Chapter 17 #3
Then he sits up, inhumanly fast, and tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear before practically throwing me onto the couch, proving that I’m all but weightless to him.
He buries his face between my legs, hands curling under my thighs to anchor me, and goes at me like he’s starving and this is the last meal on Earth.
It’s nothing like I’ve had in the past: it’s not perfunctory, not something to cross off a list—Saylor eats me out like a worshipper at the altar, like a drowning man clutching the only rope thrown to him.
He nuzzles in, tongue strong against my clit, and licks with slow, deliberate strokes, savoring the taste of me like it’s a new language he’s desperate to pick up.
I fist his hair—his ridiculous, mussed-up hair—and try to steady myself, but he won’t let me.
His hands pin me open, holding me with so much care that I don’t feel exposed; I feel precious.
He hums into me, low and deep, the vibration going straight through the center of me, and I whimper, louder this time, not even caring what the neighbors might overhear.
He slides two fingers inside, curling them just right, and my hips buck forward of their own volition, needing more, chasing that ruthless, dizzying pleasure. My vision goes hot around the edges. He pulls back long enough to look up at me, mouth shiny, eyes feral.
“I love the way you look when you’re about to come. So fucking beautiful,” he praises, voice blown wide open, and then goes right back to it.
He doesn’t let up—fingers relentless, tongue circling, lips sealing around my clit until the world telescopes down to that single, throbbing point.
I shudder apart and then explode, helpless.
The orgasm rips through me so sharp and sudden, I can’t breathe.
I hear myself cry out, maybe his name, maybe just nonsense, as the contractions roll through my legs and spine and stomach until I’m nothing but a shivering, gasping wreck.
He works me through it, licking and sucking, fingers stroking until I’m whimpering from the unbearable, oversensitive aftershocks. Only then does he slow, easing off, kissing my thighs with an adoration that makes my vision blurry.
He looks up, lips swollen, chin slick, and grins like a man who just found religion before he thrusts into me, sliding inside so deep I arch back and accept my fate.
The pleasure swallows me whole; I’m no match.
I simply float as Saylor has his way with me.
There’s no teasing, no slow build—just raw, glorious fucking, his mouth pressed to mine, his hands under my ass, pulling me up to meet every slam of his hips.
The couch is squeaking, the blankets sliding off, but I don’t care.
He can tear the world apart if it means I get to come with him again.
Eventually, he’s gasping, “Celeste, I’m gonna—” and I pull him tighter, wanting to feel it, all of it. He bucks up, hard, then pulls out at the last second, hot pulses striping my stomach, up to my breasts.
He doesn’t move. Just stands over me, hands braced on the couch cushions, head bowed, brow furrowed.
Sweat drips from his chest, landing on my skin and mingling with the white stripes painting me from navel to sternum.
I half expect him to collapse, but he just hovers, staring down at the mess he’s made of me with a kind of reverence.
Not pride, not embarrassment—something rawer, almost holy.
“Sorry,” he says, voice shredded. “I didn’t know if you were on anything, and I didn’t want to risk—”
I laugh, a little breathless, and run my pinky through the sticky trail on my stomach. “Saylor, I’m thirty-eight. I’m on everything.” I swipe a glob up, wipe it idly across my thigh. “You can finish wherever you want.”
His gaze flicks up to mine, and for a moment he looks surprised. Then pleased. “Yeah? In you?”
“Yes.”
“In your mouth?”
I pause, considering. “Sure.” I’ve never done that for any man, but I don’t tell him. I tuck the secret away, a private dare.
But the next thing I know, he’s dipping his finger into the pearl on my belly, swiping it up, and holding it to my lips.
His eyes glint with mischief, but there’s an undercurrent of challenge—will I call his bluff?
I part my lips and he slides his finger in.
I taste him, salty and alien and strangely electric.
He watches, transfixed, as I suck his finger clean, the taste not unpleasant—just strange, like I’m sampling a new cuisine for the first time and trying to place the notes.
He grins, triumphant, and wipes the rest off my stomach with a wet paper towel he fetches from the kitchen.
He flops onto his back next to me, which only a couch of this size would allow.
Both of us face the ceiling, arms and legs splayed like crime scene outlines.
