Chapter 21
REBECCA
I'd heard people talk about mind blowing sex.
I'd nodded along in the way you nodded along to things you understood theoretically but hadn't personally verified—the way I nodded when people talked about business class flights or fresh truffle or the feeling of having no debt. I understood the concept. I had no data.
I had data now.
We were still in the helicopter when I understood that the evening wasn't going to end the way evenings ended when they were merely good.
It wasn't anything he did—he was just sitting beside me with his hand warm around mine, watching the moonpath on the water the way he watched everything, straight and honest. But I was aware of him in a way that had moved past aware into something physical, a low, insistent pull that had started somewhere in the lobby when he'd kissed me in front of Sasha like it was the most natural thing, and had built through the blindfold and the field and the rotors lifting us off the grass and the Atlantic opening up underneath us like a secret he'd been keeping, just for me.
By the time the helicopter banked back toward the city, I was not thinking about the moon.
I was thinking about his hands. Those big, warm, capable hands. I wanted them all over me.
The suite was warm when we got back.
The candles had burned lower. The dinner table had been cleared away by someone with a key and a quiet efficiency I was going to think about later.
In its place the room was just a room—the wide bed, the low light, the partial harbor view through the glass doors of the balcony where the palmettos were black against the city glow.
He closed the door behind us.
I turned around.
He was already watching me, the way he'd been watching me in the helicopter—steady and patient and with that focused attention that made me feel like the only coordinates in a very large map. His jacket came off. He laid it over the back of the chair without looking at it, eyes still on me.
"That was—" I stopped. Every word I had felt insufficient. "That was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
"Good," he said. Low and simple.
"I've never—" I stopped again. “I’d never been in a helicopter."
"I know."
"How did you know?"
"The way you held my hand when we lifted off." He crossed the room toward me, unhurried. "You went tight and then you let go. That's what people do the first time, when they decide to trust the machine."
I looked at him.
"I wasn't trusting the machine," I said.
Something moved in his face. Quiet and deep, like something settling into place.
He reached me.
His hands came up and found the lapels of my cardigan and he pushed it back off my shoulders slowly, watching it go, watching me. It pooled on the floor behind me and neither of us looked at it.
"Rebecca Lynn," he said.
"Yeah."
"I want to take my time with you tonight."
The way he said it—not a question, not exactly a warning, but a statement of intent delivered in a voice that was already doing things between my legs—made my breath go shallow.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"Yes." I held his gaze. "Take your time."
He kissed me.
It started soft, the way it had started soft in Proof, the way it had started soft every time.
But soft with Tommy was not gentle—it was deliberate, the kind of soft that was a choice a strong man made when he had other options and chose this one.
His hands moved into my hair and held my head the way he'd held it before, certain, not rough, just—decided.
Like he'd decided where my head was going to be and it was going to be here.
I went up on my toes.
He made a sound low in his chest and deepened the kiss, slow, and I felt it run through me the way the helicopter had run through me when we'd lifted off the grass—the thrill of leaving the ground, of being held up by something you'd decided to trust.
He walked me backward toward the bed.
I went.
He sat me down on the edge of it and stepped back and looked at me, and the looking was its own thing. It didn't make me feel examined so much as seen. I reached for the hem of my top.
"Let me," he said.
He looked at me for another moment, just standing there, and something shifted in his expression.
"You know what you are?" he asked.
"What?"
"Mine." He said it the way he said most things—without apology. Not a question. Not a negotiation. Just a fact he was putting in the room. "I don't know what to do with that yet. But I needed you to know."
I looked up at him.
My heart was doing a thing it had no business doing.
"Okay," I said.
The corner of his mouth moved. "Okay?"
"I said what I said."
I dropped my hands.
He reached down and took the hem of my top, slow, pulling it up and over my head. He reached around and unclasped my bra with one hand.
He laid me back.
He stood at the foot of the bed and took his shirt off. I watched him in pieces, because there was too much to take in at once. The breadth of his shoulders. The geography of his torso, which had the look of something functional rather than decorative, built by real use.
He was magnificent—hard planes of muscle, the dark trail of hair leading down from his navel into the low waistband of his pants where the thick outline of his hardening cock was already straining against the fabric.
He came down over me on his hands.
"I've been thinking about this since this morning," he said, mouth close to my jaw.
"Since the shower?"
"Since before the shower." His mouth moved to my neck, slow. "Since the toast."
"The toast."
"You were wearing my shirt." He pressed his lips to the place just below my ear and I felt it in my core, a hot pulse straight to my clit. "And you had jam on your finger and you licked it off without noticing."
"I didn't—"
"You did." His mouth moved lower. "I thought about it the entire walk to the flower shop."
I laughed, surprised, and then stopped laughing because his mouth had found my collarbone and moved lower still—sucking one stiff nipple deep into his wet heat, tongue flicking hard before he scraped it gently with his teeth—and laughing was not the thing my body wanted to do anymore.
My back arched hard off the bed as slick heat flooded between my thighs.
He took his time, the way he'd said he would.
He was thorough in the way of a man who understood that the point was not the destination. He learned me by feel, by attention, by the patience of someone for whom this mattered more than being efficient about it.
