Chapter 13 #2
"I'm Callie," I said. "I'm the woman he's going home with. Tonight and every other night. And you seem lovely, but this conversation is over."
Margarita Barbie stared at me. Her jaw worked.
She looked at Clay — looking, I assumed, for an apology or a rescue.
Clay's lip twitched. Just the corner. The barely-there twitch that I'd learned meant he was holding back something enormous.
Margarita Barbie saw it too. Whatever she found in his face wasn't rescue.
"Right," she said. Picked up her margarita. Walked away.
Clay watched her go. The twitch became a grin — slow, spreading, the full-voltage Clay Blackwood grin that started in his eyes and didn't stop until it had rearranged his entire face.
He grabbed my hand. Pulled me off the dance floor so fast my heel caught on the edge of the wood.
"What are you —"
"You," he said, his mouth against my ear, his voice rough and low and vibrating through every nerve I had, "are the hottest fucking woman I have ever known. Please never stop being you."
He pulled me through the crowd, past the bar where Bev raised a margarita in salute without breaking conversation, down the narrow hallway past the kitchen, and into the single-stall bathroom. The lock clicked behind us.
"Clay, we are not —"
He kissed me. I kissed him back. My back hit the door and his hands were in my hair and we were both grinning — grinning into the kiss, grinning while he fumbled with my zipper and I yanked his buckle loose, grinning like two people who had lost their minds and were thrilled about it.
"Left side," I gasped. "The zipper's on the left side."
"I know where the zipper is —"
"You clearly do not —"
He found the zipper. I found his belt. The band kicked into the Garth Brooks number thirty feet away and the bass shook the walls and I laughed against his throat — breathless, wild, a laugh I didn't recognize as mine.
"Perfect timing," I said.
He lifted me. I wrapped my legs around him and the door rattled against its hinges and he pressed his forehead against mine with his eyes open and we were both still smiling — stupid, punch-drunk, ridiculous smiles — and then he moved and the smiling stopped and I grabbed his shoulders and said " Oh " and he said " Yeah " and it was fast and graceless and the best sex I'd ever had in a bathroom, which was a category I hadn't known existed until sixty seconds ago.
" Fuck, " he breathed against my neck. "Callie —"
"Don't stop — don't you dare —"
He didn't stop. His hand braced against the door, his hips pinning me, and I bit his shoulder to keep from screaming because there were people thirty feet away eating nachos and I had some remaining shred of dignity, though it was fading rapidly —
I came with my face buried in his neck and his name between my teeth, and he followed three seconds later with a groan that the Garth Brooks cover almost but not quite drowned out.
Silence. Both of us breathing hard. The door rattling faintly in the aftershock.
He was still inside me. His forehead dropped to my shoulder and I felt him shaking and for one terrifying second I thought — and then I realized he was laughing.
"That," I said, "was —"
"Yeah."
"I can't feel my legs."
"You're welcome."
His mouth was on my neck, still breathing me in, still tasting my skin between words, and I was trying to form a sentence, but his hand was tracing the curve of my thigh, and my brain had left the building.
"We just did that," I said. "In a bathroom. At the Silver Spur."
"While Garth Brooks played."
"While Garth Brooks played."
He pulled back to look at me, and his eyes were dark and blown and satisfied and absolutely delighted with himself, and something about that look made me clench around him, and his whole face changed.
"Don't," he said, low. "Unless you want round two against this door."
"Is that a threat?"
"It's a promise."
My legs gave out and he had to set me down and I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror — my dress twisted sideways, his shirt untucked, my lipstick smeared across his jaw, his hair absolutely destroyed by my hands, a bite mark on his collarbone that I did not remember leaving — and lost it completely.
"You cannot go back out there," I said, wiping my eyes.
He looked at himself in the mirror. Grinned. "I look great."
"You look like you were mauled."
"I was. Happily." He tried to fix his hair. Made it worse. Ran his thumb across the bite mark and raised an eyebrow at me. "This yours?"
"I have no memory of that."
"Liar. I felt teeth."
"Prove it."
He caught me by the waist and pulled me back against him and kissed me — slow this time, lazy, tasting like whiskey and trouble — and I felt him grin against my mouth.
"How's my collar?" he murmured.
"There's lipstick on it."
"Good."
I shoved him. He caught my hand and kissed it, and we stood in a bathroom at the Silver Spur grinning at each other like two people who'd just gotten away with something.
We cleaned up. I fixed my hair. He tucked his shirt in. I caught his eye in the reflection — flushed, wrecked, a mark on his neck I'd put there — and grinned.
