Chapter 2 #2
He said it the way another man might say a prayer he had not meant to say out loud. His hand came up and traced the line of her collarbone with the back of one knuckle, then down between her breasts, then lower, his palm flattening against her stomach as if to feel her breathing.
"Tell me what you want," he said. His voice had gone rough at the edges in the way it did when he stopped negotiating.
"You. Touch me. Just — please."
He did.
His mouth found her throat first, and then the soft underside of her jaw, and then her breasts, slow, deliberate.
When his mouth closed over her she made a noise that surprised her with how close it was to crying, and his hand at the small of her back tightened, holding her up, holding her there, as if to say I have you, I am paying attention, I am not anywhere else.
She got her hands on his shirt. She wanted skin.
She wanted the live warm fact of him, the man, not the suit.
Her fingers shook a little on the buttons and he made a low sound in his throat and helped her, freeing one cuff and then the other, shrugging the shirt off and tossing it somewhere onto the back of a chair he would later not be able to find.
His chest under her palms was warm and known.
She had loved this chest in dark hotel rooms in Lisbon, on a sailboat off Hydra, in their bed upstate on a hundred Sunday mornings.
Her hands knew the shape of him now the way a musician's hands know an instrument.
She pressed her mouth to the place over his heart.
His pulse was fast. Good, she thought, with a fierce small possessiveness that surprised her.
Good. Let me be the one who does that to you tonight.
"Sit down," she said.
He huffed something that was almost a laugh. "Bossy."
"Sit down, Alexander."
He sat, on the long low cream sofa where he took meetings during the day, where his lawyers had been three days ago discussing a merger she did not understand.
She climbed into his lap, knees on either side of his hips, the silk of her underwear and the wool of his pants the only things between them, and the friction of that — through fabric, careful, withheld — made her gasp before he had even moved.
His hands found her hips. He looked up at her. The lamplight caught his face from below and softened all the lines that the financial press loved him for, the strong jaw, the wavy chestnut brown hair, the cool gray eyes, and what was left was just a man in his own living room looking at his wife.
"Don't move yet," he said, low. "I want to look at you."
She did not move.
He looked. His thumbs traced small slow arcs on the bones of her hips. His eyes moved across her: her mouth, her throat, her collarbones, her breasts, the shadow between them.
"There you are," he said softly.
It undid her. She leaned forward and kissed him the way she had wanted to kiss him on the terrace at the gala when the woman in emerald had been laughing about her across the room.
After that it was not slow anymore.
He got her underwear off her with one hand and his pants open with the other.
She rose up on her knees, reached down between them and guided him, and when she sank down onto him they both made the same sound at the same time, a low shocked grateful breath.
His forehead came down against her shoulder and he said her name into her skin.
"Melody. Melody."
She set the rhythm. He let her. His hands stayed on her hips, guiding without controlling, and his mouth found her breast again, her collarbone, the hollow of her throat and her mouth, again and again, as if he could not pick a place to stay.
Melody moved on him slow at first, then less slow, then not slow at all.
The room narrowed to the warmth of him under her and the warmth of him inside her; the warmth of his mouth on her skin and the warmth of his hands holding her steady.
The city outside the window did not exist. Catherine did not exist. The pause in the car did not exist. There was only this, the long known animal honesty of their bodies meeting, the place in their marriage where she had never once doubted him.
"Look at me," he said, ragged. "Look at me, sweetheart, look at me when you —"
She looked at him. She kept her eyes on his, and the wave came up through her in long slow breaking pulls. She did not look away, she watched his face as he watched hers, and she watched him follow her over a few seconds later with her name in his mouth.
They stayed like that for a long time afterward. Her forehead against his. His arms locked around her lower back. Both of them breathing.
His hand came up and traced, very gently, the line of her cheekbone. His thumb caught a little wetness she had not known was there.
"Hey," he said. "Hey. Are you —"
"I'm fine." She laughed, wet and surprised. "I'm fine. It's good. It's — you. It's just you."
He kissed the place his thumb had touched.
"I love you, Melody Carter Winters."
"I love you, Alexander."
He said it, then, with his mouth against her temple, the way he sometimes said things he did not say in daylight: "You're mine, you know that. You're mine."
Melody stilled, but did not pull back.
There was a difference between belonging with a person and belonging to them. She had not understood there was a difference until very recently. She did not think Alexander understood it yet at all.
But his arms were around her, and his pulse was slowing under her cheek, and he loved her. He loved her so much his voice cracked on the word.
Probably nothing was wrong. Probably she was tired. Probably the storm her body kept bracing for was a storm her body had invented because it had spent too many years, before him, learning to brace.
Probably.