His hands spread my thighs wide, thumbs stroking the soft, soaked folds of my pussy before his mouth followed, licking slow, filthy stripes up my slit and circling my swollen clit until I was grinding against his face, coating his lips and chin with my arousal.
He found the places that made my breath catch and stayed there until the catching turned into something else—thick fingers sliding deep while he sucked my clit rhythmically.
He talked while he did it, low and close—here, like this, tell me, is this—yes, there—and I answered him the way I'd answered him the night before, honestly, moaning and begging and soaking his hand.
By the time he worked his way back up to my mouth, I was desperate in a way I hadn't known I was capable of being. I could feel the wanting in my whole body—my pussy clenching, thighs trembling, nipples tight and aching.
"Tommy," I said against his mouth.
"Yeah."
"I need you."
"I know."
"Now."
"I know. I need you, too." He kissed me again, soft and deliberate, letting me taste my own tangy wetness on his tongue, and I made a sound against his mouth that I'd have been embarrassed about anywhere else and wasn't, here, with him. "I've got you."
He settled between my thighs, and I felt the warmth of him—the heavy, thick head of his cock dragging through my slick folds, teasing my entrance, so hard and hot it made my walls flutter. I pulled him closer with both hands, nails digging into his back.
"Look at me," he said.
I looked at him.
He pushed in slow—inch after thick inch stretching me open, filling me so completely my eyes rolled back at the delicious burn and pressure.
The breath left me in a long exhale and his jaw tightened.
We stayed there a moment, both of us still, both of us feeling the rightness of it—that this, the perfect fit and the warmth and the way everything in me settled rather than braced, was special—his heavy balls pressed against me, my body gripping every veined inch of him.
He smiled. Then he moved.
He was slow about it—long, deep strokes that made me feel every inch of him, the fat head dragging along my front wall on every withdrawal before plunging back in to the hilt.
It built the way the song I'd written this morning had built, from the first chord to the chorus, with intention and patience and the confidence of someone who knew where the melody was going and wasn't going to rush it.
I rose to meet him, my soaked pussy making wet, obscene sounds around his cock with every thrust. My hands found his back, his shoulders, the back of his neck.
My legs wrapped higher around his waist and he shifted his angle—driving harder against that perfect spot inside me—and the sound I made was not quiet, a raw, broken cry.
"There," he said, low.
"There," I confirmed, breathless.
He stayed with it. Found the rhythm and kept it, steady, building in the way only patience built things—his cock swelling even thicker inside me, balls tightening—and I felt it gather the way storms gathered—not in a rush but in an accumulation, pressure and warmth and the sweet, unbearable tension of being almost and then more than almost and then—
I came with his name in my mouth, clamping down hard around his cock in long, pulsing waves, gushing wet heat around him as my whole body shook.
Long and deep and with the completeness of something that had been earned. He held me through it with his hands cupping my face, and I felt him feel it, the way he went still and breathed against my mouth and said God, Rebecca Lynn—
And then, he let go.
It moved through him deep and real, his cock jerking and throbbing inside me as he pumped me full of thick, hot spurts of come, his voice rough and wrecked when he said my name. It was a sound I was going to hear in quiet moments for the rest of my life.
It was pure bliss.
We lay there after.
The candles had burned to stubs. The harbor light came in through the balcony doors, the partial view, just a piece of the water, just enough.
His hand moved in slow circles on my back.
My ear was pressed to his chest and his heartbeat was doing what heartbeats did after—slowing, steadying, coming back from somewhere far out.
I thought about the moonpath.
I thought about the silver light on the water from a hundred feet up, the way it had run from us to the horizon like something deliberate, like the ocean had laid it out for us to follow.
"Tommy?”
"Mm."
"What you told me in the helicopter. About your father."
He was quiet.
"You don't have to say anything else about it," I said. "I just wanted you to know that I heard it."
A long moment.
His hand stilled on my back. Then started moving again.
"I know you did," he said.
"And that it mattered. That you said it."
Another moment.
"Yeah," he said. "It did."
I pressed my lips to his chest, lightly, over his heart, the way he'd kissed my forehead in the doorway this morning.
He pulled me closer.
Outside, a church bell counted the hour somewhere in the dark of Charleston—low and even and unhurried, the way things rang when they'd been ringing a long time and intended to keep going.
I didn't count the strokes.
I lay in the warm dark with his heartbeat under my ear and thought about the song I'd written this morning with the line you came in off a road I didn't know was there, and I thought about how I'd written it as a metaphor and how it was turning out, with every passing hour, to be simply true.
He had come in off a road I hadn't known was there.
I hadn't known the road existed.
I was beginning to understand that some roads didn't show up on any map you'd been given. Some roads you only found because somebody arrived on them, unexpected, and the arriving was the only proof you needed that the road was real.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
"You're thinking."
"Always."
"What about?"
I considered telling him about the song. About the line. About the road.
I decided to save it.
Some things you kept until you were sure they'd be received the way they deserved, and I was learning—slowly, imperfectly, with the moderate success of someone who was new to the practice—that the keeping wasn't fear.
Sometimes the keeping was just knowing the right time.
"Nothing important," I said.
He made the sound that meant he didn't believe me and wasn't going to push.
I smiled into his chest.