Chapter 23 – Milo #3
I don't stop. I work her with my mouth and my hand both until her hips are rocking against my face and her grip in my hair has crossed from guidance into desperation.
When I feel the moment she tips I push into it and she comes apart with a wrecked cry, thighs locking around me, my name fractured into syllables she can barely shape.
I hold her through it. She's still trembling when I stand.
"Milo." It's just my name. It's everything.
I line up against her and push inside in one slow, deep stroke, and the sound she makes goes straight through me.
For a moment I hold completely still. Her body tight around me, her hands gripping my shoulders, the heat of her against every part of me, and I think, this is what I almost lost. This exact thing.
I need a second to know I'm actually here.
She rolls her hips. "Move."
The first rhythm is slow and hard, long strokes that make her gasp on each one, that make her grip tighten in my hair and her heels dig into the backs of my thighs pulling me in.
I press one hand flat to the counter beside her for leverage and wrap the other around her hip and angle her exactly where I want her.
I go deeper and she makes a broken sound against my ear that I will not forget.
Her nails drag down my back. I feel every one. I press my mouth to the side of her neck and feel her pulse hammering. She turns her head and finds my mouth and kisses me like she's still angry and glad and relieved all at once. I kiss her back the same way because I am all of those things too.
"Harder," she says against my mouth.
I give her harder. Her breath catches on a moan she doesn't bother to muffle and she wraps both arms around my neck and holds on as I drive into her.
I feel her clench around me and the moment she starts to go.
The way her whole body draws tight, the way she goes suddenly breathless, and I push into her harder still.
She breaks apart with a wrecked cry, one hand fisted in my hair and the other gripping my shoulder hard enough to leave marks. Her face pressed to my neck, her whole body shaking against me.
I follow her a moment later, buried deep, her name the only word I have, holding her as close as I can because there is no version of this where I am not holding on.
We breathe.
The city hums outside the windows. The counter is hard and the kitchen light is still on and neither of us mentions it.
She pulls back just enough to look at me. Her hair is a wreck and her eyes are soft in a way I don't think she knows about, and I put my hand against her face and she leans into it.
"Come to bed," I say.
She takes my hand and slides off the counter.
Somewhere between the kitchen and the hallway the urgency shifts. She walks ahead of me and I follow. She turns in the doorway of the bedroom and looks at me over her shoulder, and that look — unhurried, certain, entirely hers — is enough to undo me all over again.
I lie her down and take my time with her the way I've wanted to since Washington. Mouth to her stomach, her hip, the soft inside of her thigh, and she makes a low sound above me and threads her fingers into my hair and I stay there until she's pulling at my shoulders, both hands, insistent.
"Now," she says. "Milo. Now."
I slide back inside her and she arches up against me and exhales my name in a long, shaking breath. I press my forehead to hers and hold still for a moment, both of us breathing, her hands moving up my back, the city quiet outside the windows, before she tilts her hips and I start to move.
This version is different.
Slow and deep and completely unhurried, the two of us with nowhere to be and nothing to prove and all the time there is. I feel everything The heat of her around me, tight and perfect, the way she pulls me deeper when I roll my hips, the give of her body against mine at every point we're touching.
I am aware of her with a totality that has nothing to do with management or strategy or anything I have ever used to keep the world at a workable distance.
"Stay with me," I say. Against her temple. Not a direction. Not quite a request. Just the truest thing I have.
"I'm not going anywhere," she says.
The tension inside her becomes something she doesn't try to contain.
It takes her over completely and she says my name against my throat with a rawness she hasn't allowed in longer than I can remember.
I feel her answer, that long, shuddering release, and I say her name back, just once, in the register I used in the kitchen doorway.
Like she is the only thing I am certain of.
Afterward I stay where I am, her forehead on my shoulder, my hand moving slowly up and down her spine.
Neither of us speaks for a long time.
We don't need to.
She presses her mouth to my collarbone and I feel my arms tighten around her in response.
"We're better together," she says eventually. Not planning to say it. Not composing it first. It just surfaces, the way true things sometimes do when the careful thinking has been quieted.
My chest rises. Falls.
"Yes," I say. "We are."
Nothing else needs to be said.
We don't say anything else.