20. Chapter Twenty #3
What happens then is not careful. The withdrawal and the return, every bit of it present and unavoidable, his full weight behind it.
“You have no idea what you’ve been doing to me for months,” he says, strained at the edges. “Honey. Goddess. You feel—” He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t need to.
He shifts and I lose the thread of every thought I had.
He finds a rhythm that makes coherence impossible, that narrows the world down to exactly this—his weight, his heat, the sounds he makes low in his chest when the angle is right, deep, primitive, satisfied sounds I feel in my sternum as much as hear.
I’d forgotten this was possible. Maybe I never knew it could be like this.
And I did not know what he would sound like when he lost control.
Now I know, and the knowing is permanent, already written somewhere in my body that will not forget.
“Honey,” he says, close to my ear. “Look at me.”
I open my eyes.
He’s looking at me. Entirely at me. Present and close and completely here. It is just him, looking at me like I am the thing he has been looking for, and I feel it land somewhere I didn’t know was available.
“My Honey,” he says softly.
With another male, I might have felt the possessiveness in those words as a warning.
With Kragen, I feel it as the thing it actually is—not a claim but a recognition.
Something shifts in his chest—that low rumble, continuous, moving through every point where his body meets mine. I feel it most in my sternum.
I pull him down.
We stay like this, the rhythm building past deliberate into something neither of us is steering anymore.
He is warm inside me, and deep, and present, and I feel the pleasure build in a way that has no careful overlay, no managed distance, nothing between me and it.
I hear myself. I don’t try to stop hearing myself.
When I come the second time it takes me completely—his name out of my mouth before I know I’m saying it, my whole body giving over to it, wave after wave, longer than I thought it could go. I’m shaking. I didn’t notice when I started.
He makes a sound against my throat that I feel in my back teeth—the rumble breaking open, unguarded, the thing underneath all that careful control finally saying what he couldn’t put into words. It moves through me like the last wave, and I hold on.
He finishes with his face pressed to my neck and his hands gripping my hips and my name in his mouth like it costs him the last of his restraint. Like it means something now that it didn’t mean before.
I stopped resisting this a long time ago. I just didn’t know it until right now.
Much later.
The lamp is still on. I reach over and turn it off, and the room drops into the blue-dark of a summer night in Missouri—not full dark, the sky too large out here, the stars doing actual work. Through the curtains, the workshop is a shape in the trees.
He’s on his side with his arm around me, and his feet are off the end of the bed by several inches, which I knew would happen.
“Your feet,” I say.
“My feet are fine,” he says. Eyes closed.
“They’re hanging off the bed.”
“I’m aware.” A pause. “I’ve been aware of that for approximately the last twenty minutes and decided not to mention it.”
I look at the ceiling. The old plaster, the hairline crack in the corner that’s been there since I was a child. Every window open to the dark.
His thumb moves against my shoulder. Slow. Present.
“You don’t lock your door,” he says.
Not accusatory. Not dramatic. Just an observation from a male lying in the dark noticing things, which is what he does.
“No,” I say. “Never have.”
He pauses. “Four generations of women on this property alone.”
“We’ve never needed to.”
Another pause. His thumb still moving. “Not anymore,” he says. “Please.”
I should have a feeling about that. I consider having a feeling about it. Instead of feeling controlled, I feel cared for.
“Okay,” I say.
The curtains move in whatever breeze comes off the ridge at this hour. Somewhere down the hill a frog makes its case for something.
“My nearest neighbors,” I say, “are half a mile away.”
His chest moves. Not quite a laugh. “Yeah?”
“Eighty-three. Hard of hearing.”
He does laugh then—the real one, low and a little rueful, the one that changes his face. I feel it against my side.
“Good planning,” he says.
“Pure accident,” I say. “Although I’m choosing to see it as foresight.”
He pulls me slightly closer. I let him. Outside, the Missouri summer night is loud with frogs, crickets, and the occasional owl. This room. This pocket of softness inside all that noise.
His feet are hanging off the end of the bed, and the ceiling has that crack, and he is entirely, completely here.
“Sleep,” he says.
“I don’t always sleep well,” I say. This is true, though I don’t know why I’m telling him.
“I have a feeling you’ll sleep well tonight.”
I close my eyes.
The house settles around us: a sound from the floor, the mournful creak of the boards in the heat.
He’s here. He fills the room completely and fits inside it completely, and I stopped arguing with that a long time ago. I just didn’t know it until tonight.