Epilogue - Part 2
KNOX
I carry her to the bedroom like she weighs nothing at all, lay her back against the pillows, and settle over her with my weight braced on my forearms. This is different.
Slower. I want her face this time, want to watch, want to see her when it happens instead of just feeling it happen underneath me.
"Look at me," I say, sinking into her by careful degrees, both of us going quiet at the first perfect inch of it.
She looks at me. Hazel eyes, dark and locked on mine, nowhere close to careful.
"Mine." Not a question. My hips find a rhythm that has her gripping my shoulders. "Say it back."
"Yours." Her nails drag down my back. "Only yours."
I shift my angle and find the exact place that makes her whole body arch off the mattress.
"Right there, baby." I watch her face for every reaction, satisfied, unhurried. "Don't hide it from me. Let me see it."
Something in me finally lets go, some old fear I've been carrying since before I knew her name, and I drive into her harder, both of us chasing something we already know we're going to catch.
I talk the whole time, filth and truth tangled together in the same rough voice. When she comes apart this time, it's with my eyes locked on hers the entire way through, watching every second of it. I follow her a breath later with her name on my mouth.
I don't stay soft for long. My body still hasn't figured out the concept of finished. Not around her, not ever.
She's curled against my chest, boneless, tracing one of my tattoos the way she's done a hundred times, when she feels it. She lifts her head.
"Seriously? Again?"
"I'm always hard for you." A fact I'm reporting, easy and unbothered, though it costs me more than she knows to have kept it quiet for as long as I did. "You should know that by now."
"I do know it." I feel her mouth curve against my chest. "I'm just enjoying the research."
I don't answer right away. I reach instead for the nightstand, and I feel my own face change into something that has nothing to do with round two.
"I want to try something," I say. "Something I haven't asked for."
She goes quiet, watching me.
"I've thought about it for a while." My thumb traces slow along her hip. "Having all of you. Every part."
Understanding moves across her face. "You want to be the only one."
"I already am the only one." Flat. No hedge in it anywhere. "I want to be the only one there too."
I reach for the small bottle of lube from the nightstand, methodical. I came prepared because I'd already decided this was happening before she had.
"Yes," she says, before I can ask.
Something in my chest goes dark and grateful. I guide her instead of rushing her, a hand at her hip turning her onto her stomach, and I stack the pillows beneath her, angling her hips up until she's exactly where I want her. Comfortable. Open. Mine.
I find her ass first, both palms cupping, kneading, slow enough that it's not about anything except how much I love the shape of her under my hands.
"You have no idea what you do to me," I tell her, low, almost reverent. "Every single time."
I work one finger in first, slick and careful, and she moans into the pillow. A sound I feel land somewhere low in my own spine. I don't rush that either. I work her open with a patience that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with getting this exactly right.
The condom. The quiet tear of foil. I roll it on and reach for the bottle again, warming more lube between my fingers before I touch her, taking my time working it around her, over her, making sure there's nothing but slick where I'm about to go.
I coat the condom the same way, thorough, unhurried, because there's no such thing as too much here.
Only then do my hands go back to her hips, steady, grounding.
I can't see her face like this. I feel myself hesitate at the first blunt press of myself against her, feel myself wait, one hand smoothing slow up her spine, reading her body since I can't read her expression.
"Breathe for me," I say.
She does. I push in slow, an inch at a time, feeling every single one of them. A stretch I know borders on too much until it isn't, until her body opens for me the way it's opened for no one else. I stop when she tenses. Wait. Feel her relax under my palm and only then press forward again.
"Fuck, you're so tight." I sound wrecked even to my own ears. "Maren."
"More," she gasps into the pillow. "I need more, don't stop—"
I give her more. Inch by inch until I'm seated fully inside her, both of us frozen there for one long breath. The fullness of it, the sheer intensity of having every part of her, punches something out of me that isn't even a word.
"Okay?" Rough. I check, even now, even like this.
"More than okay." She pushes back against me, testing, and I groan at the feel of it. "Move. Please."
I move.
