24. The Beginning of Ours #3
He never rushes anything that matters. He treats everything he's decided matters with the same focused thorough attention and I am included in that category and have been for a while.
I feel it every time.
He walks me backward through the entryway, his mouth on mine, my hands on his chest, neither of us breaking the kiss for anything as unimportant as furniture or doorframes. We have navigated this house in the dark before and muscle memory handles it while the rest of us are occupied.
We make it to the bedroom.
The lamp goes on low. Amber light. The private warm version of the room that belongs to this specific hour.
He pulls back and looks at me.
Takes my left hand. Looks at the ring on my finger in the lamp light. Turns it slightly, watching the way it catches the glow, his thumb moving slowly across my knuckles.
He looks up.
He reaches for the buttons of my shirt with steady deliberate hands, his eyes on mine the whole time, unhurried, certain, the way he approaches everything he has decided is worth his full attention.
I reach for his simultaneously and we do this together in the warm lamp light, the good shirt coming off, the good boots hitting the floor, the careful Saturday presentation of both of us dismantled piece by piece until there's nothing left between us and the evening and the room.
He is unfairly constructed.
I have thought this before. I think it again now with considerably more firsthand evidence than the first time.
He pulls me against him, warm skin against warm skin, and I go without resistance because resistance stopped being available to me a long time ago where this man is concerned.
His hands move with the specific intentional knowledge of someone who has been paying attention, learning, cataloguing. Someone who understands me in a way that feels detailed, deliberate, and completely focused.
His mouth finds my jaw, my neck, the soft skin below my ear that he identified early as a location of strategic importance and has never stopped using to considerable effect. I make a sound I don't bother holding back. We are long past holding back. We have been past it for a while.
"Laney," he says against my skin.
Just my name.
The way he says it that has nothing to do with just a name.
I say his back.
We move to the bed with the ease of two people who know each other. Not just physically. In all the ways that make the physical what it is between two people who have seen each other at their worst and most exhausted and most afraid and chosen to stay anyway.
That's what this is.
What it has always been underneath everything else. He maps out my body with his hands. Massaging, caressing, feeling, and just plain turning me on. My body is arching into him anxious for him to enter me.
He takes his time with everything, unhurried, focused, generous in a way that communicates clearly that he is here entirely and not anywhere else and has no intention of being anywhere else.
His hands are sure on my body, his mouth is warm against my skin, his voice low in the dark saying things that I feel more than hear.
I give as much as I take.
He responds to everything. He finally settles in and enters me, slow and methodical, giving my body time to take him the way he always does. I'm so ready for him.
We find our rhythm the way we find it in everything, naturally, without counting, the particular ease of two people who stopped trying to navigate each other a long time ago and just started moving together instead.
Inside the ranch house the lamp is low and warm.
Inside this room there are no walls left between us.
There haven't been for a long time. Our breathing quickly settles into the same rhythm. He moans first as his body goes stiff. I immediately follow with much satisfaction.
Afterward, I lie against his chest with his hand moving slowly in my hair and the ring on my finger catching the lamp light every time it moves. The ranch settling around us into its night sounds.
Outside the celebration drifts across the ranch yard in warm scattered waves of laughter and voices.
Remy's voice. Maisie's laugh, bright, clear, carrying all the way to the ranch house window.
The particular warm noise of Silver Mesa doing what Silver Mesa does at its best, full of people who showed up.
I look at the ring.
At his hand in my hair.
At the ceiling of a room in a ranch house on twelve hundred acres of Texas that started as a listing photograph and became the whole shape of my life.
"Beckett," I say into the quiet.
"Mm."
"That speech you forgot."
His chest moves under my cheek. "Yeah."
"Tell me sometime," I say. "When you remember it."
He's quiet for a moment as his hand stills in my hair.
Then he says quietly, with that steady certainty that still undoes me, "I remember all of it."
I lift my head and look at him in the lamp light.
He looks back with those steady eyes.
"Then tell me," I say softly.
He does and it takes a while.
It is worth every word.
We head outside and join the celebration.