Chapter 35
I am woken up abruptly by the sound of hammering on the patio doors.
I look at my phone. It’s two in the morning.
Sleep hadn’t been a conscious choice. I had slumped myself into bed, fully clothed, drunk the last of the room cocktails and cried for a bit until clearly my body couldn’t handle it any longer.
I look up to see a dark figure shadowed by the gauze curtains. It takes me a while to adjust to the light, to recognise his figure, the slim, effortless athleticism of his body, his hair, wild from an evening spent nervously fussing his hand through it in an attempt to keep himself busy.
I pull myself from the bed and make my way to the door. I slip the bolt free from the lock and it swings open.
‘Say it now,’ Florian thunders, a murderous look in his eyes.
‘What are you talking about?’ My eyes are still stinging from sleep, head raging from the cocktails I consumed just to be able to stop thinking about him.
‘Just say it out loud, not reading it from some fucking book. Say it.’ His intensity is terrifying, his chin trembles slightly as he speaks and his fingers rap on his thigh like rain.
‘That I love you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I… love you?’
‘You don’t sound sure.’
‘I love you.’ I say it again, this time without the question, this time with all of the confidence and assurance I have.
His eyes meet mine. I watch as they narrow, scan from one iris to the other as if he might be able to read me, be able to tell if I’m lying.
I step towards him again and when he doesn’t immediately jump back, I take my hand and press it onto his shirt, his heart pounding under my palm.
My fingers brush up the side of his neck and come to rest on his cheek. I pull his head down to face me until his forehead is resting on mine.
‘I love y—’ I don’t have a chance to finish.
Florian grabs me, his mouth is on my mouth, one hand is on the back of my neck, pulling me to him, the other on my hip stopping me from leaving. Not that I would want to.
He kisses me hard, I kiss him back harder until we are tripping back into my room. My hands work quicker than my head. I strip him of his shirt, and he sheds it like some useless second skin.
‘You look so fucking beautiful,’ he gasps in my ear as he plays with the straps of my dress. ‘All night I just couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted to take this dress off of you.’
‘Why rush?’ I challenge. Part of me wants to talk, wants to see whether this is forgiveness or some last-time, one-time thing. I don’t think I’m strong enough to endure that.
‘I’m not risking losing you again before we do this.
’ It is the sexiest thing that I have ever heard come from a man’s mouth.
I reach for his belt, run the leather through my hands until he’s free of that too, but just as my fingers start on the buttons of his trousers, he pushes me back onto the bed with a thud.
I look up at him, standing there over me until he sinks to his knees.
The sight of him, prostrate at my feet, sends something inside of me throbbing.
He bites his lip and slips his hands up my knees pushing my legs wider apart.
‘Fuck,’ he mumbles, pressing his lips against my knees in short little pulses.
‘What?’ I gasp, scared that at any minute he might pull away, leave me here waiting for something that might never happen. I would take death by firing squad over not getting to experience him here between my thighs.
‘You’re not wearing underwear,’ he groans, his lips moving up and up until I can feel his breath, the warmth there at the very centre of me.
I think he might just need to touch me and I might lose it.
‘I fucking love that you aren’t wearing underwear.
’ And then he’s there, and I let out an immediate, guttural groan.
He works slowly, methodically, as if we have done this hundreds of times, as if he knows where to plant every kiss, where exactly to put his tongue in order to send me somewhere that I think only he could ever take me.
I reach down for his hair, run my hand through it and grab a clump between my fingers.
He swears under his breath again and moves harder, longer.
I am forced to lie back and he hooks my thighs over his shoulders, his hands on my hips, pulling me into him until something starts building, something I haven’t felt in a very long time.
I start to groan, protesting every time he pulls away, clenching my eyes shut, one hand still in his hair, the other tugging at the fabric on my dress until a heat starts to spread through me in waves.
‘Yes.’ I manage to splutter out an affirmation.
‘Fuck yes,’ I repeat but instead of this encouraging him, he slows down; his kisses move back down my thighs.
I prop myself up on my elbows and look at him aghast. He is acting like nothing has happened, like we normally do this. ‘I’m not done,’ I protest.
‘Oh, I know,’ he smirks, starting to unbutton his trousers, stepping out of them and kicking them to a chair in the corner until the only clothing on his body is a pair of boxers, satisfyingly tight in the crotch.
‘You know, it’s good practice when you have a girl trembling at your tongue to let her finish.’
‘That’s not how this is going to go.’ He shakes his head and then peels off his final item of clothing.
I feel slightly cheated. I had hoped to be the one to do that.
He comes to the end of the bed, takes my wrist in his hands, pushing my back into the mattress again.
‘The first time, we finish together.’ He kisses me hard on the lips. The heat starts to spread.
‘And the second time?’ I grin.
‘I’ll let you choose.’ He starts to press his lips into my neck and down the straps of the dress, pulling them below my breasts and exposing my nipples.
He takes one in his mouth, and I arch my back to him, just in time for him to catch my thigh in his hand, pressing it to the bed and pushing himself down onto me.
