17. Stay #2
Something broke in him at that. I felt it happen, the snap of restraint giving way, and then his hands were everywhere, unclasping my bra with a dexterity that might have been impressive if I'd been capable of thought, cupping the bare weight of me, his thumbs dragging slow circles over my nipples until I gasped and pulled at his shirt because I needed skin, needed to feel him against me without barriers.
He stripped the shirt off over his head in one motion. I put my hands on his chest and felt muscle… and heat… and the rapid percussion of his heart. I thought: this is what it feels like when touching someone doesn't cost you anything. When hands on your body are an offering, not a claim.
He walked me backward until my shoulders hit the wall, and then he sank to his knees.
I looked down at him, this man kneeling on my hallway floor, his hands on my hips, his mouth pressing kisses into the soft skin above the waistband of my jeans, and my hands were shaking again, but for a different reason entirely.
He looked up at me. Waited.
"Yes," I said again. "Yes."
He unbuttoned my jeans slowly, easing the zipper down, hooking his fingers in the denim and the cotton underneath and sliding both down my thighs in one long, deliberate pull.
I stepped out of them, and the air hit my bare skin, and his hands wrapped around the backs of my thighs.
He pressed his mouth to the inside of my knee, and I stopped breathing.
He worked his way up. Slowly. Deliberately.
Each kiss open-mouthed and lingering, each one placed higher than the last, and I could feel his breath against my skin, warm and uneven, and his thumbs tracing the crease where thigh met hip, and the anticipation was a physical ache, pulling low in my belly.
When his mouth found me, I said his name in a voice I didn't recognize; rough, broken, desperate.
My head fell back against the wall, and my fingers threaded through his hair.
I held on because my legs were not reliable anymore, because his tongue was doing something devastating, licking through my wetness in long, flat strokes that found every nerve and lit it up, and I was shaking, I was shaking apart.
He held me against his mouth with one hand spread wide across my lower back, the other gripping my thigh, holding me open, and he ate me like he had nowhere else to be, like this, my pleasure, the sounds I was making, the way my hips were moving helplessly against his face, was exactly what he wanted.
All of it. Every broken syllable of his name.
I came with my fist pressed against my mouth, trying to be quiet, failing spectacularly.
The orgasm rolled through me in waves; tight and sharp at first, then spreading, loosening, my whole body going liquid with it.
He gentled his mouth but didn't pull away, working me through the aftershocks with soft, slow strokes until I was gasping and pulling at his hair because it was too much; it was perfect; it was too much.
He rose to his feet and kissed me. I tasted myself on his mouth and felt no shame about it, only want, only the need for more.
"Bed," I managed.
The bedroom was eight steps away. I counted because counting is what I do.
His hands were on my waist, steadying me, and his jeans were rough against my bare legs, and when we reached the bed, I turned and pulled at his belt.
He helped, shedding denim and everything else while I crawled back across the sheets and watched him in the low light from the hallway.
He was beautiful. I mean that technically, the proportions, the composition, the way light fell across the planes of his body, but also in the other way.
The way that had nothing to do with symmetry and everything to do with the expression on his face when he looked at me. Like I was worth the looking.
He covered me with his body, and the weight of him was a revelation; solid, warm, and grounding in a way I hadn't expected.
I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him closer, and felt him hard against me, the length of him pressing against where I was slick and still pulsing. We both groaned at the contact.
"Serena." His forehead was against mine. His voice was wrecked. "Tell me what you want."
"You. Inside me. Now."
He reached for a condom, I think, somewhere. I didn't track the logistics, and then he was back, settled between my thighs, and he pushed inside me in one long, slow stroke that made every thought in my head go white and quiet.
For a moment, neither of us moved. We just breathed. The stretch of him, the fullness, the way my body opened, took him and fit around him, it was almost too much, almost too intimate, and I felt my eyes sting. I pressed my face into his neck and held on.
He moved. Slowly at first, long, rolling strokes that I felt everywhere, that found a depth in me that made my toes curl and my breath hitch on every thrust. His hand slid under my hips, angling me up, and the change hit something electric.
I cried out, and he did it again and again, finding the rhythm that unwound me.
"Right there," I gasped. "Don't stop. Right there."
He didn't stop. His pace built, still controlled, still deliberate, but the control was fraying at the edges, I could hear it in his breathing, in the tight sounds he was making against my throat, in the way his hand gripped my hip hard enough that I'd feel it tomorrow and I wanted to feel it tomorrow, I wanted the proof.
I came a second time with him deep inside me, my whole body seizing around him, and the sound he made when he felt me clench was the most honest thing I'd ever heard from anyone, raw, overwhelmed and undone.
He followed me over seconds later, his hips stuttering, his face buried in my neck, my name in his mouth like it meant something sacred.
Afterward, we lay in the dark and didn't speak for a long time.
His fingers traced lazy patterns on my hip. My head was on his chest, and I could hear his heart returning to normal, the steady downshift from desperate to calm. Outside, the preserve was silent. The magnolia tree was a dark shape against a darker sky.
I thought about Marcus. About the door that I hadn't locked. About the fear that was still there, somewhere under the surface, but quieter now. Smaller. Crowded out by something louder.
"Thank you," I said, and then winced. "That's not, I don't mean it like that."
Jasper laughed. The real one, low and easy, the laugh that had made me like him before I'd decided to.
"I know what you mean," he said. His fingers moved to my hair, threading through it slowly. "You don't have to translate everything."
I pressed my face into his chest. Let myself have this: the warmth, the weight, the particular safety of lying beside someone who knew something true about you and stayed, anyway.
At some point, he said he should go downstairs. That his brothers would notice his absence and draw conclusions he wasn't opposed to, but that I might not be ready for.
"Not yet," I said. "Five more minutes."
"Five more minutes," he agreed.
He stayed for twenty.
Then he was gone. I stayed in my apartment with the door locked, really locked, the deadbolt turned, for the first time in weeks.
The sound it makes is a small, solid click I feel in my chest. I stand there for a moment with my hand still on the knob and notice what I'm feeling, the way my therapist had taught me to notice things. Name them. Let them be what they are.
Scared. I'm scared.
And underneath the scared: something quieter, something that knows the locked door doesn't actually stop Marcus if Marcus is determined.
It never did. The alarm systems, the security chain, the restraining order working its way through the courts, none of it had stopped him from leaving a rose on my pillow.
A locked door is theater. A locked door is what you do when you need to feel like you're doing something.
But I do it anyway. And then I checked it again. And a third time, my fingers finding the knob in the dark, confirming the resistance of the deadbolt.
Three times.
I haven't done that since the first week I arrived.
I stand in the middle of my apartment and look at what's around me; the space I've made mine, slowly, without noticing I was doing it.
A print I'd bought at the town market tacked above my desk.
A mug with a chip in the handle that I'd kept anyway because it fit my hand right.
The photographs I'd taken of the magnolia tree, printed and leaned against the windowsill, charting the way the light changed through it week by week.
A life. Accidentally built. Marcus's presence in this town felt like a hand on the back of my neck, a thumb pressed to all the careful work of being safe, threatening to undo it.
And yet, and this is new, I can still feel Jasper's hands on my skin. Not as a haunting, but as a reminder of what touch means when it's freely given and freely taken. Of what it feels like to want something, reach for it, and not be punished.
I'm not going anywhere, I told myself that morning on the porch after his first text. I had meant it then. I mean it now, but meaning things and being able to hold them are different skills. Tonight those skills are not cooperating.