The movie’s long since rolled into credits and then into the algorithmic silence that comes when all the suggested content has been exhausted. He’s first to break the hush.
He pulls me on top of him, my naked body becoming his blanket. “Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“You okay?”
“I’m so far past okay I might need to invent new vocabulary.”
He grins. Presses his forehead to mine. I reach between us, giving his dick a gentle stroke of appreciation and I’m shocked to see he’s still hard. Not mildly attentive. Aggressively alert. I know he came…I tasted.
“Did you not get enough?” I ask, genuinely concerned.
“Enough of you? Never.” He chuckles as I continue to stroke his length, more out of sheer wonder than anything else. He adds, nonchalant, “This is kind of my superpower.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” I balk.
“Yeah, and how would that conversation go, Celeste? My super erections are on a need-to-know basis.”
Lucky. Fucking. Me.
I smile at him. “Let’s do it again.”
When he enters me, I close my eyes and make a sound that comes from somewhere behind my lungs.
Somewhere underneath my ribs where I keep the things I’ve never said out loud.
Not a performance. An arrival. The sound of a body that spent twenty years believing it was broken discovering it was only misassembled, and the right hands just put everything back where it belongs.
We find our rhythm together again. It’s not choreographed.
It’s imperfect in places, clumsy in others, and infinitely better for every stumble because the stumbles are honest. I wrap my legs around him and his forehead drops to my shoulder and we breathe together in the amber light while the city hums forty-some floors below, a machine that has no idea what’s happening up here and wouldn’t care if it did.
The second time is slow and I cry at the end.
Not from sadness. From the specific overwhelm of a body reclaiming something it believed was lost. He kisses the tears without comment, which is exactly right.
No questions. No concern. Just acknowledgment.
Just his mouth on my wet cheek saying: I see this. It’s okay. Keep going.
The third time is past midnight. We’ve migrated to my actual bed by then, stumbling through the hallway around eleven, wine-cooler-dizzy and laughing at nothing and bumping into walls because neither of us is willing to stop kissing long enough to navigate properly.
It’s faster. Hungrier. My teeth on his shoulder.
His hands knotted in my hair. The urgent, graceless collision of two people who’ve stopped negotiating and started claiming.
I push him onto his back and ride him and his hands grip my hips and his eyes don’t leave mine and I have never in my life felt more powerful and more vulnerable simultaneously. Both at once. Both essential.
I shut my eyes for what feels like mere minutes before gray light begins to press against the windows.
Saylor’s already awake. He traces the length of my spine with his fingertips.
I don’t know if this woke me, or he’s doing this to specifically wake me.
But I shimmy backward, locking my ass into his hips, enjoying being the little spoon.
We lie still in the wreckage. Sheets still tangled into modern art.
Skyline eventually going gold through the windows as the city wakes up.
His chest rises and falls behind my back in a rhythm steady enough to set a clock by.
My fingers trace idle shapes on his arm that’s draped over my middle, holding me close.
His other hand moves through my hair in long, unhurried passes, finding tangles and working through them with a gentleness that belongs in another century.
“I’ve been thinking about the nursery,” I say.
I feel his attentiveness that sharpens without stiffening. Like he’s straightening up to pay attention to an important conversation. “What about?”
“The sage green is perfect. You have a genuinely good eye for color.”
“Is that surprising?”
“Yes. Because you own three T-shirts and one pair of presentable jeans. I say this with love, but the bar for your aesthetic judgment was not high.”
He lays flat on his back, pulling me with him. I shift to my side, head held in one hand, my fingers playing notes onto his bare chest.
“But the color works. I want to keep it. And I want to add a proper rocking chair. Something with a wider seat, so I could fall asleep in it if I needed to, because everything I’ve read says the first three months are essentially a survival test dressed up as a bonding experience and nobody sleeps in their actual bed. ”
He laughs. Low, rumbly. It vibrates through his sternum.
“What else have you been reading?”
More than I should admit. Eleven tabs about infants are open on my phone at any given time.
I’ve been reading about feeding schedules and sleep regression and something called the fourth trimester, which sounds invented but is apparently a legitimate developmental stage that nobody warns you about until you’re already in it.