3. Senna #2
“I’ve missed this,” he says against my skin. “I’ve missed the taste of you. I’ve missed waking up wanting you and actually reaching for you instead of-” He stops. Shakes his head. “I’m going to put my mouth on you now. And I’m going to take my fucking time. And you’re going to let me.”
“Bossy,” I manage, and it comes out almost like our old banter, almost like the people we used to be.
“Starving,” he corrects. “There’s a difference.”
Then he puts his mouth on me.
Unhurried. Unapologetic. No rush of guilt.
He opens me with careful thumbs and draws a long, wet stripe from entrance to clit like a man relearning a language he used to be fluent in, and the sound I make is loud enough that it startles me - because I’ve been quiet for so long, about everything, and my body has apparently forgotten how to be quiet about this.
“Fuck - Rocco-”
“Good.” The word is muffled against me, wrecked. “Keep saying it. I’ve been lying next to you in silence for eighteen months and I can’t-” His tongue finds my clit and circles, precise and devastating. “I can’t do silence anymore. Not with you. Not like this.”
I bury my hands in his hair - dark, thick, the same hair he’s always run his fingers through when he’s anxious - and hold on.
He works me with a patience that feels like penance and worship at once, two fingers sliding into me when I’m wet enough to take them, curling against that place that makes my back arch off the mattress.
The guilt is still there, humming under my skin, the knowledge that Fiorella exists and the studio exists and tomorrow morning might erase this - but his mouth is relentless, and my body is greedy, and for a few minutes I let myself have this without calculating the cost.
“You’re dripping for me,” he groans against my thigh, then returns to my clit like he can’t stay away. “Look at you. My wife. Opening for my fingers like you never stopped wanting this.”
“I never stopped,” I gasp. “That’s the problem. I never fucking stopped wanting you.”
Something breaks in his rhythm - a hitch, a shudder - and then he’s doubling down, sucking on my clit with single-minded hunger while his fingers work me open, and climax coils low and mean, months of denial finally snapping.
When it hits, it hits hard - sharp, almost angry, lonely and relieved and furious all at once.
I cry out. My thighs shake around his head.
He doesn’t stop. He works me through it until I’m whimpering, oversensitive, tugging at his hair.
“Mercy - Rocco - mercy-”
He lifts his head, chin shining, eyes dark in the low light of our bedroom. “Not yet, amore.”
The Italian lands soft. He only uses it when he means it.
He stands long enough to shove his jeans and briefs down, and I watch him with the hungry attention of someone who’s been denied the sight - the hard line of his cock freed, thick and flushed and already wet at the tip, familiar as my own hands.
Seven years of marriage and I still go dry-mouthed looking at him like this.
“Closer,” I say, sitting up, reaching for him.
He steps into the space between my knees. I close my hand around his cock and stroke once, watching his face go tight, watching his stomach flex. A bead of wetness gathers; I lean in and lick it off the head, tasting salt and him, and he swears - something filthy and half-broken in Italian.
“Senna. Fuck. Your mouth-”
“You’ve been denying yourself this too,” I say against the shaft, kissing along the length of him. “Haven’t you?”
“Every fucking night.” His hand threads into my hair, not pushing, just holding. “Every night I came home late and lay beside you hard and aching and too much of a coward to wake you. Too ashamed. Too empty.”
“Wake me now.” I take him into my mouth - not deep, just enough to feel the weight of him on my tongue, to remind both of us what this used to be.
He groans. His hips jerk once before he steadies himself.
I suck, slow and deliberate, tasting him, watching his head tip back, and for a moment the guilt and the distance and Fiorella all fall away and there’s only this: my husband, hard and shaking under my hands, saying my name like a song he almost forgot.
“Stop-” He pulls back gently. “Stop, or I’m going to finish in your throat and I’ve been waiting eighteen months to be inside you properly.”
“Then get inside me properly.”
He laughs - short, wrecked, almost disbelieving - and then he’s pushing me back onto the pillows, settling between my thighs, the head of his cock nudging against where I’m still wet and open from his mouth.
