Chapter 19 #2
"Christ." My voice echoes off her ceiling.
She works me slow and thorough, her tongue doing something that makes me forget the English language entirely.
I am looking down at the top of her head, she makes eye contact, and it almost finishes me on the spot.
God, she's so fucking beautiful with her mouth on me. My hips are moving against my will and I let them. She takes me deeper and I groan again, ragged this time, and say the only coherent thing left in me: "Right there. You’re so fucking good at this. Don’t stop. "
She doesn't stop.
When she has me right at the edge of losing everything, she pulls back. She reaches up and slides two fingers into her own mouth, slow, holding my gaze. Pulls them out. Reaches down.
I watch her face when she does it. The way her lips part. The small sound she makes. She's giving me exactly what I asked for the other night and she knows it and she's watching my face while she does it and I say it out loud without meaning to: "Fuck. Watching you. I'm trying to hold on."
She looks up at me from under her lashes and smiles and it is the most dangerous thing I have ever seen in my life.
Then she climbs up my body and straddles my hips and sets both hands on my chest. She's so wet she takes me all the way down in one slow motion. I feel her quiver around me and I grip the sheets and say her name.
"Look at me," she says.
I look at her. Her eyes are dark and her hair spills around her shoulders. I grab her hips.
"No." She lifts my hands and moves them to the sheets. "Hold on."
I hold on.
She sets the pace and it is nothing I have ever experienced in my life. Not urgent. Not rushed. Slow and deliberate and entirely hers, every variable, every angle, every inch. There is nothing I can do about any of it and she knows it.
"Maren." The word comes out ruined.
She leans down, puts her mouth at my ear, and tells me what she's going to do to me before she does it.
In the declarative register I use on her, exact and unhurried, my vocabulary turned against me by the woman who learned it from the receiving end.
I grip the sheets so hard I pull the corners loose and I say something that isn't a word.
She stops moving. "Ask me," she says.
I go still for one beat. Then I give her what she's asking for.
"Please." Raw. Not quiet. "Maren, please."
She rolls her hips and I arc off the mattress and the sheets tear free entirely.
She works me like this, slow and relentless and absolutely perfect, and I watch her face because I cannot look away from it. The flush in her cheeks, the way her head tips back when she finds the angle she wants.
She narrates all of it: what she's going to do next, what I feel like, and what she wants from me. I am not functioning. I am not a man who manages things in this room. I am just hers, entirely, sheets bunched in my fists, her name falling out of my mouth in a voice I don't recognize.
She comes apart above me with her hands flat on my chest, my name breaking in the middle, the sound of it something she only makes when she's not performing for anyone on earth.
I follow her over and stay there a long time.
Neither of us moves.
When she finally shifts and lies against my chest, slick and hot, my heart is working hard.
I find my voice somewhere underneath the wreckage.
"I'm not going anywhere unless you make me go."
She tilts her chin up, looks at me, and the thing on her face is the most honest thing she's shown me in ten years of watching her control herself in every room she enters.
I close my hand over hers.
I'm still looking at her when I feel it. What's already happening.
She feels it too. Looks down between us and looks back up with one eyebrow raised.
"Knox."
"Again." Her own word, thrown back to her. "Come on, Trouble."
She stares at me.
Then she laughs. Real and unguarded, the laugh she only makes when something catches her completely off guard, and I feel it against my chest. Then she's not laughing, because I've rolled her under me and she doesn't try to stop it.
The second round is faster and looser and both of us less armored than we've ever been. She digs her nails from my shoulders to my spine and I say something I didn't plan to say. She pulls me down by the back of my neck and I give her everything I have left.
Afterward she lies against my chest. Her breathing evens out and I look at the ceiling and feel the quiet of a man who has nothing left and doesn't regret a single second of how he lost it.
My phone lights up on the nightstand.
A forwarded message from Holt. No text. Just a screenshot.
I read the header before I've decided to.
FORGED DOCUMENT CIRCULATING. NAMES MAREN SULLIVAN AS PARTY WHO DIVERTED THE BLACKWATER SHIPMENT. SIGNATURE TRACED TO SULLIVAN TRANSPORT AUTHORIZATION FILE, THREE YEARS OLD. ALREADY WITH THREE LOCAL MEDIA CONTACTS.
I set the phone face-down.
She is warm against my side. Her breathing slow and even, her hand slack on my chest.
I look at the ceiling and think about what she's going to wake up to.
Her name on a document she never touched, in a town that watched me walk out of the Elks Lodge on her account two nights ago, attached to a crime built from credentials stolen before the rodeo, before any of us knew to look.
Whoever built this frame built it the same way they built everything else: patient, precise, and a full step ahead.
They picked the right Sullivan. They knew exactly which one would hurt the most.
Her hand is still on my chest. I don't move it.
I look at the ceiling and count what I've burned and what I'm still holding and try to locate the line between protecting her and the next lie I haven't told her yet.
In the dark, that line is getting harder to find.