Chapter 14 #3
The orgasm hits like a wave crashing against a rock. It’s sudden, total, obliterating. My thighs clench, and I ride it out against his mouth, breathless and graceless and completely undone, his name a broken sound in my throat that I swallow before it can become what it wants to be.
He stays with me through every pulse of it, steady and unhurried, until my grip on his hair loosens and my legs stop shaking and I’m just standing there in my kitchen, bare and wrecked and breathing like I’ve run a mile.
He rises and lifts me up again. Without a word, his eyes on mine, he pushes inside me, and the sound that comes out of me is not something I can control.
He fills me completely, a slow, relentless stretch that makes my head fall back against the wall.
He holds still for one beat, his forehead pressed to mine, his breathing ragged, and I can feel him trembling with the effort of not moving.
Then he thrusts. Hard. Fast. Deep.
The wall takes the impact of every thrust. His hands grip my thighs, holding me up, holding me open, and the angle is wrecking me. He hits something deep inside me on the first stroke that makes my vision blur, and after that, I stop thinking entirely.
It’s hard. It’s fast. The sound of our bodies is obscene in the quiet kitchen, skin against skin, my back hitting the wall in a rhythm that knocks the picture frame sideways.
I’m making sounds I’d be mortified by if I could hear them over the roar of my own blood.
His mouth is on my neck, my collarbone, my lips, and every point of contact is another detonation building toward something catastrophic.
“Fuck,” I gasp, because he’s shifted the angle, and his thumb is on my clit, and the combination of his cock inside me and the pressure is pulling me apart from the inside out.
“Eyes on me,” he growls.
My eyes meet his, and the connection is as intimate as the sex. He watches my face as he fucks me, noticing every reaction, every sound, every flinch of pleasure, the way he notices everything, and the precision of his attention is what undoes me.
I come. Hard. A wrenching orgasm that locks every muscle in my body and tears a sound from my throat that the neighbours definitely heard.
My pussy clenches around him so tightly he swears, a single, broken word against my shoulder, and then he comes too, slamming his hips into me once, twice, three times before burying himself deep, staying there as he dumps his cum.
We stand there. Pinned against the wall, breathing like we’ve run a marathon, his forehead against mine, my hand fisted in his shirt. The kitchen is silent except for us.
Slowly, he lowers me. My feet hit the floor, and my legs are so unsteady that I grip his arms to stay upright. He keeps his hands on my waist until I’m stable, and the transition from rough to gentle, without a single awkward beat, makes something crack behind my ribs.
I press my face into his chest and breathe. His hand comes up and rests on the back of my head, fingers in my hair, holding without pressing.
After a minute, I pull back.
“Shower,” he says and scoops me up in his arms, cradling me like I’m this precious thing to him.
He carries me up the stairs as I direct him to my room. He sets me down on my feet and reaches past me to turn the shower on, and I let him, which is its own kind of admission.
When it comes to temperature, he helps me in, and the hot water hits my shoulders, and I close my eyes.
He strips off and steps in behind me, and the warmth of him at my back is different from the wall, different from the kitchen floor urgency of five minutes ago.
This is quieter. His hands move through my hair, working the knots loose with a patience that makes my throat tighten.
I don’t say anything. Neither does he.
He washes my hair with the shampoo from the rack, his fingers slow against my scalp, and I stand there with my eyes closed and let it happen.
Let myself be handled without it feeling like weakness.
It’s a strange, unfamiliar thing, being touched without bracing for impact, and I’m not sure I trust it yet. But I’m too wrung out to fight it.
He rinses my hair and turns me gently so I’m facing him.
The water runs down his face, and his eyes are lighter in the steam.
He takes the soap and works it into a lather between his palms before running them over my shoulders, my arms, down my back with a thoroughness that is somehow more intimate than everything that came before it.
I watch his face while he does it. The focus there.
The same quiet attention he gives everything, like I’m a problem worth solving correctly.
“You’re staring,” he says, without looking up.
“You’re in my shower.”
“Fair point.”
His hands move to my waist, my hips, my pussy, which makes me catch my breath.
He’s clinical and careful around the bruises Troy left on my wrist. He avoids them deliberately, and the deliberateness of it makes my chest do something I refuse to examine.
He rinses me off, and the water runs clear, and then he just stands there with his hands resting loosely on my hips, looking at me.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you look at me like you’re memorising something.”
Something moves across his face. Not a smile. Quieter than that. “Maybe I am.”
I look away first. The water is starting to cool, and I reach past him and shut it off. He hands me a towel from the rail without being asked.
I wrap it around myself and step out onto the bathmat.
He follows, and he scoops me up again to carry me to the bed.
He sets me on my feet and dries me off, which should feel awkward but doesn’t, and that’s the part I find most unsettling.
I don’t know what to do with a man who makes silence feel safe.
He pulls back the covers and helps me crawl in.
“Stay,” I say, before I can talk myself out of it.
He looks at me. Steady. Not surprised.
“The sofa is shit,” I add. “And you know where everything is now. It’s practical.”
“Practical,” he repeats.
“Don’t read into it.”
He says nothing and climbs in next to me, pulling me to him. I fit against him like I was made to be in his arms.
I hate it.
But I don’t move.
“Dec,” I say into the dark.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t leave before I wake up.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says.
I fall asleep in the arms of a man I don’t know enough to trust, in a house that belonged to my dead father, in a university that wants to eat me alive.
I sleep like I’m safe.