Chapter Nine #3
We stayed on the steps a while longer, our hands linked between us. Every so often, Dread’s thumb brushed across my skin. I leaned into his shoulder, and his fingers tightened around mine.
When we stood, we stood together. His hand at the small of my back, not pushing, just there, same as it had been in the kitchen and on Kitty’s porch and in all the moments where touch had become the default rather than the exception.
We moved through the screen door into the house -- quiet, amber light from the lamp in the living room casting long shadows across the leather couch and the medical journals and Ellie’s rocks on the windowsill.
We moved down the hallway. His bedroom door was open, the room, until he reached over and turned the lamp on. The light hit the bed, the walls, him standing beside it with his hand still on mine.
I reached for the buttons of his shirt. Worked the first one free, then the second.
He watched my face and didn’t rush me, didn’t reach for me, just let my hands do what they wanted.
His chest under the cotton was warm and solid, and when my palms found bare skin I heard him suck in a breath, sharp, like it cost him something to stay still for it.
His placed his hands on my waist, tracing the curve slowly, his thumbs pressing into the dip above my hips, and when I pushed his shirt off his shoulders his hands came up to cup my face instead.
He kissed me deeper than he had on the porch, his tongue sliding against mine, and something in my chest came loose that I didn’t have a name for.
We fell onto the bed together, his body coming down over me.
He was heavy in a way that should have felt like too much and didn’t -- it felt like being pinned by something that wasn’t going anywhere.
I dragged my hands down his back, felt muscle shift under his skin, and when his jaw scraped my collarbone I gasped.
He stilled. “Okay?”
“More than okay.”
His pressed his mouth against my throat, sliding his hand under the hem of the T-shirt -- his shirt, the one that had become mine somewhere along the way -- and when he pushed it up and off, his gaze stayed on my face, watching every reaction like he was memorizing it.
I arched into his hand. He ran his fingers through my hair, and when his mouth closed over my nipple the sound that came out of me wasn’t one I recognized as mine. I couldn’t undress fast enough.
He ran his hands down my body slowly, deliberately, and when his mouth found my pussy I forgot how to breathe.
He worked me like he did everything, patient and precise, adjusting the second my hips jerked or my breath caught, slowing when I needed slower, pushing harder when my body begged for more.
I buried my hands in his hair and held on.
My hips came off the mattress without my permission.
When he finally moved up my body and settled between my thighs, I could feel how hard he was against me, and I reached down and guided him in. He pushed inside slowly, one long thrust that filled me completely, and I gasped his name against his shoulder.
“Katy.” My name broke from him, rough enough to send a shiver through me.
I pulled him closer, my legs tightening around his hips.
He moved again, and whatever control I had left vanished.
I pressed my face to his shoulder as pleasure swept through me, my cry muffled against his skin.
Dread followed moments later, breathing my name against my neck before shifting his weight and settling beside me, one arm still wrapped around me.
Afterward, we lay in the dark. My back against his chest, his arm across my ribs, his palm flat against my sternum where my heartbeat was slowly finding its way back to normal.
The lamp was off. Dread’s breathing behind me went deep and even, the rhythm of a man who slept like he did everything, without wasted motion, and it filled the space where fear had lived for five years.
I watched the dark for a while. Tomorrow would come whether I planned for it or not.
Our bags were still zipped in the guest room closet. I knew exactly where they were. Knowing had mattered. They were there if Ellie and I needed to leave, one more precaution I wasn’t willing to surrender.
Tonight, they were just bags in a closet.
Dread slept behind me, one arm draped over my waist, his breathing slow against my neck. He knew now. Not every detail, maybe, but enough. He knew why I’d packed the SUV, why I’d run the moment I learned a man I feared was getting out of prison, why accepting help had been harder than refusing it.
He knew, and he was still here.
I covered his hand with mine and closed my eyes.
Tomorrow, the bags could stay where they were.
I closed my eyes. Let myself settle against him. There was nothing to see with my eyes closed, and that was the point. The dark held everything. And the gift of a night where vigilance had finally, mercifully, gone quiet, was enough to build a life on if I allowed it to be.
I allowed it. That was the thing. I allowed it.