Chapter 13 #3
I begin to move again, slower now, gentler, and the gentleness isn't a retreat from the dynamic.
It's the other side of it, the side that exists because the dominance earned the trust and the trust earned this.
My mouth finds hers, and the kiss is soft and thorough and carries the weight of everything I can't say while I'm inside her and she's shaking under me and the walls between us are rubble on the floor.
Her body responds to the shift. The tension in her thighs loosens. Her hands slide from my shoulders into my hair, and the touch is different than before, less desperate and more purposeful, her fingers tracing the shape of my skull with a tenderness that tightens my throat.
"Stay with me," I say again, and this time it's as much for me as for her, because the way she's looking at me, open and present and stripped of every defense, is reaching into a place I've kept locked for years and turning the handle.
She pulls me down against her and we move together slow and deep and unhurried.
Her mouth finds the spot below my ear and the warmth of her breath against my neck sends shivers down my spine that I feel in my cock, and when she whispers my name against my skin the tenderness in it breaks open a place I didn't know was still sealed.
Her next orgasm builds slowly, for both of us.
I feel it in the gradual tightening of her body around mine, the way her breathing quickens and her hips begin to roll to meet me stroke for stroke.
Mine gathers at the base of my spine, heavy and inevitable, and I hold it back because I want to feel hers first, want to feel the moment she lets go and the woman who spent years performing surrender discovers what the real thing feels like when it isn't wrenched from her but offered freely.
She comes quietly this time. Her face turns into my neck and her fingers thread through my hair and her body tightens around me in slow, deep waves, and the sound she makes is a whisper that contains my name and nothing else.
The intimacy of it, the smallness and the trust, is more devastating than the louder one that came before.
I follow her over. The orgasm empties me with a force that drives the air from my lungs and buries me against her, my face in her hair and my hips pressed tight against hers and every muscle in my body shaking with the release.
I can feel her pulse against my ribs, fast and even, and mine hammering back against it, and for a few seconds the only thing in the world is the heat between our bodies and the sound of both of us trying to breathe.
I don't move off her immediately. I hold my weight on my forearms, keeping the pressure of my body against hers because the grounding contact matters more right now than space.
Her breathing is steady but her hands haven't let go of my hair, and the trembling running through her is the deep, structural kind, trembling that runs through a person when the last wall comes down and the open space behind it is vast and terrifying and full of air she hasn't breathed in years.
I ease out of her slowly, and she makes a small sound at the loss that I catch with my mouth, pressing a kiss against her jaw, the corner of her lips, the bridge of her nose. I pull her against my side before the loss of contact can register as absence.
"I'm going to get you water," I tell her. "I'll be ten seconds."
"Five."
"Demanding." I press my mouth to her forehead and cross to the bathroom, wet a cloth with warm water, fill a glass, and bring both back.
She drinks half the water in one pull. I take the cloth and clean her gently, between her thighs where her skin is oversensitive and flushed, and the care of the gesture makes her eyes close and her breathing catch for a different reason than the sex did.
I pull the sheet up over both of us and settle against the headboard with her tucked into my side, my hand in her hair, running the slow repetitive rhythm that brings someone back into their body after it's been somewhere unfamiliar.
"Tell me what you're feeling," I say. "Whatever it is. There's no wrong answer."
"Like I just ran a marathon I didn't train for." She presses closer against my side. Her skin is cooling, and I pull the sheet higher around her shoulders. "Like I've been holding my breath for years and I just exhaled and I don't know what my lungs are supposed to do with all this room."
"That's the surrender. The real kind. It's supposed to feel too big the first time."
"Does it get smaller?"
"It gets familiar. The size stays." I pull the sheet higher around her shoulders. "You called yellow. That was exactly right. That's what it's for."
"I almost called red." The admission is quiet, almost lost against my skin. "Not because anything hurt. Because I could feel myself letting go and I didn't know where the bottom was."
"There's no bottom. There's me." I tilt her chin up until her eyes meet mine. "That's the deal. You let go, I catch you. Every time. That doesn't change."
She doesn't look away for a long time. The trembling has slowed to a fine vibration in her hands, the last of the adrenaline working through her system, and her eyes are swollen at the edges and her mouth is soft in a way I've never seen it, stripped of the sharp edge she wields like a weapon.
"I've never actually surrendered before," she says. "To anyone. Every scene, every Dom, every time I knelt on that floor or bent over a bench, I was giving them the choreography without the feeling. I didn't know the difference until right now."
I pull her closer. I press my mouth to her temple and feel her pulse against my lips.
"I know," I say. "Thank you for trusting me."
She curls into my side, and her body settles into the curve of mine as if the shape was already familiar. I keep my hand in her hair, keep the rhythm even, keep the contact consistent while her breathing slows and her body settles and the trembling stops.
"Are you warm enough?"
"Mm."
"I need words, Renata."
"Yes. I'm warm. I'm good. Stop hovering."
The bratty edge creeping back into her voice is the best sign I've heard all night.
It means she's coming back to herself, reassembling the pieces in the right order, and the woman who emerges from the other side of this will be the same sharp, defiant, impossible woman who walked into my life and refused to leave, except now she knows what it feels like to stop performing, and she let me be the one who showed her.
The kitchen table and the case files and the killer and the operation and Hebert's warning and the badge on the line all exist outside this room, waiting, and they will be there in the morning.
Tonight, she chose to stop running. She chose me. She chose the honest version of herself over the performance, and the courage that took is greater than anything the badge has ever asked of me.
Her breathing evens out against my side.
Sleep pulls at her in slow increments, and I feel each one in the way her weight shifts deeper against me and her fingers finally uncurl.
The steps between my door and the guest room stopped meaning anything the moment she pressed her face into my neck and let go, and the only distance left is the one between tonight and tomorrow.
Tomorrow she will walk onto Dominion's floor wearing a wire and I have to trust the plan we made to keep her alive.