Chapter 44 #2
He fills me inch by inch, the slick heat of my body taking him until I'm seated fully, hips to his. I stay there for a second, just feeling him. His cock throbs inside me. His hands tighten on my hips, holding himself back.
"You good?" he asks, voice rough.
"Better than good." I roll my hips once, testing, and the cot creaks again. We both grin. "You stay right there and let me do this."
He does.
I set the pace. Slow at first, careful rolls of my hips, taking every inch.
His hands stay on my hips, thumbs stroking the skin there, taking some of the weight every time I rise and sink.
The heat of his chest under my palms is solid and warm, muscle shifting as he holds himself still for me.
I lean forward a little, bracing on that heat, and his cock drags against the perfect spot inside me on every downstroke.
"This room used to mean we were about to tear each other apart," I say, voice catching as I move a little faster. "Now look at us."
"Now look at us," he echoes, and the smile in his voice makes me clench around him.
I ride him like that for a while, taking what I want, setting every rhythm, every depth.
His hands never stop supporting me. One slides up to cup my breast, thumb brushing my nipple, and the other stays low on my hip, steady.
The heat of him is everywhere, under my hands, inside me, against my thighs. Almost too much and exactly enough.
When I start to come it builds slow and deep, the orgasm rolling through me in long waves while I keep moving on him, clenching tight around his cock. He groans, low and helpless. I feel him throb inside me as he follows, spilling hot and deep while I'm still pulsing around him.
We stay joined for a long minute after, both of us breathing hard, my forehead resting against his. Neither of us moves. The tack room is quiet except for our breathing and the occasional creak of the old cot.
I finally lift off him slow and careful. He helps, hands gentle on my hips until I can swing my leg over and settle beside him.
After, we're a mess of quilt and bare skin on a cot built for one, which means I'm mostly on top of him. There's only the one way I fit anyhow, a thing we figured out laughing twenty minutes ago.
The string lights from the barn throw a little glow under the door. Somewhere out there the party has wound down to Dima and Hollis arguing about something in two registers of the same stubbornness. A horse shifts in the next stall. The whole room smells like sap, like leather, like us.
"Okay," I say into his chest, when I can talk. "New association. Room's officially rehabilitated."
"Took one night." His hand is moving slow up and down my spine, the way it did the first time.
Except the first time he went somewhere else in his head at the end of it.
I rolled away and added him to the case against me.
He's not going anywhere now. He's all the way here, his heartbeat steady and easy under my ear, nothing held back behind it.
"Efficient. I should put you on the renovation crew. "
"I don't do drywall. I do horses and emotionally constipated Russians." I prop my chin on his sternum to look at him. "Speaking of. You said no locked room. Earlier. You meant it?"
"I meant it." He looks at me, and there's no flinch in it, none of the shutters coming down, none of the braced quiet I used to feel arrive in him a second before he closed a door I couldn't see.
"Ask me anything. Right now, tonight. Anything you ever wondered about and didn't ask.
There's no version of me you don't get to have. "
I think about it. I think about all the things I spent two months trying to catch him at, all the corners of him I was sure were locked.
And lying here in the rebuilt room with his heart going steady under my hand, I find I don't need to open any of them.
I already know what's in there. I've been living in it.
"Nah," I say. "I've got the whole map. I was just checking the door still opens."
"It opens." He tips my face up with one finger and kisses me, slow, no argument in it. "It only locks from your side now. You hold the only key, and you can throw it in the canyon for all I care. I'm not going anywhere a closed door could keep me."
"Good." I settle back down on his chest, boneless, the bump a warm pressure between us where our three are riding out the most eventful wedding night of their unborn lives.
"Because I married you twice now. The State of California and a barn full of armed men watched me do it the second time on purpose, so you're stuck.
No exits. I checked. I had a guy sweep the room. "
He laughs, the real one, the one that shakes his whole chest and rolls me with it.
I ride it out grinning into his skin, the two of us helpless, laughing on a cot too small for one, in the room that used to be the worst place in my life, in the barn my father built, on the land that's mine now, free and clear.
The door's wide open. Neither one of us is going through it.
"Get some sleep, wife," he says into my hair, soft. "We've got three of them coming and I hear they don't."
"In a minute." I find his hand in the dark, lace my fingers through it. This time when his breathing slows it's real, no performance in it, a man who finally stopped waiting for the bill to come. "I'm not done having the day. Best day of my life. I'm staying up for the rest of it."
"Best day of mine," he says, already half under, "was the morning a woman up to her elbows in mud told me to get the hell off her rail."
I don't have anything to say back to that.
For once in my life I just let a thing be that good, don't reach for a joke to cut it.
I lie there on the chest of the man I married for a ranch and kept for himself, in the dark, in the new pine, the leather, the clean straw.
I listen to him fall asleep under me without once letting go of my hand.