4. Josie
JOSIE
Ican’t settle.
We went to bed at eleven and it’s midnight now and I’m lying here listening to Levi breathe, and my whole body’s humming like a plucked string. Nerves, I tell myself. The party. The plan. The line I keep rehearsing. The poppy seed. Pick one, there’s plenty.
There’s something else down under my ribs too, something small and nameless that’s been sitting there since Dot’s text, but I don’t look at it.
I don’t even know it’s there to look at.
All I know is I need him closer than he is, which is ridiculous, because he’s eight inches away, one big arm flung over his face, warm as a woodstove the way he always runs.
I need his hands on me. I need—proof, of something, I don’t know what, and I’m not going to lie here and interrogate it.
So I go get it.
I climb over him in the dark, knees on either side of his hips, and he wakes up the way he always wakes up when I do this—instantly, hands first. Hands finding my hips before his eyes are even open, big hot palms sliding up under the hem of his own T-shirt that I sleep in, and I feel his whole chest rise under me on one long breath.
“Well, hey,” he says, voice all gravel.
“Hi.” I put my mouth on his jaw. His scruff scrapes my lips, three days past a shave, and I drag my mouth down to his neck where he’s soft and warm and I feel the sound he makes more than I hear it.
“Somethin’ on your mind?” His hands tighten on my hips, fingers digging in just enough, and there it is already, that low pull in my belly, that falling-open feeling.
“You,” I say against his throat. “Just you.”
“Good answer.” He rolls his hips up under me, once, slow. “C’mere.”
He hauls me down and kisses me like it’s the middle of the day, no sleep in it at all, one hand fisting up into my hair.
I’m already pulling at the T-shirt, and he sits up with me in his lap and strips it off me in one motion, and the June night air hits my skin for half a second before his mouth does.
“God, look at you.” He says it into my collarbone, hands running up my back, my sides, everywhere, greedy.
“Three years and I still can’t—“ He doesn’t finish it.
Puts his mouth on my breast instead, and I stop caring what the end of that sentence was, my head dropping back, fingers in his hair, gasping up at the dark ceiling.
I love his hands. I think about his hands at completely inappropriate times—at the bank, at Dot’s, in line at the IGA.
Big and rough and sure, and he touches me like I’m the only thing he’s ever been careful with in a life full of engines and gravel, right up until I don’t want careful anymore, and he always knows the exact minute I stop wanting careful.
“Levi.” I’m pulling at his boxers, graceless, impatient. “Off.”
“Bossy,” he says, grinning against my sternum, but he lifts me off him and shoves them down, and then his hands are back and he’s laying me down into the warm middle of the bed, settling that whole big frame over me, and the weight of him—God, the weight of him.
Every time. He props on one forearm and slides his other hand slow down my belly and into my underwear and finds me soaking, and the sound he makes is filthy and reverent at the same time.
“That all for me?”
“No, it’s for the other guy who lives here.” It comes out breathless, doesn’t land like a joke, and his fingers are already moving, slow and exactly right, and my hips are moving with them, no dignity to it at all.
“Smart mouth.” Two fingers, curling deep, thumb still working my clit, and I grab his wrist—not to stop him, just to hold on. “This pussy’s so wet for me,” he says, low, watching my face come apart. “There she is. Right there, baby.”
“Levi—“
“Nope. Watching this.” And he does—props up on his elbow and watches me with those dark shop-focus eyes while his hand works slow and merciless, watches every twitch and gasp like he’s diagnosing something, thumb circling right over my clit exactly where I need it and then wandering off exactly when I need it not to, until I’m arching up off the mattress chasing his hand and swearing at him in a whisper, and he grins in the dark like the smug enormous bastard he is. “Ask nice.”
“I will fucking end you.”
“That’s not nice.” But his mouth comes down to my breast again and his hand stops teasing and goes serious, and the whole room tilts.
He works me right up to the ragged edge of it, until my thighs are shaking around his hand and I’m making sounds into his shoulder I’d deny in daylight—and then I shove at his chest because I don’t want it like this, not tonight.
“Inside me,” I get out. “Now. Please.”
He drags my underwear off, settles between my thighs. God, the size of his cock lined up there always gets me for a second—has to, my whole body has to open up and make room for all of it, for him.
He pushes in. One long slow thick stroke, and I feel every inch of it arrive—the stretch first, that bright edge of too much, then the slick give of my own body opening around him, easing, letting him all the way home. It punches the air clean out of both of us.
