Chapter 13 #3
The bedroom faces the western dark. He closes the door. I sit on the edge of the bed and look at him standing in the low light with the open patience of a man who has decided to let me set the terms.
"I want to watch you," he says. Flat. Certain. The register he uses when he's already made up his mind. "While you take yourself apart for me."
I hold his gaze for a long moment. This is Knox building an architecture he thinks will keep him in control of this room. I can see the whole structure of it from here and decide to let him build it.
"Sit down," I tell him.
He sits in the chair by the window, the moon at his back. He opens his jeans, takes himself out, and wraps his hand around himself without any performance or apology, his eyes on me and nowhere else.
"Show me," he says, licking his bottom lip.
I pull my shirt over my head. Unclasp my bra. His jaw tightens and his hand moves once, slow and deliberate, and then stops. Waiting.
"Your hands," he says. "On your tits. Show me what you do with them."
I do. His eyes track every movement, dark and absolutely focused. I watch him watch me and there is nothing performative about this. I want this. I want his eyes on me like this, want the way his throat moves and hand strokes when I do something that gets through his control.
"Good," he says, low and even. "Now tell me something."
I raise an eyebrow.
"The last two nights," he says. "When you were alone. Did you think about me?"
"Yes," I breathe.
"Show me how." His hand moves again, slow, watching me. "Exactly how you did it. I want to see."
My jeans come off. I move back on the bed and his breath audibly changes, one sharp exhale through his nose, his hand tightening around himself.
"Slow," he says. "From the bottom. All the way up. Don't skip anything."
I put two fingers into my mouth and pull them out.
He groans, "Fuck."
I stroke myself exactly the way he said, slow, the full length of it, and the sound I make isn't quiet. He says again in a voice that has lost most of its steadiness. His hand is moving in the same rhythm, matching me, both of us watching each other in the low light.
"Circle it," he says. "Right there. Stay there."
"Knox—"
"Stay there." Not a request. His voice drops lower. "Tell me if it was your hand or something else. The last two nights, Trouble."
I tell him. His expression when I do is something I am going to think about for a long time. The specific undoing of a controlled man hearing exactly what he wanted to know and finding it worse than he expected.
"Next time you're alone," he says, voice rough now, the flatness mostly gone, "that's the only way I want you saying my name. When you're thinking about me. When you're coming." His eyes don't move from my face. "You understand me?"
I don't answer with words. He watches my face, his hand moves and he talks. He tells me what he sees and what he's going to do to me when he gets his mouth on me.
I come watching his face come apart right alongside mine, my back arched off the bed.
He's across the room before I've stopped shaking.
His mouth replaces everything, immediate, relentless, no pause between the end of one thing and the beginning of this. He knows exactly where to go and he takes his time getting there.
I have both hands in his hair and I stop being quiet. He is thorough in a way that makes completely clear he has been thinking about exactly this for a very long time.
I come a second time and he growls against my inner thigh, low and certain, "There it is."
When he moves up my body his expression is something I have never seen on him before.
Stripped down to the frame. Unguarded in a way that has nothing to do with softness and everything to do with the fact that the architecture he built at the start of this is completely gone and he is the one who is wrecked and we both know it and he doesn't reach for the control. He just looks at me.
"Knox," I say.
"Yeah." His voice is rough in a new way. "I know."
We don't sleep for a long time after that.
He's out before I am. Deeply, finally, the sleep of a man who has been running on adrenaline for six days straight. I lie against his chest and listen to his heartbeat settle.
My phone is on his nightstand.
I pick it up carefully and open the screenshots.
I look at them for a long time.
Then I look at Knox sleeping beside me. The man who has had this footage since Monday and chose tonight to show it to me, who said not tonight three different times with three different meanings. I put the phone face-down on the nightstand.
Tate's voice in the kitchen. Be careful which family you're serving.
I think about everything else Knox hasn't shown me yet.
I think about everything else I haven't found yet.
Someone has been moving through Blackwater security for three years using a dead man's name, and the man sleeping with his arm around me has known about it since Monday morning, and there is more he hasn't told me and we both know it.
I close my eyes.
I hold onto the screenshots next to everything else I'm not ready to use.
Not yet.