He looks at me. Really looks. The raw, exposed core of the man I married, the one who used to cry at commercials and tell me his dreams at 3 a.m.
“I love you,” he says. “Even when I was drowning. Even when I couldn’t write. Even when I was the worst version of myself. I never stopped.”
“Show me.” I wrap my legs around his waist. “Stop promising. Show me.”
He pushes in.
Slow. Careful. One long slide that seats him deep and punches the air out of both of us. I gasp. He freezes, buried to the root, forehead dropped to mine, shaking.
“Still with me?” he rasps. “Say it-”
“Move.” My nails dig into his back. “Don’t soften this into an apology. I said try, and I meant all of it - heat included.”
He moves.
Not the frantic rush of strangers rediscovering each other - something slower, deeper, the rhythm of two people who still know each other’s bodies even after forgetting how to speak.
He rolls his hips and I meet him, and the wet sound of it fills the quiet bedroom, and every thrust feels like an argument and an apology and a prayer.
“Fuck, you feel-” His voice breaks. “You feel like home. You always fucking felt like home and I walked away from it every morning like an idiot.”
“Then stay.” I pull his mouth to mine. “Stay in me. Stay with me. Fuck me like you mean the eighteen months.”
He does. His pace picks up - harder, deeper, the headboard knocking softly against the wall - and he shifts, hooking one of my knees over his shoulder so he can get deeper, so he can hit that place that makes stars burst behind my eyes.
I cry out. He swears. His hand finds mine and pins it to the pillow, fingers laced, and the intimacy of that - holding hands while he fucks me - undoes me more than the filthy parts.
“I’m close-” I gasp. “Rocco, I’m-”
“Fall for me.” His free hand slips between us, fingers coaxing my clit in time with his hips. “Fall apart on me. Let me feel you. Let me remember the sound of my wife coming undone.”
The second orgasm hits differently - deeper, rolling, less sharp and more inevitable.
I shatter with his name caught between my teeth and his hand in mine and him so far inside I swear I can taste him.
He follows me over a handful of thrusts later, groaning into my neck, pulsing inside me with a shudder that runs the length of his body.
We stay like that. Locked together. Breathing.
It’s not perfect. It’s shadowed by everything we haven’t said, by the eighteen months of distance that can’t be erased in a single night. But it’s real. It’s us. And when it’s over and we’re lying tangled together, I let myself believe that maybe this is the beginning of something.
“I love you,” he murmurs against my hair.
“I love you too.” I close my eyes and let the words settle. “I love you so much it terrifies me.”
“Why does it terrify you?”
“Because love doesn’t protect you from pain. Sometimes it’s the thing that makes pain possible.”
“That’s dark.”
“I’m a dark person. You knew that when you married me.”
He laughs softly. “I did. It’s one of the things I love about you.”
“My darkness?”
“Your honesty. You never pretend things are better than they are. Even when it hurts.”
“Even when it hurts,” I repeat, and I’m not sure if I’m agreeing or warning.
***
I wake up alone.
The bed beside me is cold, the sheets pulled back. Pale morning light filters through the curtains, and I lie still, listening for the sounds of him - the coffee maker, the shower, his footsteps in the hall.
Nothing.
I reach for my phone: 7:43 a.m. Early, but not that early. He should still be here.
I get out of bed and pull on a robe, moving through the house like a detective. Kitchen: empty, but there’s a rinsed mug in the sink. Living room: silent. Studio: dark.
The note is on the kitchen counter, written in his hurried handwriting on the back of a receipt.
Fiorella had an early idea - wanted to catch it before it disappeared. Didn’t want to wake you. Back for lunch. - R
The words mean the same thing: he chose work over staying. After last night, after everything we said, he woke up and left for Fiorella. My sister, who has his number, who knew exactly when to reach him.
I crumple the note, then smooth it out again, then stare at the empty bed visible through the doorway.
Last night, he said he wanted to try. He said he wanted to be here, that it had to count for something.
This morning, he’s already gone.