts and I haven't even gotten my own pants off yet because I'm down here pressing my face against her skin like a man who's lost the ability to sequence basic tasks.
"You're shaking." She says it quietly, not a question.
I am. They've shaken for her before, in the dark, with her sleeping. They've never shaken like this, in the light, with her watching. They're steady in surgery, steady under fire, steady when I stitch skin back together at three in the morning. They shake for her.
"Mais, I know." I press my forehead against her stomach. "Give me a second."
"Take your time." Her fingers trace the scar through my eyebrow, down my temple, along my jaw. "I'm not going anywhere."
She's not. She's not going anywhere. She climbed through a window and ran through a field and she's standing in my bedroom telling me to take my time like I'm something worth waiting for.
I turn my head and press my mouth between her thighs.
Her hand tightens in my hair and the sound she makes is nothing like the sounds she made asleep. Awake, she's louder, sharper, her hips pushing toward me instead of the unconscious arch I memorized in the dark.
I lick her clit and her whole body jerks and her breath leaves her in a word that might be my name or might be profanity or might be both, and I grip her thighs harder because she can see my face and she's watching and the wrongness is gone, the transgressive charge of taking something she didn't offer, and what replaces it is worse.
She chose this. Eyes open, lights on, every scar visible, and she chose this. There's no frame to hide behind, no role to play, no dark to blame. Just me, on my knees, with my mouth on her pussy and my hands shaking and nothing between us.
She's wet and she tastes like want and I work her clit with my tongue, slow and then not slow, reading her body except now I can look up and see her face and what I see there guts me.
Her chin tucked, lips parted, eyes half-closed but not closed because she's watching me too.
Her hand in my hair isn't guiding. It's holding on.
"Remy." Clearer this time. My name in her mouth while I'm between her thighs and she can see everything, the scar on my ribs, the tattoo over my heart, my shoulders bunching when I pull her closer.
I slide two fingers inside her and curl them and her knees buckle.
I catch her weight, one arm around her thigh, my mouth never leaving her clit, and she's gripping my hair hard enough to hurt and I don't care because the sounds she's making are wrecking every wall I've ever built.
She comes with her eyes open, looking down at me, and the noise she makes is raw and real and nothing like the soft unconscious sounds I conditioned myself to need.
This is so much better it terrifies me.
I press my mouth against her thigh and breathe, and her hand loosens in my hair and slides to my face, her thumb tracing my cheekbone, her pulse ticking against my skin.
"Come here." She pulls gently at my jaw.
I stand, and her hands go to my belt, and she's steady where I'm not, working the buckle and the button and the zipper with the calm competence of a woman who has already decided what she wants and doesn't need to negotiate with herself about it.
My pants hit the floor and her hand wraps around my cock and every muscle in my body locks.
"Breathe." She says it like she's the one with the medical degree.
Her hand moves, slow and sure, and I can't look away from her face and she can't look away from mine and this is the thing I've been avoiding since Louisiana, being seen while I want her, no performance between my need and her eyes.
Her other hand finds the scar on my ribs.
Her fingers trace the line of it, the place where a knife meant for my father caught me instead, and my breath stops because no one has ever touched that scar while looking at my face.
Every woman who found it got the redirect, the joke, the deflection.
Evie doesn't ask. She traces it like she's reading the story with her fingertips, and then her hand moves up, across my chest, and her palm flattens over Arthur's handwriting.
My father's name, inked into my skin in his own hand.
She knows whose writing this is. She grew up in the LeBlanc orbit. She's seen his signature on charity letters, on the portrait in the estate, on the documents Odette keeps in the study. She knows.
Her eyes come up to mine.
"I see you." Three words. Simple, direct, the realest thing anyone has ever said to me in this room.
I have nothing. No charm, no deflection, no smooth line. She's got her hand on my cock and her palm on my father's name and she's looking at me like I'm one person, not fragments, not performances.
I kiss her.
I lift her and she wraps her legs around me and the ankle makes her wince, just once, a flash across her face that she tries to hide.
I catch it, and I adjust my grip, shifting her weight so the left leg bears nothing, and she notices me noticing and her mouth softens into something that isn't quite a smile.
The back of her thighs hit the mattress and I follow her down, one hand bracing beside her head, and she pulls me closer with her heels against my back and I push inside her.
Slow.
Her breath catches and her eyes go wide and she doesn't close them.
Her pussy is wet and tight and the grip of her wraps around my cock like she was built to take me, and every inch of the slide in, her body opens and then grips, and my arms are shaking again and she can see all of it.
The sweat on my temples, my jaw clenching, my hips stuttering when I bottom out because the feeling cuts the breath out of me before my brain can catch up.
