Chapter Nineteen #2
When she wanted my hands higher, she took one of them and guided it.
When she wanted me closer, she pulled. When a touch startled her, I stopped before she had to ask.
Every time I felt her go still, I went still too and waited until she told me, with her eyes or her breath or the pressure of her fingers, whether to go on.
She always, eventually, told me yes.
Sometimes in a whisper.
Sometimes with a nod.
Sometimes by closing the distance herself.
The first time my mouth touched the line beneath her ear, her whole body shivered.
I stopped.
She breathed once, twice.
Then tilted her head to give me more room.
“Again,” she said.
So I did.
Softer.
Her hands slid from my hair to my shoulders. I felt her grip through my shirt, felt the effort in her not to disappear from the moment when sensation rose too fast.
“Stay with me,” I murmured against her skin.
“I am.”
“Tell me what you need.”
“You.”
The word was almost angry.
I lifted my head.
Her eyes were bright, her lips parted.
“You,” she repeated. “Not careful Eli standing six feet away from me inside his own head. You. Here.”
Something rough moved through my chest. “I’m here.”
“Then kiss me like you’ve wanted to.”
I looked at her for one last second. “Bee, I have wanted to for years.”
“I know.”
“You sure you want all that at once?”
Her gaze dropped to my mouth. “No,” she whispered. “Not all at once.”
Then she looked back up. “But some of it.”
That was permission enough to ruin me.
I kissed her with more weight behind it, one hand spreading at the center of her back, the other holding her waist. Still controlled. Still listening. But no longer pretending I was untouched by her.
She made a small sound into my mouth.
My grip tightened before I could stop it.
She felt it.
I immediately loosened my hands.
“No,” she said.
I froze.
Her fingers closed over my wrist. “Don’t let go because you’re afraid of me.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“Yes, you are.” Her voice softened. “You’re afraid I’ll break.”
I had no answer for that.
She guided my hand back to her waist and pressed it there.
“I might,” she said. “A little. But not because of you.”
My throat closed.
“And if I do, you’ll stop?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“And if I ask you to stay?”
“I stay.”
“If I ask you to hold tighter?”
My hand flexed beneath hers. “I hold tighter.”
Her eyes held mine. “Then trust me too.”
That nearly broke me worse than anything else had.
Because she was right.
I had made a sanctuary out of restraint, but even restraint could become another locked door if I never believed her when she said yes.
So I trusted her.
My mouth claimed hers with years of hunger finally let loose.
My tongue slid against hers, slow and deep, tasting every corner as her fingers tightened in my hair.
She pressed closer between my spread knees, her body warm and solid against my chest. The kiss turned wetter, hungrier, our breaths mixing as she tilted her head to take more of me.
I stood without breaking the contact, hands sliding down to grip her waist and lift her.
Her legs wrapped around him on instinct.
I laid her on the bed, making quick work of my clothes before my body covered hers.
I kissed her, tongues stroking, lips parting only for quick gasps before crashing back together.
Her hands roamed, palms flat against his back, nails dragging lightly as she pulled me closer.
I broke the kiss, my mouth moving along her jaw, then down her neck.
I licked the pulse point there, sucking gently until she arched and moaned.
My teeth grazed her skin, not biting hard, just enough to make her shiver.
"Eli," she breathed, voice already rough.
Her hands went to the hem of the t-shirt and I helped her pull her it over her head.
Her breasts spilled free, nipples tight.
I lowered my head and licked one, circling the stiff peak with his tongue before sucking it into my mouth.
Bee gasped, hips lifting. I switched to the other, sucking harder while my hand cupped and squeezed the first.
Her fingers threaded through my hair again, holding me there. I kissed lower, tongue tracing down her stomach, dipping into her navel. Her eyes were dark, lips swollen from kissing.
"Yes," she said before I could ask. "Keep going."
The lamp burned low beside us.
The room narrowed to breath and warm skin and the quiet sound of her saying my name like she was testing what it could mean here.
This was a woman whose body had been made into a thing taken from her. Walked into the dark and handed to monsters. Locked up and medicated and managed for years until it stopped feeling like hers at all.
And what we did in that room did not erase any of it.
Nothing could.
We gave her something new beside it.
