Chapter Nineteen Claudio #2
"We got everything. Hard drives, documents, the network map. Kreiss isn't there. Geneva. But the Maryland cell is done."
"Emilio?"
"He's got Savannah. She's safe."
"Good." She shifts in my arms. Turns. Faces me. Her eyes are half-open, heavy-lidded, the deep blue barely visible in the low light from the window. "I'm in your bed."
"I noticed."
"It's very you. Minimalist. Clean. The bookshelf is a nice touch. I didn't expect books."
"What did you expect?"
"Weapons. More weapons. A shrine to ammunition."
"The ammunition shrine is in the closet."
She laughs. Soft. The sound hums against my chest. Her hand comes up and touches my cheek, traces the line of it, finds the bruise that's faded to yellow and green.
"I missed you," she says. "Which is stupid because you were gone for eight hours and I've spent three years not missing anyone."
"It's not stupid."
"It feels stupid."
"That's because you're not used to it. Missing someone requires caring, and you've been rationing that for a long time."
She's quiet. Her thumb traces my lower lip. The cut from the corridor is healed. A faint scar, barely visible, but she finds it with the care of a woman who has mapped every mark on my face.
"I want to be in your room," she says. "Not tonight. Every night. I want this to be where I sleep."
"Okay."
"You don't have to think about it?"
"I've been thinking about it for days. The answer has been the same since the farmhouse."
She kisses me. The slow kind, two in the morning, slow of a woman who's been asleep in your bed and is waking up against your body. The slow of a kiss that doesn't need to rush because nobody is running and nobody is being chased and the door is locked and the war, for tonight, is paused.
I kiss her back and bite her bottom lip, sucking as I release.
My hand slides under the shirt she's wearing, my shirt, and finds bare skin.
Her waist. The curve of her hip. The dip at the small of her back where her spine begins.
She's warm from sleep. The heat of her seeps into my palm like a remedy for something I didn't know was cold.
She deepens the kiss. Her tongue against mine, her hand in my hair, her body pressing into me with a slow insistence that isn't demanding.
It's asking. She's asking, the way she's learned to ask, not with words but with her body, with the shift of her hips and the arch of her back and the small sound she makes when my hand slides lower and cups her ass and pulls her against me.
"I want you," she says against my mouth. "Slow. I want it slow tonight."
"We can do slow."
"No condom."
"No condom."
I pull the shirt over her head. She lies back on the pillows, my pillows, in my bed, and the sight of her bare skin against my sheets is something I'm going to carry for the rest of my life.
She's pale in the low light. The shadows find her collarbones, the valley between her breasts, the slight curve of her stomach.
Her hair fans across the pillow in dark lines.
I take my time. This is different. This is not the farmhouse where the want was angry, and the sex was a collision.
This is not the cabin where she needed to reclaim herself.
This is not the shower where the urgency made us rough.
This is my room and my bed and the woman I love lying in it with her eyes open and her body offered and all the time in the world.
My mouth open against her pulse, feeling it jump under my lips.
I kiss down. The line of her collarbone.
The space between her breasts, where I can feel her heart beating.
I take her left one in my mouth and she sighs, a long exhale that she's been holding since I walked through the door.
I circle her nipple with my tongue, slow, feeling it harden, her fingers tighten in my hair.
I switch to the other side. Same pace. Same attention.
She arches into me and the sound she makes is quiet, barely there, the kind of sound a woman makes when she's being touched exactly the way she wants and doesn't need to perform anything louder.
I kiss down her ribs. Her stomach, where the muscles flutter.
The jut of her hip bone. The soft skin of her inner thigh, where her legs open for me without hesitation.
I settle between her thighs and press my mouth to her pussy, flat tongue, long stroke, and her hips lift off the bed and her hand grips the sheet.
"Claudio." Whispered. Almost lost.
I taste her slow. Long, deliberate strokes of my tongue through her folds, circling her clit, sliding lower.
She's wet. Not from urgency. From wanting.
The slow, steady arousal of a woman who's been waiting in my bed and thinking about me and letting her body build.
I slide two fingers into her and curl them forward, and the sound she makes is deeper now, a moan that vibrates through her whole body.
Working her with my mouth and my fingers, patient, building her toward something that doesn't need to be chased because it's already there, already growing, already inevitable.
Her thighs press against my ears. Her hand finds my hair and holds without pulling.
Her breathing goes from counted to uncounted to ragged, and I feel the moment she stops thinking and starts feeling, the shift from Charlotte to the woman underneath, the one who gasps and grips and says my name like she's losing her fucking mind.
She comes quietly. A long, rolling wave that pulses around my fingers and against my tongue, her back arching off my sheets, her mouth open, her eyes closed. I work her through it, gentler now, easing her down, pressing soft kisses to her thigh, her hip, the curve of her stomach.