Every time before this, I had the dark. I had her sleep. I had a frame between what I wanted and what I let myself feel. There's nothing now. Just her eyes on my face and my cock inside her and the sound she makes when I move, and I can't hide behind a single goddamn thing.
I pull back and push in again and she moans, full-throated, her back arching off the white sheets, and her hand finds my face.
Not my shoulder, not my chest. My face. Her palm against my jaw, holding me where she can see me.
The grip reads as anchor. She isn't pulling me anywhere — she's keeping me where she can find me.
"Look at me." Her voice is rough and certain and it goes through me like current.
I look at her. Brown eyes, flushed cheeks, swollen mouth, hair fanned across my pillow in dark waves. She looks wrecked and steady at the same time, and I don't know how she does that, how she holds both things without one canceling the other.
I thrust deeper and her nails dig into my jaw and the sound she makes vibrates against my palm where it's pressed to her ribs.
Her heart pounds rapid and hard, and mine matches it, and I'm moving inside her with a rhythm that has nothing to do with control because I lost control somewhere around the time she said I see you with her hand on my father's name.
"You gonna stay with me, chère?" It comes out barely a whisper, my mouth against her temple. Just a question. The kind of question that shouldn't cost anything and costs everything.
The silence after is the worst thing I've ever done to myself.
Her breath catches. Something moves across her face that I don't recognize — fast enough that if I weren't this close I'd miss it, and her eyes go bright, and her chin trembles once before her jaw sets.
"I'm here." She says it into the space between our mouths, and her voice cracks on the second word, and my chest goes tight.
I bury my face in her neck and I stop trying to be anything.
My hips move and her hips answer and the sound of us fills the room, skin and breath and the groan of the bed frame and her voice saying my name, not Tripp, not Saint, just Remy, and I'm so far past any version of myself I recognize that the only thing keeping me here is the feeling of her body around mine.
She comes first, clenching around me so hard my vision whites at the edges, her back bowing off the mattress, her mouth open against my shoulder.
It's everywhere, the throb of her orgasm gripping my cock, and I last three more strokes before I follow her, spilling inside her with a sound I've never made, low and broken and more Louisiana than anything I've said in eight years.
My arms give out. I catch myself enough to collapse beside her rather than on top of her, and she turns into me immediately, her forehead against my collarbone, her damaged hands pressed flat against my chest. My arm goes around her back.
Her breathing is ragged and mine is worse, and neither of us moves apart.
The room is quiet except for us.
The blade of light from the gap in the curtains cuts across the floor and stops at the foot of the bed, the same stripe that's been there since I moved in. I never fixed it.
Evie sleeps on her side, facing me, one hand tucked under the pillow and the other resting between us on the sheet.
Her breathing is slow and even and her mouth is slightly open and her hair is everywhere, dark waves across the white linen that I'll find on my pillow for days.
My hand rests on her hip, thumb against the bare skin below her ribs, and each breath she takes expands against my palm.
Not monitoring. Not reading her respiratory rate or tracking the depth of her sleep cycle.
Just touching her because she's here and my hand wants to be where it is.
The bruise on her temple has gone yellow-green, hemoglobin breaking down on schedule, and my thumb starts toward it before I catch myself.
The medic surfaces for half a second, the diagnostic eye scanning the healing timeline, and I let it go.
I let it pass through me without grabbing for it and settle back into whatever this is, this thing where I'm lying next to a woman with my hand on her skin.
She's warm. That's the whole thought. Her body is pressed against mine and her heat seeps through my skin into the muscle underneath. Her skin against my chest, my ribs, my stomach. The weight of her leg draped over mine. The house sounds different with two people breathing in it.
She shifts, a small movement, her hand sliding from the sheet to my chest, palm settling over the tattoo she traced an hour ago. Her eyes open, barely, just a glint of brown under heavy lids.
"Cold." Mumbled, half a word, already sinking.
"Non, chère." Barely a whisper. My arm tightens around her, and I pull the blanket up over both of us with my free hand.
She makes a sound that isn't a word and drops back under, her fingers loosening against my skin, her breathing leveling out within seconds into the rhythm of real sleep.
The door is open. The hallway is dark and quiet and the guest room is empty and the door to this room is open because neither of us closed it. I lie still and listen to her breathe and the unnamed thing sits in my chest like another heart, solid and persistent and too big for the space it occupies.
I don't know what this is. Every version of me would call it something different. None of them have anything to say tonight. I'm just the man lying next to her in the dark with the door open and his hand on her hip and no word for the thing that keeps him awake while she sleeps.
The light from the curtain gap stretches across the floor. I don't fix it. I don't move. I don't close my eyes.
I stay.