CHAPTER NINE
Tala
I wake in Nerys's suite with my face against her shoulder and my leg hooked over her hip and the specific drowsy awareness that the woman beneath me is already conscious and has been watching me sleep.
"How long have you been awake?" My voice is rough. Dawn light through the windows turns the suite gray-gold.
"Twenty minutes."
"And you've been doing what, exactly?"
"Observing."
"Observing what?"
"The way you sleep. You move constantly. You adjusted position four times without waking. You talk occasionally — nothing intelligible. And you have a habit of pressing your face into the nearest surface as if you're trying to burrow through it."
"Romantic."
"Accurate."
I shift. Prop myself on one elbow. She's lying beneath me with her dark auburn hair spread on the pillow and the silver streak catching the early light like a vein of quartz in granite.
Her face is unguarded in a way she would never permit in public — softer around the mouth, the permanent analytical line between her brows smoothed out by whatever the sleep version of Nerys Quillan looks like.
She looks younger when she's not strategizing.
Not young — she's forty-four, and the lines around her eyes and the set of her jaw belong to a woman who has lived through things that aged her beyond simple chronology.
But the severity is absent, and without it, she's not intimidating. She's beautiful.
I reach for her. My hand slides under the sheet to her hip, my thumb tracing the bone, my fingers curving around to the warm skin of her lower back. I pull myself closer. Press my body against hers — my chest to her ribs, my thigh between her legs.
"We have ninety minutes before I need to be at the range."
"I know." She looks at me with an expression that makes my pulse skip. "That's enough."
"Not the way I want it."
I roll on top of her. She lets me — my weight settling across her hips, my hands on her shoulders. I pin her wrists against the pillow, testing, playing, discovering what it feels like to hold down a woman who is six inches taller and entirely capable of reversing the position.
Her wrists are narrow in my grip. The tendons shift beneath my fingers. She watches me with calm curiosity, the way she watches me address a ball — cataloguing, assessing, waiting to see what I'll do with the position I've taken.
I grind down. Slowly. Rolling my hips against hers.
She's wearing only the gray T-shirt and underwear, and I'm wearing nothing — I stripped before bed and she pulled me against her back and held me there until I fell asleep — and the friction of cotton against my bare skin sends a line of heat from my core to the back of my skull.
She's responding. I can feel it — the slight lift of her hips, the tension in her thighs, the breath that deepens when I press harder.
I love the geometry of this. My compact body on top of her long one.
My thighs bracketing her narrow hips. The fact that she extends past me in every direction and I'm still the one pressing her into the mattress.
I lean down. Kiss her jaw. Her neck. The soft skin behind her ear.
She reverses me.
I don't see it happen. One moment I'm on top, mouth on her throat, hands on her wrists. The next, the world tilts — leverage, a smooth rotation of her hips, her long legs hooking under mine — and I'm on my back looking up at her.
Six inches of difference. Her face above mine. Her hair falling forward, auburn and silver framing the gray-green eyes that are looking down at me with something that is not amusement and not authority and is probably both.
"This morning," she says, "you wait."
"For how long?"
"Until I say."
She sits up. Straddles me. Pulls the T-shirt over her head in a single motion and drops it off the side of the bed.
In the gray Singapore dawn, her body is a study in contrasts — the lean muscle and the soft skin, the contour-line tattoo dark against her ribs, the small breasts and the long torso and the silver streak falling against her bare shoulder.
She looks down at me the way she looks at a course she's spent three days mapping. Like she knows every contour. Like she's already decided the optimal path and is about to execute it.
Her mouth starts at my forehead. A kiss between my brows. