14. Grant
Grant
The bedroom door is barely closed before Sophie’s hands are at my collar, working the buttons with that focused precision she brings to everything she decides to get right.
There’s no clock on this anymore. No two months. No Brazil. That fact sits heavy and quiet between us, changing the shape of the whole night.
She gets my shirt open and pushes it off my shoulders. I let her. Nineteen years of being the one who moves first, and here I am standing still while she undresses me like she has all the time in the world. It feels more exposed than anything else we’ve done.
“You’re staring,” she says, not looking up from my belt. Her fingers are steady. Her voice isn’t.
“I know.”
“It’s unnerving. Like being assessed.”
“You’ll live.”
She glances up through her lashes, that quick dry humor still flickering even with her breath already uneven. “I feel like I should be taking notes. Grant Guilligan, staring like he’s trying to memorize something.”
“I am.” My voice comes out lower than I meant. “Keep going.”
She laughs—surprised, a little breathless—and gets the belt open. Her hands pause against my stomach for half a second, like she’s testing how much of this is actually hers now that there’s no end date hanging over us.
I answer by not moving.
She pushes me back onto the bed. I go easy.
She climbs over me, deliberate, hair falling around her face.
The green sweater disappears somewhere between one breath and the next; I’m too busy watching the way her eyes darken when she feels me hard beneath her to track the fabric.
She registers the look I’m giving her and her mouth tilts, small and satisfied.
She should. After five years of a marriage that taught her the opposite, she should get used to being looked at like this.
Her hands map the old scar along my ribs, slower than usual. Her mouth follows, open and warm, tracing the line like she’s learning it for the first time even though she’s done it a dozen times before. Something’s different tonight and we both feel it. Neither of us names it.
“You’re quiet,” she says against my jaw.
“I’m concentrating.”
“On what?”
“On not flipping you over and fucking you yet.”
She goes still, then laughs low against my throat. The vibration of it frays whatever’s left of my restraint. “Yet,” she repeats. “Interesting word choice.”
“I have a sequence in mind.”
“Of course you do.” She nips the underside of my jaw, then sits up just enough to look at me properly, eyes bright and already a little wrecked. “That’s the least romantic thing you’ve ever said to me and I am, somehow, extremely into it.”
I let her get about as far as I can stand to let her get before I decide I’ve had enough of watching.
I roll her under me in one motion, and she makes a sound of surprise that turns into something else fast, her hands sliding up into my hair, her whole body arching up to meet mine like the movement's been waiting on her too.
"Oh," she says, breathless, looking up at me with that wry light in her eyes that never fully goes out, not even now.
"Let me take care of you," I say.
It's not a request.
She doesn't argue. That, more than anything, tells me where we are tonight — Sophie Guilligan, who argues with everyone about everything, including herself, going soft and quiet and letting me do what I've wanted to do since the day I walked back into her life and found her running an entire household better than anyone had a right to expect from a twenty-three-year-old who married into a family she barely knew.
I finish undressing her slow, on purpose.
Every piece of clothing I move gets a beat of attention before I move to the next — her collarbone, the curve of her waist, the soft skin just below her ribs that makes her breath catch every time, without fail, like her body's still surprised by it after five months.
She squirms under the pace, impatient, and I hold her hips still with one hand and keep going anyway.
"You're doing this on purpose," she says, voice already fraying at the edges.
I take my time. I've always taken my time with her — it's one of the only real advantages age actually gives a man, the patience to get somewhere slow and mean every single step of it — but tonight there's no reason to hurry, and I use every minute of that.
My mouth finds her, and her hands fist in the sheets, and the sounds she makes stop being words somewhere around the third time I do the thing that makes her hips buck up off the mattress entirely.
“Grant!”
I kiss the rest of the sentence out of her, and she stops trying to win the argument, hands sliding back into my hair, pulling me down over her with a want that's stopped bothering to hide itself.
I move over her, and she meets me there, and for a long stretch of time there's nothing in the room but the two of us — her hands mapping my shoulders, my back, the old scar at my hip she still hasn't asked about and I still haven't offered; my mouth at her throat, her jaw, the soft spot behind her ear that makes her gasp every time without fail.
I watch her the whole time. There's just her, present-tense, mine, for as long as either of us wants that to be true — which, as far as I'm concerned, is forever, a word I have never once let myself use about anything in my adult life until this exact room, tonight.
She gets close again, faster this time, her nails dragging down my back in a way that's going to leave marks I intend to enjoy noticing tomorrow. I feel it happen before she says anything — the particular way her whole body goes still, right before it doesn't.
There’s a word sitting in my chest that I’ve been circling since “baby girl” slipped out of me in her kitchen five months ago. Neither of us mentioned it again. Both of us pretended it hadn’t landed the way it landed. I’ve never said the other one. Never let myself.
I’ve earned it now.
I lean in close, mouth against her ear, and give it to her low and deliberate at the exact moment she’s got nothing left to defend herself with.
“That’s it. Good girl. Daddy’s got you.”
The words hit her like a live current. Her whole body seizes around my cock—tight, then impossibly tighter—and then she breaks.
A broken, helpless sound tears out of her as she comes, hard, and I feel the sudden wet rush of it, hot and filthy, soaking my cock and the sheets beneath us.
