Chapter 38 #2
Nora shifts forward on her knees in the gold light, her heavy breasts swaying slightly as she moves, her body fuller than I've known it.
The heat coming off her skin is literal.
Almost fever-warm, her whole body running hotter now.
She braces one hand on my chest, the other reaching between us.
Her fingers wrap around my cock, already hard and leaking.
She drags the head through her slick folds, coating me in the wet heat of her before she notches me at her entrance.
I keep my hands on her hips, palms wide to support as much of her weight as I can. My ribs still pull when I move wrong, half-healed from the yard and everything after, but I will take the ache. I will take anything as long as she is here.
She sinks down slow.
Inch by inch. The tight, wet heat of her grips me, hotter than before, the inner walls slick and yielding only because she sets the pace. I feel every degree of that heat as she takes me, the slickness thick around me as she lowers herself all the way down.
I remember the door.
The memory rises sharp. Her back against it months ago, me driving into her like I could fuse us together before the world could take one of us. Urgent. Rough. Desperate claiming because I was terrified of losing her. The line I growled then had been about possession born of fear.
This is the opposite.
Now she has me. Now she decides the depth, the speed, the rhythm. Now I lie still beneath her and let her have every inch at her pace. What was once against a door in panic is now her astride me in a rented house with nothing left to fear and everything given freely.
She starts to move.
Slow rolls of her hips at first, testing how her body feels like this.
Her palms stay braced on my chest. Her hair falls around us.
I keep my hands light on her hips, not directing, only steadying, thumbs stroking the soft new give of skin there.
Every time she rises I feel cool air on my cock for a second before she sinks again, the wet heat of her clenching and releasing around me in a rhythm only she controls.
"You feel different," I tell her, voice rough. "Hotter. So fucking wet."
She makes a small sound, half moan, half breath, and leans forward just enough that her breasts drag across my chest. I lock my jaw to keep from thrusting up into her. She is in charge. I won't risk anything.
Her pace stays slow and deliberate. She rises until only the head stays inside her, then sinks all the way down again, taking her time, letting both of us feel every thick inch.
The slick heat of her tightens with every stroke.
One of her hands leaves my chest and slides between us.
She touches herself, fingers working her clit while she rides me.
My wife, touching herself while she takes me. The sight nearly breaks my control.
I slide one hand up her side, palm flat over the warmth of her. She leans into the touch, eyes half-lidded, mouth open. I stay still beneath her, letting her use me exactly how she needs.
"I love you," I say again, because I finally can. "Ride me however you want. I'm not going anywhere."
Her rhythm shifts. Still careful, still hers, but faster now, deeper on every downstroke.
She tightens and grips harder. I feel her orgasm building before it hits.
Her thighs tremble. Her inner walls start to pulse around me.
She comes with a soft, broken cry, clenching hot and rhythmic on my cock, her body bowing forward over mine.
I hold her hips steady through it, letting her grind down and take every wave while I stay still beneath her.
Only when she starts to come down do I let myself thrust up.
Once, twice, shallow and careful, chasing the tight, slick heat still fluttering around me.
I come with a low groan, spilling deep inside her, the release sharp because it has been too long, because she is here, because I finally said the words without anything between us.
She stays on me afterward, breathing hard, forehead to mine. I keep one hand at her waist and the other in her hair, holding her close without pulling. The gold light has softened. The rented house is quiet around us.
After, I have her against my chest in a bed gone warm, her back to my front because that's the way that's easy on her now, my hand spread flat and low over the curve of her where I can feel one of them move, a small turning under my palm.
I lie in the dark of a rented house with my wife in my arms, one of my children pushing against my hand, and I don't have a word in any language for what it does to me.
"You felt that," she says, drowsy.
"I felt that."
"That's the one I think is going to be trouble. Never stops moving." She covers my hand with hers, holding it there. "Like its father. Can't sit still in a room without checking the exits."
"Then we'll teach it the exits are fine." I press my mouth to the back of her shoulder. "It's got a whole family standing in front of every door. It never has to check them itself. None of the three of them do."
She goes quiet, and I feel her take that in, the thing I've spent a month learning how to say. Her hand tightens over mine.
"You're going to be a good father," she says. "You know that? The kind nobody taught you to be. You already are. You just told a kid the size of a mango it never has to be afraid."
I don't answer that. My chest goes tight and full at once, the praise reaching a place in me that has no callus on it.
The old reflex is to bury it. I do the thing she taught me instead of the thing my father did.
I let it move through me, warm and unbearable.
I keep my hand on the small turning life under her skin.
I let her feel that my breathing has gone uneven, and I don't pretend it hasn't.
"Tell me the words again," she says into the dark, drowsy, half gone to sleep. "I'm going to want them a lot. Fair warning."
"I love you."
"Mm." A smile in it. "Good. Get used to saying it. You're going to be doing it for about sixty years."
"That's the plan." I tighten my arm over her, careful of the bump, keeping her even the way I'll keep her in my sleep without trying. "Sleep. I've got the door."
"I know you do." And she's gone, easy, trusting, asleep on the arm of a man the world is afraid of.
I lie awake a while longer, not braced this time, just keeping watch over the four of them in the dark for the simple animal pleasure of it, a man who used to wait his whole life for an invoice, holding the one thing nobody could have sold him, given for free, his.