37. Josie
JOSIE
His hands find my face first, later, in our own dark kitchen—both of them, rough and warm and careful, tilting me up to be kissed like something he’s got no right to?—
and for half a breath I’m back in the gravel lot.
It just comes, uninvited, quick as a slammed door: cold car metal at my back, my teeth chattering on a June night, those same two hands hanging useless at his sides while everything burned down between us—the fear arrives fully loaded, my body bracing against his kitchen counter the exact way it braced against my car door, wait, check, protect?—
—and then his thumb moves. That’s all. His thumb strokes once along my cheekbone, patient, present, asking, and the lot lets go of me.
Because these aren’t those hands. Same hands.
Not those hands. These are the hands that shook holding a mic in front of a hundred people two hours ago, that paid full price in the only room that’s ever mattered to him, and the memory rises and washes through and drains out, and what’s left standing in my kitchen is just us.
I said yes into that roaring room—said it once, and had to say it again louder because the roaring, Dot sobbing into her apron, Tucker upending a whole table getting to us, Reyes bellowing something in Spanish I’m going to make him translate someday—and now the door’s shut on all of it, and it’s quiet, and I get to say it the private way.
“Hi,” I whisper.
“Hi,” he says, wrecked. “So. That went?—“
“Don’t you dare debrief it.”
“I was gonna say okay. That went okay.” And his mouth twitches, and mine does, and then we’re both laughing in the dark kitchen with his hands still on my face, shaky, helpless, hiccuping laughter with a whole summer of pressure behind it, the kind you can’t schedule and can’t fake, and somewhere in the middle of it his forehead comes down to mine and the laugh runs out of both of us at the same time and turns into breathing.
And I pull him down to me by the collar of that black shirt and this time nothing stops it—no horn, no party, no fear—and he kisses me slow and deep and shaking a little, and I feel it go through my whole body like current finding a path it’s been denied for a month, and I want him so bad it’s got no undertow at all anymore.
That’s the miracle. I keep checking underneath the want, old habit, hand into the dark of it feeling for the drop—and there’s just floor. Just want, all the way down.
“Bed,” I say against his mouth. “Now.”
He picks me up. Actually picks me up, both hands under my thighs, my legs going around him, laughing into his neck as he carries me down the hall of our house like the trouble dress night finally coming home to roost, and he lays me down on our bed in the dark and stands there one second looking at me—that fish-tank look, that scared-and-staying look?—
“Come here,” I say, and he comes.
We take it apart slow. The green dress—the other one, tonight’s—he unzips like it’s a ceremony, mouth following the zipper down my spine vertebra by vertebra till I’m shivering and gripping the footboard, and when it pools at my feet he just stands there a second, looking, one knuckle trailing down my arm, and says, “Been three years and I still don’t know what you’re doing with me,” and I tell him to get his shirt off before I cry, and he laughs.
And I get it open button by button with hands that only shake the good way now—and under it he’s warm and solid and scarred in all the places I’ve mapped a thousand times, the frostbite mark at his collarbone, the burn on his forearm from the exhaust in year two, this whole atlas of a man I know by heart and get to keep.
He walks me backward to the bed slow, kissing me the whole way, and lays me down into the middle of it like I’m something that matters, and follows me down.
And when we’re skin to skin at last, the whole warm length of him over me, familiar as home and new as anything, he braces up on his forearms and looks at me—really looks, taking his time about it, thumb brushing my cheekbone, my jaw, like a man relearning a road he’s driven all his life—and says, rough:
“Tell me what you want. Tonight you’re fucking driving. Every inch of it.”
“I want your mouth on me first. Then I want your cock so deep I can’t walk right tomorrow.
I want you to make me say your name loud enough the whole street hears it.
” I say it out loud, filthy and specific, the things I’ve been not-letting-myself-want for a month—and I watch it hit him, watch this big wrecked grateful man take orders like they’re benedictions, yes ma’am against my throat, anything else?
like a man being handed back his whole vocation—and his eyes go dark and he does every one of them.
His mouth at my breasts until I’m arching off the bed.