I start slow, rolls of my hips that have her gripping the pillow beneath her, and then something in both of us stops asking permission, chasing something too intense to stop. My hand finds her hair. Not pulling, just holding, and every stroke drags a sound out of her that she doesn't try to muffle.
"I'm going to cum," she gasps, fast, unrelenting, the words torn out of her before she's decided to say them. "Knox, I'm going to cum—"
"Let go." Rough, urgent, my hips never breaking rhythm. "I've got you. Let go."
She does. It rips out of her violent and sudden, and I feel the exact moment it hits, her whole body shaking around me. I follow almost instantly, a broken sound against her spine, both of us undone far faster than either of us expected.
I collapse over her carefully, most of my weight braced on my forearms, and press my mouth between her shoulder blades.
"Christ," I breathe.
"Yeah," she manages. "That.”
Afterward we lie tangled together, both of us wrecked in the good way, sheets kicked into a ruin around us. Her head is on my chest, my fingers tracing slow patterns down her spine.
She laughs at something, I don't even know what, some sharp thing she says at my expense. I laugh too, and then I stop laughing and just look at her. Something about her face still catches me off guard even now.
"What?" she asks.
"Nothing." I tuck her hair back. "I just like looking at you."
"You've had plenty of time to get used to it."
"I don't want to get used to it." My thumb traces her jaw. "I want it to keep feeling exactly like this."
She doesn't have a smart answer for that. She kisses me instead, and I stop keeping track of anything except the shape of her mouth.
The roast turns out perfect anyway by the time we make it back to the kitchen, resting exactly as long as it did.
We sit down at the table like actual adults for once, half-dressed and unbothered by it, while the last grey light drains out of the valley and the wind picks up hard enough to rattle the windows over the sink.
Afterward I build the fire up in the great room and put on Chris Stapleton, the same worn-in, soulful sound I always reach for when the day's finally over, Tennessee Whiskey drifting low through the house the way it has since a truck cab on a July drive that feels like a different lifetime now.
We end up on the couch with a blanket over both of us, her back against my chest, my arms around her, the snow still working itself into a fury against the windows.
She tips her head back and kisses me, easy at first, and then anything but easy, because apparently there's no version of me that doesn't come undone within about ten seconds of her deciding to.
I can feel myself getting hard again beneath her, and she presses down against me, and I groan against her mouth, rough and unguarded.
Six months in and it hasn't settled once. Some part of me kept waiting for the wanting to soften into something calmer, the way it's supposed to. Instead it just gets sharper, a low current running under every ordinary minute of every ordinary day, and I've stopped expecting it to do anything else.
"Again," I say against her mouth, her own word from a decade of firsts thrown back at her one more time.
My phone rings.
I curse against her throat, low and creative, and she laughs even as she feels me go tense underneath her, the switch flipping the way it always does. I reach past her for the phone on the side table without letting her off my lap.
I answer with one word, listen, and feel my whole posture change, small and immediate.
"Tell Holt to handle it," I say. "The usual way."
I hang up. Set the phone face-down on the cushion beside us and look back at her like the interruption never happened, one hand still warm against her hip.
"Problem?" she asks.
"Not anymore."
She doesn't ask what the usual way means.
She already knows, the same way she's known since a hallway outside my father's study and a west pasture that doesn't officially exist. She chose this life with her eyes open.
I watch her choose it again, every single day, and tonight is no different.
She settles back against my chest instead, her palm finding my heartbeat and slowing it.
"You're staring," she says.
"I'm allowed."
"You're always staring."
"You're always worth it."
I feel her go soft against me at that, the same place everything I say seems to land lately. I close my eyes and let the fire and the music and her heartbeat be the only things that matter for one more minute.
Headlights sweep across the window.
I'm up before the engine cuts, some old instinct still wired tight under all this ease. She gets up and follows me to the door because she's learned that when I move like that, she moves too.
Holt comes up the porch steps two at a time, a folder under one arm, snow blowing sideways behind him hard enough that I can barely make out his truck at the end of the drive.
He looks between the two of us, at her bare feet and my untucked shirt, and something almost like an apology crosses his face before he decides not to bother with it.
"Sorry," he says. "Couldn't wait until morning."