We walked back into the bar. Bev took one look at us over her margarita, and her eyebrow climbed half an inch. She sipped. Said nothing. Didn't need to.
We walked home.
Hand in hand through the empty streets, the air still warm, the stars absurd.
I leaned into him, and somewhere around the corner of Main and Elm, he stopped.
Turned me to face him. Put both hands on my face and kissed me in the middle of the street under the hardware store awning with the whole empty town as witness.
Not hiding. Not careful. Not tucked into a bathroom or a dark booth.
The main street of Copper Creek, Texas, and his mouth on mine, and I didn't care who saw.
We made it to the cottage. Barely. His hands on me the whole walk — my waist, my hip, the small of my back — like he couldn't stop touching me, like his hands had made a decision his brain hadn't caught up with.
Inside. Door locked. And then everything slowed.
The urgency from the bathroom was gone. In its place was something quieter. He stood in my hallway and looked at me, and the grin faded into something else — something serious and open and stripped of all the charm.
"Come here," he said.
I went.
He undressed me in the hallway. Slow. The zipper he'd fought with at the bar — he found it on the first try this time, slid it down with one hand while the other traced my spine.
The dress pooled at my feet and he looked at me in the lamplight from the living room and something crossed his face — raw, unguarded — and his eyes went dark.
"You're so beautiful," he said. Not performing. Not a line. The raw, unsteady voice of a man saying something he couldn't hold back. "You walk into a room, and I can't see anything else. You know that? There's just you."
He picked me up — not urgently, gently, my legs around his waist, my arms around his neck — and carried me to the bedroom and laid me down like I was something he'd been trusted with.
He kissed my forehead. My eyelids. The bridge of my nose. My mouth — slow and deep and thorough. He kissed my jaw and the hollow of my throat and the place where my pulse hammered, and I arched into him and whispered “please," and he said "I've got you,” and I believed him.
He undressed himself and stretched out beside me and pulled me against him skin to skin and the full-body contact — chest, stomach, thighs, every inch — made us both exhale like we'd been holding our breath for hours.
"I see you," he said against my collarbone. "All of you. The parts you show and the parts you hide and every single part in between." His lips trailed lower. "And I want all of them."
He took his time. Lips on my breast, my ribs, the dip of my waist. His hand between my thighs — not rushing, not teasing, just learning me with his fingers the way he'd learned everything else about me.
Paying attention. Reading the catches in my breath.
Adjusting. Coming back to the places that made my hips roll and my hands fist the sheets.
"Right there," I breathed. "Clay — right there —"
"I know." Low, against my hip. "I've got you."
He brought me to the edge slowly. Held me there.
His fingers curling, his thumb circling, his breath hot on my stomach, until I was shaking and begging and saying things I'd never said to anyone — "please, don't stop, I need you, please" — and he whispered "let go, I'm right here" and I came apart with his name on my lips and his hand still moving, drawing it out, making it last until I was boneless and trembling and tears were sliding into my hair.
He moved over me. Pressed inside me slowly — inch by inch, watching my face, giving me time to adjust to the fullness of him. My hands found his back. His forehead dropped to mine.
"You feel —" He exhaled. Shaky. "Callie. You feel like coming home."
We moved together. Slow. His hips rolling into mine in long, deep strokes that hit places I didn't know I had. No urgency. No performance. Just his body and mine and the rhythm we found together — the one that felt like it had always been there, waiting for us to find it.
He said it against my skin while he moved. "You're everything." Hips rolling. "You're brave and fierce and kind, and you don't even know —" A thrust that made me gasp. "You don't even know what you do to me."
"Show me," I said.
He showed me. He hooked my leg over his hip and changed the angle and I cried out and grabbed the headboard and he groaned and pressed deeper — "there, stay with me, right there" — and I felt it building — enormous, inevitable, the kind that starts behind your ribs and radiates outward until your whole body is electric.
"Open your eyes," he said. "Look at me."
I opened my eyes. His face was inches from mine. His pupils blown. His arms shook with the effort of holding himself above me while he moved.
"I'm falling in love with you," he said. "I'm already there. I need you to know that."
I came. The orgasm hit like a wave, and I pulled him down and held on and said "me too, Clay, me too" and felt him shudder and follow and his face buried in my neck and my name — just my name — the only word left in him.
We lay tangled together. His fingers tracing my spine. My head on his chest. The room dark except for the streetlight through the curtains.
"Stay," I said.
"Darlin', I'm not going anywhere."
I fell asleep listening to his heartbeat and thinking that this was what it was supposed to feel like. This was what it was supposed to feel like all along.