Chapter Thirteen #3
Ellie’s door was cracked, the small nightlight casting a pale orange glow into the hallway that reached just far enough to touch the threshold of our bedroom.
I stood in the doorway and listened to her breathing -- deep, even, the rhythm of a child who had decided that this house was worth sleeping in -- and then I closed our door and the room went dark except for the lamp Katy had left on, dialed low, the amber light barely reaching the walls.
The window unit kicked on with a metallic rattle, old enough to sound offended every time the compressor engaged.
Cool air pushed into the room, stirring the edge of the curtain.
Beyond the fence, a motorcycle passed along the perimeter road, the engine audible for a few seconds before distance swallowed it.
Cotton, probably. Or Hornet. Someone checking the east fence line where the camera coverage had been improved that morning.
Katy stood at the foot of the bed. She’d changed into the T-shirt she slept in and her hair was loose around her shoulders, the lamp light catching the chestnut and turning it closer to copper at the edges. She didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to.
She reached for me first. Her fingers found the collar of my shirt, curled into the fabric, and I pulled her in without a word.
Her body came against mine -- warm, certain, the particular density of a woman who had spent five years being lighter than she was supposed to be and had only recently remembered how much space she was allowed to take up.
I rested my hand at the small of her back.
She tucked her face against my neck and leaned into me, closer than she’d been a moment before.
Her breathing hitched once, then eased, and some of the tension went out of her body as she settled against me.
We undressed slowly. Her hands on my buttons, working them free one at a time, her palms finding my chest beneath the fabric with a certainty that made my breath hitch.
My fingers at the hem of the T-shirt, pushing it up and over her head, her mouth warm and sure against mine, her tongue finding the seam of my lips with a confidence that hadn’t been there the first time and was there now.
The bed took our weight. Katy’s skin was warm under my hands.
I traced the curve of her waist, the dip above her hip bones, the faint silver marks along her stomach where her body had carried Ellie and rebuilt itself.
I put my mouth on them, followed those pale lines slowly with my tongue, and she made a sound against my shoulder, half-laugh, half something else, her fingers tightening in my hair.
“Tickles,” she murmured, and I kept going lower.
I watched her face while I worked her with my mouth -- the furrow between her eyebrows when a sensation landed right, her bottom lip caught between her teeth when it got to be too much, her breath going shallow right before her hips lifted off the mattress on their own.
I slowed when she needed slower. Pushed harder when her body asked for it.
Her hand found my wrist and guided me, and I let her, because that told me more than instinct alone ever could.
When I finally pushed inside her, Katy slid her hands around my neck and pulled me down to her.
I kissed her as I moved, swallowing the sounds she made while her fingers curled against my skin.
Whatever control I’d started with disappeared fast. There was nothing clinical about this, nothing measured, and the sound that escaped me when she tightened around my cock belonged entirely to the moment.
“Katy.” I breathed her name against her mouth, then kissed her again before I could say anything else.
She held on as I drove into her, one hand buried in my hair, the other gripping my arm.
When her release hit, she broke the kiss and turned her face into the pillow, her body tightening beneath mine.
I lasted only moments longer before pleasure overtook me too, my mouth pressed to the curve of her neck as I rode it out with her.
Afterward, we lay tangled. Her head on my chest, her hair spread across my sternum in a way that made the lamp light catch it and turn it amber.
My hand moved along her spine -- slow passes, from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine and back again, the cadence of a man who had nothing urgent to do with his hands and had chosen this.
Her breath warmed my skin. Even. Deep. The rhythm of someone who had stopped holding tension in her diaphragm and had allowed her body to remember what rest felt like.
The window unit cycled off, leaving the room noticeably warmer. Outside, the perimeter road had gone quiet, and the curtains shifted faintly from the last push of cool air.
We stayed tangled together while our breathing slowed and the heat between us faded. Katy rested against my chest, one leg draped over mine, comfortable enough that neither of us seemed interested in moving. I ran my hand along her back once and left it at her waist.
After a while, Katy lifted her head and propped her chin on my chest. “I keep waiting for it to stop feeling like this.”
I looked at her. Her hair was mussed, strands falling across her cheek and sticking near her temple. I brushed them back, taking my time with it.
I understood what she meant. The difference was, I’d stopped waiting.
“Like what?” I asked.
She pressed her palm flat against my sternum. Right over my heart, her fingers splayed, feeling the beat through skin and bone and whatever else lived between us that neither of us had named. “Safe,” she said.
The word hung between us. Small. Heavy.
I covered her hand with mine. My palm over her knuckles, my fingers folding between hers, and I didn’t answer because the answer lived in the contact -- in the press of her body against mine, in the particular stillness of a house where the smallest door was cracked and a nightlight cast an orange glow into a hallway that no longer needed to be checked twice before bed.
She knew. I knew. The space between knowing and saying was its own kind of language, and we had both become fluent in it somewhere between the porch and the bedroom and the kitchen sink where a child had asked for permanence and had been given it without hesitation.
We lay there. The house held us. The perimeter road stayed quiet.
I kept my hand over hers while she rested against me.
The bedside lamp lit the rumpled sheets and the clothes we’d left scattered nearby, evidence of how thoroughly my bedroom had changed since Katy came into it.
I’d spent the day thinking about cameras, the service road, and a man whose location we still couldn’t pin down.
Lying there with her, I realized I hadn’t thought about any of it for several minutes.
I wasn’t checking the clock or planning what needed to happen next.
For once, my attention stayed exactly where I wanted it -- on the woman beside me.