His hand working my clit slow and deep while he watches my face like the screen at the clinic, like a wonder, two fingers curling inside me exactly right until I’m pulling his hair and gasping—and when I’m right at the edge he doesn’t pull back, doesn’t tease, not tonight—“Cum for me, baby, fuck, let me see it”—and I break the first time just like that, on his hand, loud, no neighbors close enough to care and I wouldn’t care if they were.
He works me through it and then gentles, kisses my temple, my cheekbone, the corner of my mouth.
“There she is,” he murmurs against my skin. “God, I missed that. Missed you.”
I come back down in pieces, and when I open my eyes he’s watching me with a look that’s half wrecked and half unbearably smug, and I inform him breathlessly that he can wipe that expression off his face.
“Can’t,” he says. “It’s permanent now. You signed off on it in front of the whole town.”
And I’m laughing—laughing, in bed, mid-everything, the way we used to, the thing I was most scared we’d lost—when the laugh turns back into want mid-breath.
“Inside me,” I get out, still shaking. “I want—all of it, I want you?—“
He settles between my thighs—big enough over me that the lamp light disappears behind his shoulders. God, the size of this man. I still have to breathe through the first inch of him every single time, that same bright stretch, my body opening up around him inch by slick inch.
He pushes home in one slow deep stroke, all the way, and we both make a sound like grief and gratitude at once. I feel every inch of him arrive, feel myself close around him, feel how full is too small a word for it.
Then he stills—buried full, stretched full, forehead to mine, both of us breathing?—
“I love you,” he says. Right there. Middle of it, unprompted, plain. “Gonna say it so much you get sick of it.”
“Prove it,” I whisper, and he laughs, low and dark, and moves.
And it’s different. I’d braced for it to be complicated—for ghosts in the bed, for checking—and instead it’s just deeper, everything deeper, slow rolling strokes with his eyes open on mine, my heels in the small of his back pulling him in, the headboard finding its old rhythm.
“Been thinking about this every night on that fold-out.” His voice is wrecked at my ear, hips still moving, slow and deep. “Every damn night. What you feel like. What you sound like.”
“Levi—“
“Still mine.” He says it low, mouth at my jaw, hips rolling into me on the word. “Still mine, right here.”
“Up.” He pulls out of me somewhere in the endless middle of it, and hauls me over him as he rolls, settling me astride.
His hands span my hips—damn near meeting around them, and the size difference between us never stops doing something to me, never has, three years in and it still knocks the breath clean out of me.
“Wanna watch you take my cock.” His voice is wrecked. “Wanna see all of you.”
I sink down onto him slow, having to take him inch by inch the way I always do, feeling every inch of the stretch as I go, slick and open and shaking with how much of him there still is to take. Both of us groan at the new depth of it.
His eyes move over me in the lamp light like the first time and the thousandth time at once. My hands brace on his chest, his thumb finds my clit right where we’re joined, and I ride him the way I want, greedy, setting my own pace.
“That’s it.” His teeth are gritted, jaw tight, eyes locked on where we’re joined. “Take my cock. Fuck, look at you.”
“Levi—I’m?—“
“My girl.” His hips punch up to meet me. “Cum on it again.”
And I do—I come again like that, riding him, his name breaking out of me, and he holds himself back through the whole long shudder of it with his jaw clenched and his fingers printing my hips, because he’s not done, because tonight he’s paying a whole summer of back wages and he’s told me so.
Then he sits up under me, chest to chest, arms wrapping me in whole, and we rock like that—deep and slow and face to face, my arms around his neck, sweat-slick, nothing hidden anywhere—and the build goes on and on, no hurry, no proving, until I’m clawing at his shoulders and telling him harder and he lays me back down and gives it to me, hips snapping now, the room gone loud with us?—
—and with his mouth against my ear, right as I start to crest, he says it:
“Forever, Jo. You hear me? This—“ deep, hard, holding—“is what forever feels like. I ain’t scared of it anymore.”
And whatever small guarded piece of me was still standing watch in some back room of my chest, arms crossed, waiting for a shoe, for weather, for the drop—it hears him, and it looks around one last time, and it goes off duty.
I come apart with his name in my mouth and tears sliding sideways into the pillow and my whole body wrapped around his like a vow, and it rolls through me so long and so deep that the edges of everything go soft and white—and he follows me down, shuddering, groaning my name into my neck like a man finally, finally home.