CHAPTER 18 – SAWYER #2
Dropping her fists onto the mattress either side of Nellie’s waist, she grazed her teeth over each of her nipples, then the curve of her ribs, easing her back onto the mattress as she went.
She hooked her thumbs into Nellie’s underwear and drew them down, and Nellie lifted her hips without being asked.
Sawyer ran her hands up the inside of Nellie’s thighs, slowly, feeling the warmth of her, not arriving anywhere yet, just mapping.
Just like before, Nellie was already deliciously wet.
“You’re teasing me,” she breathed, dropping her head back on a low moan.
Sawyer smirked. She hadn’t intended to tease; she simply wanted this to last as long as humanly possible. “I’ve barely started.”
“Sawyer, please.”
Please. That particular word from Nellie, who always stood up for what she believed in and conceded ground to no one, was something Sawyer intended to hear again.
“I’ll get you there, baby, don’t you worry,” she purred, running her fingers through Nellie’s wetness again. “Thirty-five times, if you can handle it.”
She sat back and retrieved the vibrator from the nightstand.
Nellie blinked her eyes open. “What?”
“You turned thirty-five yesterday, didn’t you? I want to celebrate every single year.”
Nellie stared at her for a half-second and then burst out laughing. “That is— You cannot be serious.”
“Very serious.” Sawyer kissed her once, firmly enough to interrupt the laughter. “I take birthdays extremely seriously.”
“You do not. Sawyer—”
“Mm?” She clicked the vibrator on. The middle setting, because the middle setting was evidently the setting, and Nellie’s laughter dissolved into a sharp, involuntary inhale as Sawyer brought it to her clit.
Sawyer moved her mouth to Nellie’s throat, her collarbone, back to the warm curve of her breast while she stroked the vibrator in a long, slow path up and down.
Then she propped her head on her elbow and watched Nellie’s face—the way her lips parted, the way she tried to keep her eyes open and failed—and felt the visceral, addictive pleasure in being the architect of this.
In having this incredible woman come completely apart in her hands. Again.
“You’re so wet,” Sawyer said, low, against her ear. “Do you know how wet you are?”
Panting, Nellie rolled her hips hard against the vibrator. “Fuck—”
“Answer me.”
“Yes.” The word was barely air. “Yes, I know.”
“Good girl.” Sawyer pressed down slightly, holding the angle that Nellie’s whole body was chasing, and watched her clench and shudder through her first climax of the evening, a steady string of filthy curses spilling from her swollen lips.
The sound of it was something Sawyer would not forget.
She committed it to the same place she was keeping the voicemail.
She let her breathe for long enough not to hyperventilate and then brought the vibrator back to her entrance.
“I can’t—” Nellie started.
“You can.”
“I can’t believe you’re going to kill me with a vibrator on my birthday.”
“Technically, your birthday was yesterday.” Sawyer kissed the hinge of her jaw. “And you called me at two in the morning to tell me about your sad lack of orgasms. This is remediation.”
Nellie laughed again, breathless, flushed to her sternum, her hair fanned across the pillow.
The laugh became something else as Sawyer began to push the vibrator inside.
She moved slower this time, drawing it out with a patience that she could see was testing Nellie’s every resource.
With every thrust she was watching, listening to the way the sounds changed, the way Nellie’s breathing went thin and urgent and then desperate.
“Please,” Nellie begged. “Fuck, please, Sawyer, I need—”
“I know what you need.” Sawyer turned her head and found her ear again. “I know exactly what you need. You can have it.”
Picking up speed, Sawyer fucked Nellie relentlessly with her own vibrator, her teeth closing again around her nipple.
Nellie came apart once more, her back arching off the mattress, her voice cracking on a high keen.
Sawyer inhaled every sound like a drug and thought, with a longing that surprised her, that there was nowhere else in the world she had any interest in being.
She wanted to make Nellie come until her legs gave out. She wanted to hear her name on Nellie’s lips until she lost her voice. She wanted Nellie to celebrate every birthday with orgasms she didn’t have to give to herself.
Four turned out to be her limit, at least when they were delivered back-to-back with barely a breather in between. When she finally pushed Sawyer away with any real force, Nellie was sweating , her thighs clamped in protest against any further attempts to wring out another small death.
Deeply satisfied with her achievements, Sawyer set the vibrator aside. “Happy birthday,” she whispered again against Nellie’s lips. “I won’t miss the next one.”
Threading her fingers into Sawyer’s hair, Nellie pulled her closer, searching out her tongue as she made some incoherent sound in response.
Sawyer kissed her back like a starving woman.
