Chapter 9 #2
I lean into him and look at the valley and let the thing that's already been decided settle into the place where decisions live. I’m his. I’m his little and he’s my Daddy. That I know. The rest? The logistics? We will figure out.
I've known since the mountain road. Some things just fit.
Thursday night, after dinner, he comes to my suite.
This is not accidental. I've known it was coming the way you know a storm is coming.
I might not have known the exact moment, but the whole shape of it, the air pressure change, the quality of the light.
He texted at eight and asked if he could come up, and I said yes, and I spent the next twenty minutes in a state of extremely dignified anticipation.
I freshened up my makeup, ran a brush through my hair and teeth and applied some softly scented lotion.
Dignified might be a stretch.
He knocks once. I open the door.
He looks at me for a moment in the doorway, taking me in and then he comes in, and the door closes behind him, and the suite which is very beautiful and very private suddenly feels like the most important room I've ever been in.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi." He cups my face in both hands and kisses me, this kiss is less a statement and more a slow, thorough conversation, his hands moving from my jaw to the back of my neck and I step closer.
When he pulls back, his forehead against mine, he says: "I need you to be sure."
"I'm sure."
"Tell me."
"I'm sure," I say again, holding his gaze. "I've been sure since the ornament station, if I'm honest. Longer than that."
"Yeah," he says softly. "Me too."
He kisses me again, and this time he walks me back toward the bed, steady and unhurried, hands learning the shape of me through my clothes.
He undresses me slowly. Deliberately. Like he's paying attention to every inch of my body, because he probably is, because that's how he does everything, and I am not used to being the subject of this kind of attention and I discover that I'm going to have to get used to it immediately.
"Look at me," he says, when I glance away, half out of some old habit of not quite letting myself be seen.
His voice. That register. Low and quiet and not asking.
I look at him.
"Good girl."
There it is. The words that land in my chest and lower all the way to my core. I've stopped having complicated feelings about how much I like hearing them. I just like hearing them.
His hands are warm and his mouth is warmer and he takes his time with removing my clothes, not drawing it out for its own sake but because he's paying attention, which is different. He asks with his hands and his eyes and I answer and he listens.
"Tell me what you need," he says, against my throat.
"I need —" I have to think, which is difficult at present. "I need you to keep going and not stop."
"I can do that."
He can and he does.
He lifts me off my feet and settles me in the middle of the bed so I’m looking up at him, not sure what I’m supposed to do with my hands.
He takes my wrists and arranges them above my head, braced against the carved wood of the headboard.
He kisses the inside of my wrists, both of them, and then lets go.
“Stay right here, just like this,” he commands.
He shrugs out of his own clothes with less ceremony, folding them carefully and setting them on the chair by the window.
His body is different than I imagined; broader, more lived-in, with stretch and muscle, some scars.
He sees me looking, and a smile tilts the corner of his mouth, unguarded enough to gut me.
He kneels on the bed, and his hands are on my ankles first, then up my calves, parting my knees gently. “You still okay?” he says, and I am, a little more than okay.
He fits himself between my legs, his mouth finding my thigh, trailing up. I am made of sensation, so much of it, everything focused in on the drag of his mouth on my skin, the scrape of his teeth, the way his hand cups my knee and pulls me open wider.
He’s so slow.
Every movement deliberate. I fill the quiet with the sound of my own breathing, until I realize, distantly, it’s not just me. He’s making these low, rumbling noises in response to every way my body shifts and responds to him.
When he slides two fingers inside, I arch helplessly. The fingers on his other hand start to flick my clit as the fingers inside hit a spot that turns my brain completely off. All I can do now is feel.
“Oh,” I hear myself say, and more noises I didn’t know I could make. This feels good. So damn good. I didn’t know it was possible to feel this good. He watches my face for every reaction and responds accordingly.
After I orgasm hard against his hands, he waits until I’m done trembling and then, only then, does he push into me, kissing me through it as I tense and then melt, my hands holding hard onto the bars of the headboard. He never stops looking at my face.
It hurts at first, he’s bigger than I’ve ever had, but not as much as I expected, and it only matters for a moment before the ache shifts into a keening kind of pleasure, folding in on itself, getting sharper and sharper.
It’s building inside and although it’s never happened before, I know I’m about to orgasm for a second time.
“How are you doing?” he asks.
I bite my lip hard and say, “More. Please. Don’t stop.”
And when I say please another time, he shudders, and starts moving, and my whole world narrows to the pressure, the way we fit together, and the way his hands are so big, and the way he kisses me when he can’t help it anymore.
We move hard and fast, like we’ll run out of time or air if we stop. I come hard, sudden, not pretty at all, and he follows after, gentle and raw at the same time, breathing my name against my cheek.
Later, after, I'm against his chest and he's doing the thing with his hand stroking my hair, steady and slow, and I'm thinking about approximately nothing which is a condition I can't usually achieve and am enjoying immensely.
"You're quiet," he says.
"You've rendered me quiet. Take the compliment."
The low laugh. Right under my ear. The best version of it.
"The cabin has two bedrooms," he says, after a moment. “I thought it was one, but it is in fact, two.”
I laugh. Actually laugh, into his chest, a full genuine laugh because of course. Of course he circles back to the practical thing.
"Is that relevant right now?"
"The second one could be your office."
"Anthony."
"Good light in the mornings. South-facing window."
"You're really doing this."
"I've been thinking about it," he says simply, like this is a reasonable thing to say while my head is on his chest after he’s brought me to two orgasms in under twenty minutes.
"I wanted you to have your own space. Your own work.
This isn't me asking you to fit inside my life, it's me making sure there's room for yours. "
Oh.
All of it at once, the south-facing window and the fiber internet and two bedrooms so I have my own space and him lying here in the firelight thinking about how to keep me whole.
Not asking me to rearrange myself. Not asking me to move in with him.
Giving me the space and time for us to grow our relationship naturally.
Having an escape if I need one. Although, I know I won’t.
"Say yes," he says, quietly.
Not to the cabin specifically. To all of it. To the whole shape of what we're building, piece by piece, from a mountain road and an injured elk and two trucks that were always going to the same place.
"Yes," I say.
His arms pull tight around me once before relaxing and resting over me.
I fall asleep to the steady sound of a heart that has become, in the space of one improbable week, the most familiar thing I know.