I feel him. The hardness. The expectation. It makes me shudder.
He breathes hard, slowly, bringing his head back up to mine. He smiles at me, and I am grateful for the familiarity. I trust him. I want him.
‘How do you want it?’ he asks, pressing his hips into mine again so I can feel what’s coming, what is about to happen.
‘I don’t care. Just with you.’
My answer satisfies him and with a breath he plunges himself into me. I gasp, arch my back to accommodate him. He stays there for a moment, both of us catching our breath until he starts to move.
I have always enjoyed sex. I enjoy the initial awkwardness, how, the first time, we bare all to a relative stranger. How good sex is a levelling force, how bad sex will fuel the topic of girls’ night for months. This sex though is something different entirely.
I marvel at Florian, how brushing my hand against his cheek feels just as intimate as him inside me.
He leans over me, his arms bracing beside my head.
Sometimes, when he gets close, I watch as he closes his eyes, bites down hard on his lip and then his eyes shoot open, find mine and it’s like he is tuning into me, translating every single twitch and groan and ‘fuck’ into a language that his body acts upon until everything begins to tighten.
It starts with a dull ache so deep that it is almost unpleasant until something else takes over and it begins to spread down, down to a depth I didn’t know my body could reach.
I start to grip the sheets in my hands. My calls for him grow wilder.
I know he feels it too because he becomes more frenetic, harder, giving me everything he has left.
I watch him cracking, take in the beads of sweat on his forehead, the darkening of his eyes, the way he grabs on to my breast so hard in the final throes I think I might bruise, but I don’t care.
He waits for me, waits for my body to stop convulsing, waits until my calls for him have quietened, waits until my body goes limp beneath him like all of the life has been squeezed out of me.
I watch as he lets go. How every muscle in his face tightens, his angular jaw pointing up to the ceiling.
His eyes clenched shut. The way he lets out a ragged, guttural moan that is so fucking satisfying I wish I could do it all again immediately just to hear that specific sound again.
He slips from me, rolling to the side, his arm immediately winding itself around my shoulder. I adjust myself, rest my head on his chest, listen to his heart regulating back into its normal rhythm.
‘Was that okay?’ he asks although I know he knows the answer. I’m pretty sure that no one has enjoyed themselves during sex more than I have in that moment.
‘Yes,’ I nod and then let out a croaky laugh. ‘Yes, that will do.’
He kisses my cheek and it becomes apparent quite how hot and sweaty we are. He grins at me boyishly. ‘To think, I was almost going to give that up.’
I shake my head, still fighting to get my breath back. ‘That would have been a very unfortunate situation for both of us.’
I trace an invisible pattern on his skin, my fingernail winding its way from his torso all the way down his arms and up his neck. He lets me, looking at me as if I’m something that doesn’t quite belong to the earth, something he has never seen properly before.
‘I wasn’t just saying it for you to sleep with me,’ I say. ‘Or for you to not hate me as much.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I do love you.’
There is a silence, a momentary lapse of conversation that makes my heart plummet. I know you’re meant to say these things without the expectation of hearing them back, but the fact that he hasn’t said it once when I must have uttered it three times in the last hour has put me slightly on edge.
‘Come here.’ He gets out of the bed and offers me his hand.
He pulls me to my feet where a delicious ache in my limbs greets me.
It’s colder away from the mattress and I reach for the quilt, wrapping it around my body as Florian leads me to the bureau.
He stands behind me, his hands wrapping across my waist, and points to the mirror.
‘Look,’ he insists. I stare at the reflection of us and the confusion sets in.
‘What exactly am I looking at?’
‘Look,’ he says again as he presses his lips into my neck. ‘Look, there, see it?’ He takes his thumb and traces my lip, the way my teeth have caught it in the corner, the way my cheeks are blushed and warm: exactly the way Florian had described that I used to look at Ettie.
‘I do the thing with you.’ It comes out as a statement. An obvious little declaration because of course I do; it figures that Florian would be able to uncover the deepest of my secrets before even I can admit to them.
‘When we talk, when we flirt, when we kiss, just then, sometimes even when I just catch you looking at me.’
For some maddening reason, I find myself blushing. Of course I love him, I’ve just made that abundantly clear but the fact I had made it all so obvious makes me feel like a teenager again, nursing a petty crush. ‘And how long have you noticed this?’
‘It started when we built that cairn.’ He looks almost bashful, admitting now that he had been reading me all along.
I turn to him, mouth hanging open. ‘That’s cheating.’
‘It’s not cheating.’ He acts like the word leaves a sour taste in his mouth. ‘Just helped me stick around when everything else was telling me to run.’
‘Well, it’s not fair! Why do you get to know every little thing about me when you remain such a mystery?’ I pretend to be offended, pout a little for effect, and he just shakes his head and then holds me a little tighter than before.
‘I’m not a mystery to anybody but you.’ He strokes some hair behind my ear, his eyes moving across my face, mouth slightly open. ‘I think it’s clear to anyone who’s ever met us that I’m madly in love with you, Ava, and that I think I’m going to be for an awfully long time.’