I crawl back up her body. She reaches for me. Her hand wraps around my cock, still hard, straining, and she strokes me once with a grip that makes my vision blur.
"Inside me," she says. "Now."
I line myself up. The tip of my cock presses against her entrance, slick and hot, and I push in slowly.
No barrier. Just skin. Just us. The feeling is so intense my arms shake.
She's tight and wet and warm, and every inch is a confession, a declaration, a promise my body is making that my mouth hasn't caught up to yet.
I bottom out. Hold still. Her legs wrap around my waist. Her arms loop around my neck. Our foreheads press together. We breathe each other's air.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi."
"I’m in your bed."
"Our bed."
Her eyes widen. One fraction. Then she smiles. Not the sharp smile or the sardonic smile. The real one. The one that belongs to the woman she’s always been. Soft and sweet, hard and tactical. Both Charlotte and Emma.
"Our bed," she repeats.
I move. Slow. Long strokes that pull almost all the way out and push all the way back in, and every thrust is deliberate, every angle chosen, every pace maintained because this is not about the finish.
This is about the middle. This is about the sustained, excruciating pleasure of being inside a woman you love in a bed you're going to share and feeling every nerve and every heartbeat and every breath she takes.
Her hips meet mine. Not rushing. Matching.
We find a rhythm that's ours, slow and deep, and the bed doesn't creak because it's a military-issue frame bolted to the floor, which is the least romantic detail in the history of sex and makes me want to buy a new bed tomorrow just so it can creak for her.
"You feel so good," she whispers. "Every time. Better every time."
"That's because you're letting me in." I press deeper. She gasps. "Not just here." I thrust again, slow. "Everywhere."
Her fingers rake up my back. Not clawing. Tracing. Following the lines of my shoulders, my spine, the muscles that tense and release with each stroke. She's mapping me the way she maps everything. Committing me to memory.
I reach between us. Find her clit. The lightest pressure. Circles that match the pace of my hips, slow and steady and relentless. She moans against my mouth, and her hips roll to meet the pressure, and I feel her tightening around me, the slow build, the gradual climb.
"Eyes on me, principessa.”
She opens her eyes. Blue. Clear. Wet at the edges. Not from sadness. From the overwhelming fullness of being seen and held and fucked and loved all at once.
"I love you," I say. Inside her. Looking at her. In our bed. "I love you, Charlotte. I love Emma. I love every version of you that has ever existed and every version that's coming."
"Claudio." Her voice breaks. "If you make me cry during sex I swear to God—"
"Then come before you cry. Or while you cry, as long as you come for me."
She laughs. The laugh turns into a moan. The moan turns into my name. And the orgasm takes her in a long, shuddering wave that I feel in every inch of my cock, her body gripping me, her legs pulling me deeper, her face buried in my neck as she comes apart in my arms.
I follow her. Not hard, not violent. A slow, deep release that starts in my spine and rolls through me like a tide, and I press into her as deep as I can go and spill inside her and the warmth of it, the intimacy, the raw, unprotected reality of finishing inside her on the bed that's now ours, is the most complete thing I've ever felt.
We stay tangled. No rush. No need to move, no alarm, no exit to count, no highway to drive. Just two bodies cooling together in a dark room in a compound where a war is being won and a family is being rebuilt and a man who used to be a machine is learning how to be human.
Her fingers find the back of my neck. Press against my vertebrae. One. Two. Three.
"What are you doing?" I murmur.
"Checking. Making sure you're still here."
"I'm here."
"I know." She presses four. Five. "But I like to make sure."
I pull her closer. She settles against my chest. Her breathing slows. Counted again, but not from fear. From habit. The rhythm of a woman who found safety in numbers and is learning to find it in arms instead.
"Emilio's fucked," I say into her hair.
"The bartender?"
"He took her to a diner."
"On the way back?"
"Nothing is on the way from Delaware."
She laughs against my chest. "He's going to be worse than you."
"Nobody's worse than me."
"You cleaned a gun seventeen times in one night because you couldn't stop thinking about me."
"It was four times."
"Emilio said seventeen."
"Emilio is a liar and a gossip."
She tilts her face up. Kisses my neck. "He loves you."
"I know."
"And you love me."
"I know."
"And this is our bed."
"Yes."
She presses her face into my chest. Breathes deep. Exhales slow.
"Goodnight, Claudio."
"Goodnight, principessa."
She falls asleep in my arms. In our bed. In the compound. Home.
I hold her and I don't sleep, not because I can't but because I don't want to miss this. The weight of her against me. The sound of her breathing. The smell of her hair on my pillow.
She’s it for me.
Everything.