She’s gushing around me, pulsing, shaking so hard she can barely stay under me.
“Fuck—” The sight of it, the feel of her coming that hard just from the word, snaps something clean in half inside me. “That’s it. Look at you. Soaking Daddy’s cock like a good girl.”
I don’t slow down. I fuck her through it, harder, deeper, chasing the wet mess she’s making, and every thrust pulls another broken noise out of her.
She’s still coming, or coming again, I can’t tell anymore—her cunt keeps clenching and fluttering and spilling more slick around me until the wet sounds in the room are obscene.
“Daddy—” she chokes out, like the word has been sitting in her mouth this whole time too, waiting. “Please—don’t stop—”
“Not stopping.” My voice is wrecked. I hook one of her legs higher, open her wider, and drive in harder, watching the way her body takes every inch like it was made for this. “You feel that? How wet you got the second I called myself your daddy? Fucking filthy for it.”
She nods frantically, eyes glassy, mouth open, and the confirmation makes me lose the last of the careful man I’ve been trying to be with her.
I drop my forehead to hers and fuck her like I’ve wanted to since the first time I had her under me—raw, relentless, the headboard slamming the wall in a rhythm that leaves no doubt what we’re doing in this room.
“Come again,” I tell her, voice low and rough against her mouth. “Come on Daddy’s cock one more time. I want to feel you gush for me again.”
She does. A second, longer wave rips through her, even wetter than the first, and the way her cunt milks me—tight, rhythmic, desperate—pulls me right over the edge with her.
I bury myself to the hilt and come hard, groaning her name and the word she just gave back to me, pulsing deep while she keeps shaking and clenching around every drop.
We stay locked together afterward, both of us breathing like we’ve been running, my cock still twitching inside the mess we made. Her face is buried against my shoulder. My hand is still fisted in her hair.
Neither of us says anything for a long time.
The word is out now. There’s no putting it back.
Afterward, when she's got enough air back to form sentences, I hear her huff out something that's half laugh, her face still pressed into my shoulder.
"What?” I ask.
"Nothing. Just—" She pulls back enough to look at me, eyes still wet at the corners, mouth twitching toward a smile she's fighting and losing to.
"Oh. That's what that was. I've been half-waiting for it since the coffee runs, if I'm being honest, and I genuinely did not expect to find out I'm — that.
I'm twenty-eight years old and I have a med school loan I will be paying off until I'm dead, and apparently I also have a very specific thing I did not know I needed until a forty-three-year-old man with a tactical watch said four words in my ear. "
"You're taking it well."
"I'm taking it extremely well, considering.
Give me a minute, I might still have a full crisis about it later, possibly in the shower.
Right now I'm just, well," She exhales, settles back against me, tucks her head under my chin like it's the most natural motion in the world, like she's done it a thousand times instead of a handful.
"Right now I'm just really glad my walls are thick, is all I'm saying, because Copper Falls does not need to know what I just found out about myself.
Diane would put it on the contact sheet. "
We lie there a while, the room dark except for the streetlight coming in sideways through her blinds, striping the ceiling in thin bars of orange.
Her head's on my chest, one leg thrown over mine, her hand tracing slow, absent circles over the old scar at my ribs like she's memorizing it properly this time, now that there's no clock running.
"Tell me about the Sullivan job," she says eventually.
So I tell her about the project; Route 9 water main, the timeline, the fact that half the existing pipe is older than I am and nobody's touched the schematics since the Reagan administration, which is either a scandal or a miracle depending on how you look at it.
It's boring, technical, unglamorous work — trenching depths, flow rates, a crew of eleven guys and one very territorial backhoe operator named Deb — and she listens to every word of it like it's the most interesting thing she's heard all week, asking real questions and not just being polite while she waits for me to stop talking.
"So you're basically playing plumber," she says.
"It's slightly more technical than that."
"Is it, though. Is it, Grant."
"There's a management component."
"Sure. You're managing plumbing."
"I hate you," I say, without any heat in it at all, and she grins against my chest, entirely unbothered, entirely pleased with herself. We goth giggle.
Somewhere in the middle of me explaining flow rates in more detail than she asked for, she goes quiet and asks, "Where are you going to live?"
I hadn't planned to get into this tonight. I'd planned, vaguely, to let it sit until the timing was better — as if there's ever a better time than a woman's head on your chest at midnight, sated and honest, asking you a question that matters more than she's letting her voice show.
"I thought I'd figure that out. My room at mom’s house is fine." I pause long enough that she notices, her hand going still against my ribs. "Unless there's a better option."
She goes still against me entirely now, not just her hand. "Are you asking to move in?"
"I'm asking if you'd want me to."
She's quiet for a second. "My apartment has one succulent and too many scrubs," she says finally.
"I've seen it. It'll do."
She laughs again, softer this time, and presses her face into my shoulder, and I feel her nod against my skin before she says anything else out loud, like her body answers before her mouth catches up.
She's asleep within a few minutes, her breathing gone slow and even against my chest, one hand still loosely curled at my ribs like she's keeping watch even unconscious.
I stay awake a while longer, running a hand slowly through her hair, looking at the ceiling of a room I intend to know very, very well for a very long time.
I turned down two hundred thousand dollars for this.
Best deal I ever made in my life, and it isn't close.