20. Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty
Honey
He doesn’t wait for the porch steps.
We’re barely across the parking area—my hand in his, the Missouri night loud around us—when he stops walking, turns, and picks me up. Not with warning. Not with a question. Just—his hands at my waist and then the ground is gone and I make a sound that is, briefly, very undignified.
“Kragen—”
“I’ve got you,” he says. Simple. Like this is information rather than reassurance.
He does have me. That’s the thing. My feet are nowhere near the earth, and he’s walking toward the porch like I weigh nothing because to him, I probably don’t.
I should have a feeling about being carried like luggage.
I find I don’t. What I find instead, once the startled laugh fades, is that my arms have gone around his neck without my deciding to, and his face is close to mine in the dark, and whatever I was going to say about being perfectly capable of walking has left me completely.
He takes the porch steps without breaking stride.
“The door’s open,” I say, when we reach it.
He turns the handle, pushes it with his shoulder, and ducks the frame without putting me down. We’re inside.
He sets me down in the living room, both feet on the floor, straightens, and just stands here in my grandmother’s house.
He takes it in. The amber oak and the lace curtains and the quilts over the chair backs.
The tatted doilies on every flat surface, the butter churn visible through the window on the porch, the piano against the wall.
My grandmother’s dulcimer where it’s always been.
All of it, and him in the middle of it—seven feet of green-skinned orc in a flannel shirt, the lamplight falling across his face, the low ceiling closer to his head than it was built to accommodate.
It looks exactly right.
I don’t know why that hits me as hard as it does. I’ve known it would look right for weeks, in the way you know things you won’t let yourself examine directly.
He belongs here. Not because the house was built for him—it wasn’t, nothing is—but because he is exactly who he is in every room he occupies, and this room is exactly what it is, and somehow those two things fit together without either one having to change.
He looks at me.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say.
He closes the distance and kisses me with everything he has: present, deliberate, like there’s nowhere else to be. His hands come to my face, that big palm I know, and I lean into it like I have since our first kiss in this very room. The kiss starts careful. It doesn’t stay gentle for long.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” he says against my mouth.
“Since before the bar.” His lips come so close to my ear that his warm breath stirs the nearby hair.
“Since the first time I stood in your kitchen and you said something that surprised me, and I wondered, how did I know that such dry wit would come out of those pretty lips?”
I turn my head to capture his mouth.
We find the stairs in the dark—by feel, without hurry, neither of us needing to rush toward anything.
He ducks the landing beam without stopping.
I notice him do it and don’t say anything because he never says anything and that’s the right call.
By the time we reach my room, the careful part is long over.
The lamp on the nightstand has amber glass that makes everything warm. He takes his time with the buttons of my blouse and when he parts it, he goes still for a moment, looking at me, and says, “Goddess, Honey,” with such complete sincerity that I don’t know what to do with it.
“You are so beautiful,” he says. Not a performance. Not a line deployed for effect. Just a true thing said out loud because he’s the kind of person who says true things when he has permission, and he has permission.
His hands are—I have thought about his hands since the first visit and I know from experience that thinking about them and having them on me are not the same thing.
He’s careful without being tentative. Thorough without rushing.
He learns me with his whole attention, filing details, not forgetting anything.
“I’ve wanted you for weeks,” he says. “Longer. Since before I knew what you were doing to me.” His mouth moves to my collarbone, my shoulder, the curve of my throat. “I’ve imagined this.” A pause, his lips warm on my skin. “It didn’t hold a candle.”
I’ve been precise my whole life. Precise about the balance beam and the parallel bars, and later about wood, and sound, and every instrument that has come through my workshop.
Every feeling I’ve allowed myself to have about the male who stood in my workshop and my kitchen and the one who sat across from me at Delia’s has been carefully managed. I am precise. I manage things.
I stop managing things.
He eases my shirt from my shoulders, sliding the blouse down my arms with a kind of deliberate attention that feels more intimate than it has any right to. Then he reaches behind me and unhooks my bra with the ease of someone who has given considerable thought to doing exactly this.
He steps back and looks at me.
Not a glance. Not a polite acknowledgment before moving on. He looks at me as though I’m worth his attention—completely, without apology. I resist the urge to do anything with my hands. I let him look.
Then he reaches out and his thumbs find my nipples and he watches my face while he does it—slow, deliberate pressure, rolling, and the sensation moves through me so sharply that my eyes close before I’ve decided to close them.
My head tips back. He does it again, careful without being tentative, and I feel it travel from where his hands are down through my stomach and settle low and insistent.
Something that has been held carefully at a distance for a long time simply lets go.
I stop thinking about what I look like. I stop thinking about my hands, or the sounds I’m making, or whether any of it is the right amount of managed.
I just feel it: his hands, the lamplight warm on my closed eyelids, the undeniable fact of being wanted this completely by someone who is in no rush to be anywhere else.
The sound that comes out of me is not planned. It comes from somewhere I haven’t accessed in years, somewhere I sealed without quite deciding to, and it arrives complete and unguarded, and I feel like someone who has just put down something she forgot she was carrying.
“Yes,” he says, warm and certain. “Show me all of you, Honey.”
He brings his mouth down to replace his hands, and I sink my fingers into his hair and stop having opinions about anything at all.
Then he lays me down and takes his time.
A moment later, he gently nips my collarbone with his teeth, then brushes the smooth shafts of his tusks against the swell of my breast. I gasp at the feel of it, so gentle, yet otherworldly.
His mouth finds the places that make my hips roll, and he stays there, learning them, not rushing past them toward some predetermined destination.
This male is thoroughly, genuinely interested in what he’s finding, and he says so.
“I’ve been thinking about this since the creek,” he says against my ribs. “I sat next to you on that quilt for two hours and thought about exactly this.”
“You didn’t show it,” I manage.
“I showed it a little.” His mouth moves lower. “You were too polite to say so.”
I was not, in fact, being polite. I was thinking about the exact same things he was, sitting on that quilt by the water, which is a thing I decide not to admit out loud.
He moves lower. His hands find the waist of my jeans, the button, the zipper, and he looks up at me once, just once, before he draws them down and off.
My underwear follows without ceremony. Then his hands spread at my hips, steadying, and he takes his time getting where he’s going—the inside of my knee, the soft skin of my inner thigh.
I am aware of my own breathing. It sounds nothing like me.
When he finally puts his mouth on me, I make a sound that belongs to no version of myself I’ve presented to anyone.
He’s good at this because he pays close attention: adjusting, responding, genuinely interested in what he’s finding and how my body answers it.
He works me slowly, his mouth and his hands, and I stop being able to track anything outside the radius of his attention. The hoot of an owl. The frogs down the hill. All of it falls away. There is just this: his tongue, patient and exact, learning what I respond to and returning to it.
His large fingers find me, and he takes his time there too: one first, slow and thorough, and when I’ve adjusted to that, two, a fullness that makes my hips tilt toward him without my deciding to.
He is not rushing toward an outcome. He is here because this is exactly where he wants to be, and I feel that knowledge settle into me as surely as everything else he’s doing.
He makes a sound against me—low, resonant, a vibration I feel move through me from the point of contact outward, up through my stomach, into my chest. I don’t have a name for it. I file it as something to think about later, except later is not available to me right now.
“You taste—” he starts, and doesn’t finish, because apparently words have failed him.
His fingers curl. I make a sound I’ve never made before. He does it again—listening, adjusting, the devastating focus of someone finding exactly what he’s looking for. My hands are in his hair. I am not being quiet. I have entirely stopped caring about being quiet.