47. Isla #2
He entered me slow, giving my body every second it needed, the blunt press of him working into that first, tight give of me before I opened further around him.
I gasped, sharp and soft at once, my nails finding his shoulders as he sank another inch deeper, then another, giving me time to adjust around every new inch before he asked for the next one.
My body yielded around him by careful, measured degrees, tight and slick and impossibly full, until he was seated completely inside me and neither of us could manage a single word for the length of one long, shared breath, foreheads touching, nothing hurried left in either of us.
"I love you," he said quietly, like the words still surprised him every time he let them out.
"I love you too. Now move, before I lose my mind."
He laughed, low and warm against my throat, and finally began to move, easy at first, every slow roll of his hips drawing a fresh, helpless sound out of me each time he sank fully into me, saying with his body every true thing he had spent the whole day finally learning to say out loud.
My hands mapped the plane of his back, his scars, the steady muscle beneath, and his mouth found mine again and again like he could not stand even a few seconds of distance between us.
He shifted his angle once, testing, and the broken sound that pulled out of me told him exactly what he had found.
He chased that sound after that, insistent, every slow thrust aimed at drawing it out of me again and again until my whole body had gone taut beneath his, my breath coming ragged against his throat, my hips rising to meet every single one of his like I could not bear even a second of distance between us anymore.
"Faster," I breathed eventually, my nails biting into his shoulder blades. "I am not going to break."
"I know." But he kept the same steady rhythm a moment longer, savoring it, before finally giving me exactly what I asked for, deeper and faster, my whole body rising to meet every measure of him until the two of us moved like something that had never once known how to be separate.
The bed frame found its own quiet rhythm beneath us, and neither of us cared enough to notice it, both too far inside the only thing that mattered to spare attention for anything else.
I felt it building low and inevitable, winding tighter with every deep, deliberate roll of his hips, until there was nothing left in me but the exact shape of him and the sound of my own name breaking apart in his mouth against my throat.
I came apart first, his name tearing loose from me in a sound I did not recognize as my own voice, my whole body clenching tight around him, and he followed only moments later with a low, ragged groan against my skin, my name the last word he managed before he buried his face against my throat and simply held on, both of us breathing hard, tangled together in a silence that felt larger and gentler than any silence I had ever known.
We lay there a long while after, tangled in sheets gone soft with use, my head against his chest and his fingers tracing slow, absent circles along my spine.
"I keep thinking someone is going to knock on this door," I admitted eventually, half laughing at myself. "Old habit."
"Nobody is going to knock. I checked the lock twice on the way in, though I suspect I did it more from ritual than actual concern."
"Old habits."
"Old habits." He pressed a slow kiss to the top of my head. "Though I find I do not mind this particular one nearly as much as I minded the others."
I propped myself up on one elbow to look at him properly, still faintly disbelieving that this was a thing either of us got to have, an ordinary bed and an ordinary morning waiting on the other side of it with nothing dangerous standing between us and either.
"I keep waiting for something to go wrong," I admitted, quiet. "Some old habit I have not managed to unlearn yet. It feels strange, being this happy without bracing for the other half of it."
"I understand that feeling better than most people alive." He pressed a kiss to my temple, unhurried.
"I have spent six years certain that anything good in my life came with a bill attached eventually. I no longer believe that is true, but I will not pretend the habit vanished the moment I decided it should."
"How do we unlearn it, exactly?"
"Slowly, and badly at first, most likely. One ordinary morning at a time, until enough of them stack up that we finally trust it." He tightened his arm around me, calm and certain.
"I intend to give us a great many ordinary mornings to work with."
"I like that plan a great deal."
"I have had six months of practice planning things around you. I am finally getting good at it."
"Do you ever think about that on-call room?"
"Constantly." He said it without hesitation, watching me with an openness that would have been unthinkable from him even a year ago. "I think about how frightened we both were, and how neither of us let that stop us anyway."
"We were terrible at hiding it afterward."
"We were catastrophic at hiding it. That guard knew immediately."
"He absolutely knew."
I laughed, and reached over to press my palm flat against the worst of his scarring, the raised ridge along his ribs that had cost him a brother and six years of his life, feeling him go still under my hand the way he always did, though there was nothing braced about it anymore, nothing waiting for me to flinch.
"Every part of you," I said quietly. "I meant that in the vows. Every single part."
He was quiet for a moment, and then he pressed his mouth against my hair and answered, low, the words meant more for my skin than for the room.
"I know. I no longer have to wonder if that is true."
We lay there a while longer after that, quiet and unhurried, my palm still resting over the steady beat of his heart.
"Steady hands," I said finally.
"Soft eyes," he answered.
Neither of us needed to say anything else.