She moved to straddle Nellie’s thigh and felt the full, immediate rush of her own want, which had been building at a disciplined pace since she’d first listened to that voicemail and was now emphatically done being disciplined.
She was soaking wet, and the press of Nellie’s warm thigh between hers produced a feral sound she’d never heard from her own lips.
Nellie’s eyes came open, dark and appreciative. Her hands found Sawyer’s hips.
Needing no encouragement at all, Sawyer began to move.
It was easier than thinking. She kept her eyes on Nellie’s face.
Nellie was watching her with more rapture than Sawyer had ever seen her show the forest, her hands at Sawyer’s hips pulling her down with a firm, deliberate pressure that suggested she was not a passive participant in this stage of proceedings.
“You’ve been—” Nellie started.
“Don’t talk,” Sawyer managed.
“I was going to say you’ve been in charge all evening.” Nellie’s grip tightened. “I can do more for you.”
“You’re exactly where I want you.” Sawyer panted.
The pressure built exactly where she needed it, her clit gliding over Nellie’s soft skin through her own slickness.
Her breath came ragged. Nellie was watching her with those gold-flecked eyes and pulling her in—steadying, guiding—and the combination of that gaze and that pressure and the warmth of her stripped everything back to what it actually was, which was Sawyer Alburn wanting this woman in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with the managed, categorized, board-approved version of her life. She let it happen.
When she came, she came gasping with her forehead dropped to Nellie’s and Nellie’s arms around her, holding on.
There was no telling how much time had passed before the room settled back into its ordinary dimensions around them, only that they were both sweating and panting and barely going ten seconds before their lips found each other again.
“Thirty-five, you said,” Nellie giggled, wrapping her legs around Sawyer’s waist. “We’ll be here for days.”
“I’ll clear my calendar,” Sawyer managed.
Nellie’s chest moved with laughter. It rumbled under Sawyer’s cheek.
She felt no urge to leave this time. She stayed where she was, and Nellie’s arms didn’t shift, and neither of them said anything else for a long while. Outside, the dark had come down fully over the trees.
When Sawyer finally moved, it was only to pull the quilt up around them both.
Morning arrived gradually, through the gap in the curtains.
Sawyer had slept through the night without interruption for the first time in two weeks. She’d woken once, briefly, at some early hour, found Nellie a couple of inches too far away, rectified the situation with a gentle tug and a kiss to her shoulder, and promptly fallen back to sleep.
As a creature of habit, however, she was dressed and in the kitchen before seven. She poured two mugs of coffee and was sitting at the table with her work email on her phone when she heard Nellie’s footsteps.
Nellie appeared in the bedroom doorway in an oversized sleep shirt and mismatched socks, her hair down and her face clear—the hangover fully metabolized, the birthday conclusively celebrated. She grinned sleepily at Sawyer and at the two mugs on the table.
“You made coffee,” she croaked.
“I figured you’d need a reason to stay upright today.”
Huffing a quiet laugh, Nellie sat down in the opposite chair and wrapped both hands around the mug.
The morning light came at a low angle through the east-facing window and turned everything in the kitchen slightly golden: the scattered papers on the table, the stacked notebooks, the survey map weighted down by an empty mug on one corner.
Nellie looked it all over as she brought her coffee to her still-swollen lips.
“I’m almost done,” she said, nodding at the map.
Sawyer followed her line of sight. “The report?”
“Yep.” Nellie leaned forward and traced a wiggly line with her index finger.
“I’ve got everything I need.” She took another long sip of coffee.
“It’s a good report, if I do say so myself.
I really think it’s going to—” She stopped herself, and her shoulders curled in a little as she winced. “Sorry. That’s— You know.”
“I know. It’s okay.” Sawyer set her phone down. “It should be a good report. It’s a good forest.”
Nellie’s mouth curved. She looked down at her coffee mug and turned it in a slow rotation.
“I’ve been thinking. Once the report’s submitted, that’s probably it for formal site visits, right?
” She looked up again, tentatively. “I won’t be on your official company schedule anymore.
You won’t have any—” She made a small gesture at the cottage around them.
“You know, any professional reason to come and see me.”
Sawyer frowned. “Is there a question in there somewhere?”
Nellie turned the coffee mug again, the trace of a smile at the edge of her mouth. “If you hear one, I suppose.”
Sawyer pushed back her chair, and walked the three steps around the table. She took the mug out of Nellie’s hands, set it aside, and tipped Nellie’s chin up. “I can think of a hundred reasons,” she said firmly, “to see you every day. Not one of them has anything to do with Alburn Systems.”
Nellie grinned up at her like the cat who got the cream. Then she reached out and took her coffee back.