A choice she did not have to make quickly.
A touch that stopped when she stopped.
Desire that did not turn cruel when denied.
Every place I touched, I touched like it mattered, because it did. And I watched her learn in real time that being wanted did not have to mean being taken. That a man could want her down to the marrow and still hold the whole of that want in.
Leashed to her yes.
Soft as morning.
I couldn’t hold back on more minute, and I pressed forward, sinking into her inch by inch. She was hot and tight around me. I paused when I was fully seated, forehead pressed to hers, both of us breathing hard.
"You feel so good," I whispered.
She nodded, eyes bright. "Move. I want all of you."
I pulled back and thrust in again, slow and deep. Her legs wrapped around my waist. We moved together, bodies sliding, skin slapping softly. I kissed her neck, her shoulder, her mouth again and again. One of my hands found hers above the pillow. Our fingers laced. She squeezed tight.
Tears slipped from the corners of her eyes into her hair. I slowed, worried, but she shook her head and pulled him deeper with her heels on my back.
"Good tears," she whispered. "Keep going."
I did. I thrust harder, angling to hit that spot inside her with every stroke.
Her free hand gripped my shoulder. Sweat slicked our skin.
The room filled with the sound of me making love to her and our shared breaths.
She came with a soft sob, clamping down around my cock.
I followed right after, burying myself deep.
We stayed locked together afterward, my weight on her, her arms around me. I kissed the tears from her cheeks. She smiled against my mouth, small and shaky and real.
She took a breath that shook all the way through her. “I thought I’d never get to choose this.”
My forehead lowered to hers. “You’re choosing.”
“I know.”
Another tear slipped sideways. “I can feel it.”
There it was.
The grief and the healing in the very same breath.
Mourning the years they stole even as she took the first thing back that was only ever hers to give.
So I stayed.
I kissed the tears from her temples. I kept my hand in hers. I let the moment be tender without making it fragile, let the heat remain without letting it become a demand.
She drew me close again.
And sometime later she curled into me beneath the blankets with her cheek on my chest and her bare knee laid over mine.
Her hand rested open over my heart.
Deadweight.
Trusting.
Her breathing softened by degrees until sleep took her all at once.
I lay there holding the woman I had wanted my whole life.
Finally.
Impossibly.
For a few minutes, I let myself feel it clean. The warmth of her against me. The faint brush of her breath over my skin. The unbearable peace of knowing she had come here freely.
Then the stone in my chest turned.
Because she trusted me now.
All the way.
She had handed me everything she had, her body, her fear, her count of when the ghost was on the rise, the words she had kept locked away for four years.
And the stone in my chest would not let me have it clean.
And I was lying to her right now. By keeping quiet.
There was a barn, four years back. There was a boy who walked her into the woods, and what he told us with a gun in his mouth before the end, and the others we hunted down one by one through a long red season, me and her brother, and buried where nobody would ever look.
She didn't know. She'd processed the woods as a thing that happened to her, never knowing the men who did it had already been in the ground for years, put there by the same two hands that raised her and the same two hands that were holding her right now.
I'd carried it as a kindness. She doesn't need the blood.
Let her heal. But it wasn't only kindness anymore and I knew it.
It was the same disease as the workman lie, the same exact sickness—me deciding what she could hold, keeping her warm and small and in the dark, calling the cage a gift.
I almost woke her. I lay there with the words right behind my teeth, Bee, there's one more thing, I have to tell you one more thing.
Twice I opened my mouth. Twice I looked down at her face gone slack and easy against my chest, the first true rest I'd ever seen on her, the best night either of us had had in four years still warm in the room—and I couldn't. I couldn't be the one to put the fear back in that face.
Not tonight. Not after she'd just crossed a room in the dark to choose me, not after I wanted to, not after I'd watched her take a piece of herself back that the world had stolen.
Tomorrow. I'd give her tonight whole and clean, the one perfect thing, and tomorrow I'd set the last stone down where she could see it and pray to God it didn't cost me the thing I'd just been given.
It was a coward's bargain and I knew it. One more day in the dark, dressed up as mercy. The exact thing I'd promised her I'd never do again, done one more time, because I was a man who'd finally gotten everything he ever wanted and couldn't stand to risk it for one more sunrise.