Chapter 3 #2
He pushes the fabric aside. His fingers slide through slick heat, parting me, circling my clit with slow, deliberate pressure before dipping lower and pressing inside.
Two fingers, curling against the front wall while his thumb returns to my clit at a rhythm designed to pull me apart at the speed he sets.
The pleasure builds tight and relentless.
His eyes stay fixed on my face with a concentration that strips me more thoroughly than his hands.
"You're doing this on purpose," I manage, and my voice is thin.
"Obviously."
His fingers curl deeper and hold, pressing and stroking while his thumb keeps its pace. My hips buck against his hand and he pins me down with his other palm flat against my stomach, holding me still while his fingers drive me higher.
"Callum."
"Say it again."
"Make me."
"I am."
His fingers press harder, finding the spot that makes my vision fracture, and he holds it.
He brings me to the edge and keeps me there the way he did the first time, reading my body with the fluency of a man who pays attention to details for a living and has decided to pay attention to this one with everything he has.
The orgasm crests through me in a wave that locks my thighs around his wrist and tears his name from my throat for the second time.
He wins that round, and the look on his face says he knows it, filing away every sound and reaction the way he learns anything: thoroughly, with the intent to use what he's learned.
His fingers hook the waistband of my underwear and pull them down my legs in one smooth motion, dropping them on the floor with the rest of my clothes. Then he steps back.
His shirt comes off first. The lean, hard lines of his torso are cut sharp in the lamplight, the definition across his stomach, the trail of dark hair below his navel. Built the way he operates: controlled, maintained, nothing wasted.
His belt is next, his hands unhurried on the buckle. He watches me watch him while I sit naked on a kitchen counter with nothing between us but the distance he's choosing to maintain. He's making me wait the way he makes everyone wait. Because he can.
The button. The zipper. He shoves everything down and the sight of him hard and ready while I'm spread bare on his counter makes my breath catch.
He steps back between my knees and his hand closes around both of my wrists, gathering them behind my back in one grip. The shift is seamless and total and sends a jolt through me that settles low and aching.
"You were saying?" His voice has dropped to something rough and commanding that tightens my stomach.
The head of his cock presses against my entrance, hot and blunt. The pause before he pushes in is deliberate. I can feel him right there, the thick pressure of him against me, and every muscle in my body is pulling him forward while he holds still and makes me feel the wait.
"Look at me," he says.
I look. Whatever he sees in my face is enough, because he pushes inside me in one long, continuous slide that fills me inch by inch until the breath leaves my body.
The fullness is consuming, a pressure that borders on too much and lands exactly right.
When he bottoms out and holds, seated to the hilt with his hips flush against mine, the sound I make is involuntary.
He releases my wrists. Both hands grip my hips, fingers digging in hard enough to leave marks I'll find in the morning.
He moves slow and deliberate at first, a withdrawal and return that lets me feel every inch of him.
My freed hands find the hard muscle of his back and pull him closer.
My mouth finds the hollow of his throat where his pulse hammers fast, betraying him the way his face won't.
His grip tightens. His rhythm shifts. Each thrust deeper, the angle changed by his hands pulling me forward on the counter so the head of him drags against the front wall with every stroke. The friction builds in long waves I can't outrun. My thighs shake, my breath coming in short, ragged pulls.
"You're going to come again," he says against my temple. Not a question. Not a request.
"You're awfully sure of yourself."
"I'm sure of you." His hips drive deeper, and he's right, and I hate that he's right. The second orgasm hits deeper and slower, pulled from somewhere behind my ribs, a rolling thing that tightens around him and drags a sound from deep in his throat.
His rhythm breaks. He buries himself to the hilt and holds, forehead pressed hard against mine, his whole body rigid. I feel him pulse inside me, hot and deep, his hips jerking in short thrusts he can't control. The sound that comes out of him is honest in a way nothing else tonight has been.
The stillness afterward is enormous. His forehead stays against mine, his hands on my hips loosened but not gone.
"Well?" He pulls back just far enough to look at me. "Did you find what you were looking for?"
I study his face in the lamp's amber wash.
The sweat at his temples. The vein in his neck still pounding.
The looseness around his mouth that only shows when every barricade has come down at once.
Without the composure holding his features in place, he looks older.
Tired. The skin under his eyes is bruised with it, and for a second he's just a man standing in a kitchen with his trousers around his ankles and no idea who tried to kill the woman he's inside of.
A Callum without an answer is a thing I've never seen before. If whatever put that look on his face is bigger than the man standing in front of me, then the thing hunting me is bigger than I thought.
"Not yet," I say. "Come upstairs."
We pull on enough to make the stairs. His coffee sits on the countertop, the spill from where he set it down too hard already drying at the edges.
The house creaks through its sequence as we climb, and my mother's bedroom door is closed at the end of the hall.
I steer us to my room without acknowledging it.
The bed is made with June's ironed sheets.
The Cather novel is still on the nightstand.
The window faces east, toward mountains I can't see in the dark.
I pull him down onto the bed, and his weight settles into the sheets my mother ironed for a room I abandoned.
The collision of those two facts, Callum Aldrich in June Holden's careful, hopeful laundering, is something I'm not equipped to hold right now. I let it go.
His body curls behind mine, his arm across my waist, his breath evening out against the back of my neck. The house settles around us with small sounds and deep silences.
This is the moment. His defenses are stripped, his composure scattered somewhere on the kitchen floor with our clothes. If there is a lie in him I will see it now, before the walls go back up.