Chapter 8 #3
Her eyes find mine. Dark, glazed, furious, wanting.
I hold her gaze and thrust deeper, angling her hips with the hand under her thigh, tilting her until the head of me drags against the front wall on every stroke.
The angle change hits something that makes her gasp, sharp and involuntary, her nails biting into my shoulders.
"Right there," I say, and I keep hitting it, the same angle, the same depth, the same grinding pressure at the end of each stroke that puts the base of my cock against her clit.
I can feel what it's doing to her. Her body tightens around me with every return, the flutter becoming a clench, and the rhythm I set with my mouth on her breast is the same rhythm I'm driving into her now, the promise kept.
Her fingers dig into my shoulders. I can feel her fluttering around me, residual spasms layering over the fresh pressure building from the angle, from the depth, from the grinding return that her body is starting to chase.
"There," she says, quiet, almost to herself. She's found something in my face, a fracture I can't feel from the inside. "That's real. That's not the fixer."
"No. It's not."
"Don't stop."
"Not a chance."
Her legs tighten around me, pulling me deeper. My hand slides between us. My thumb finds her clit, swollen and oversensitive, and the pressure sends a jolt through her that tightens her whole body around me. I groan, low and involuntary, my hips stuttering before I find my rhythm again.
My thumb works her in tight circles while I drive into her, and I can feel the moment the two sensations stack, the internal pressure and the external, because her breathing fractures and she starts to clench in rhythmic pulses that squeeze me so tight my vision blurs at the edges.
The second orgasm builds in her body in ways I can feel before she can: the tightening, the flutter, the breath that catches at the top of each stroke. My thumb presses harder, matching the rhythm of my hips.
She breaks. Her whole body locks around me, thighs clamping tight, back bowing off the wall. She grips me in deep, rhythmic contractions that pull at me with every pulse, the wet heat of her clenching so hard around my cock that I have to lock my knees to stay standing.
The sound she makes is different from the first time.
Deeper, rawer, pulled from somewhere behind her ribs instead of her throat.
Her nails rake down my back hard enough that I'll carry the marks under my shirt tomorrow, and her hips grind against me through every wave, taking the pressure she needs, using my body the way I've been using hers.
The acknowledgment in it, that the man inside her is the man she knows he is and she's here anyway, choosing this, choosing me with every clenching pulse, is what takes the last wall down.
I bury myself deep, hands gripping her hips hard enough to leave marks she'll find in the morning.
The orgasm hits with the force of a structure giving way, my hips jerking in short thrusts I can't control, each one pushing deeper while I come inside her in long, hot pulses.
My forehead presses against her throat. I can feel her heartbeat against my mouth, fast and hard, and the intimacy of that, her pulse against my lips while I'm still pulsing inside her, undoes something in me that I won't be able to rebuild.
She's still clenching around me, and the pleasure is so acute it borders on pain.
The quiet after is enormous. The October cold has crept in through the windows while we weren't paying attention, and the kitchen holds us in the particular stillness of a house that has been listening.
I lower her until her feet find the floor. She stands unsteady for a moment, then catches herself against my chest. My hands loosen on her hips.
"The face you're making right now," she says against my shoulder. "That's the one. That's the face you made when your composure went and you couldn't get it back."
"Yes."
"You're afraid."
I am afraid. The fear sits behind my ribs where her head was resting a moment ago, lodged in the place her body just vacated, and it has nothing to do with Ward or the clause or the ledger on the table.
It's the fear of a man who just came apart with his forehead against a woman's throat and felt, for the first time in his life, that the coming apart was the truest thing he'd ever done.
Every wall I've built since I was twelve years old and Ward told me the world would never hurt me again just fell, and the woman who knocked them down is standing in front of me with my fingerprints on her hips and the steadiest gaze I've ever had pointed at me.
"Not the word I'd use," I say.
She pulls back far enough to look at my face and studies it for a long time.
We dress in the quiet. The kitchen takes us back in stages, the lamp, the table, the journals still open where she left them.
The clause sits on top of June's margin notes where I set it, the manila sleeve open, the trigger mechanism facing the ceiling.
The room is the room it was before we put our hands on each other, and it isn't, and we both know it.
Greer crosses to the table. She picks up the clause and holds it in one hand.
Her hair is still loose from where my fingers pulled it, and the flush hasn't fully left her chest, and the look on her face is not forgiveness, not rejection, but something harder and more specific: the look of a woman who's just confirmed what a man is capable of building and is now deciding what to demand he build next.
"You built the weapon that's pointed at me," she says. "Now unbuild it."