He stills there, buried, forehead dropped to mine, both of us breathing like we ran here.
“Fuck. Jo.” Just my name, wrecked out of him.
“Move,” I whisper, and he moves.
It builds slow and then it doesn’t—deep rolling strokes that turn hard and jarring when I claw at his back and tell him more, wet and easy now, no resistance left anywhere in me.
The headboard starts knocking its old rhythm into the wall, his hand sliding under my hips to tilt me up so every stroke drags exactly where I need it, and I can feel exactly how deep he’s getting with every single one.
“Turn over.” It comes out of him rough, an order, and my body’s moving before my brain votes—that’s what three years does, his voice hits my spine before it hits my ears.
He pulls out of me and I feel the loss of it everywhere at once, empty and aching. He flips me like I weigh nothing—because to him I don’t, not really, not next to all that—hauls my hips up with both hands.
Then he’s pushing back into me from behind, and this angle takes him deeper than any other, deep enough that I shout into the pillow, stretched full around him in a way that always takes a second for my body to catch up to, slick and swollen and right on the edge of too much.
“Louder,” he says. “Nobody out here but the cows, baby. Let me hear you, goddamn it. Tell me how my cock feels.”
And I do—he’s got one hand splayed between my shoulder blades and the other gripping my hip hard enough to leave prints, driving into me steady and mean and perfect, and I’m saying his name into the pillow, then not into the pillow, then saying things that aren’t his name at all, filthy things, beg-shaped things.
“Yeah?” His voice comes out low and dark right against my ear, hips never breaking rhythm. “Like that?”
“Yes—God, yes, right there?—“
“Fuck. Just like that.” He drives in harder on the last word and my whole body jolts up the mattress.
“Whose is it, Jo?” His hand tightens on my hip, hard enough to bruise. “Say it.”
“Yours.” It comes out wrecked, half into the pillow. “It’s yours. I’d say it in front of a judge.”
And then I break—first time, no warning. It’s the size of him this deep from this angle, his hand knowing exactly what to do with my clit while he does it, and my whole body locks up around his cock, clenching so hard I can feel my own pulse everywhere he’s touching me.
I’m sobbing his name into the pillow, shaking, and he doesn’t stop, doesn’t even slow down—just keeps driving into me, slick and relentless, fucking me straight through it like he’s got no intention of letting either of us catch a breath.
“One’s not enough tonight.” His arm hooks around me and he hauls me up before I’ve even finished shaking, turns me under him again.
“Need to see your face for the next one.” And he folds back into me face to face, an arm under my knee, opening me deeper, and I’m loud now, fully loud, the Hendersons’ dog is going to start barking three yards over and I could not care less.
And then it shifts—something shifts. He gets both arms around me, gathers me up off the mattress against his chest, still moving, holding me so tight it’s almost too tight, his face buried in my neck.
“I need you,” he says into my skin, low and rough and half-desperate, hips never stopping. “I need this. Josie. Don’t ever—“ His voice cracks off the end of it, and his arms cinch tighter, and he doesn’t finish.
Don’t ever what?
But his thumb finds my clit right then, right where I’m aching, and the question dissolves—it just reads as want, it reads as him wanting me so much it’s got teeth, and God help me I love it.
“I’m yours,” I say against his ear, my mouth right there, his stubble scraping my lips. “I’m yours. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Cum for me, Jo.” He growls it against my ear, and he groans like something breaking loose and drives into me harder.
This one doesn’t just break—it flattens me. Bigger than the first by a mile, some whole-body thing that starts behind my ribs and goes off outward, my whole body clenching around him in one long wave.
I come with my face pressed into his neck, shaking so hard my teeth click, and it rolls through me so long and so deep my vision goes white at the edges and stays that way.
I feel him follow me two strokes later—feel the exact second he lets go, feel him pulse inside me, thick and hot, his whole big body shuddering over mine, my name coming out of him wrecked and quiet like a secret.
After, we lie tangled, sweat cooling, his heart slamming under my ear and slowing, slowing. He’s drawing circles on my bare shoulder with one rough thumb. The dark is soft and the house is quiet and my body is heavy and golden all the way through.
I press my face into his neck, half asleep already, and think: whatever’s coming—the party, the baby, all of it, the whole huge rest of it—we can survive anything.
I fall asleep before I get anywhere near wondering why surviving was the word I reached for.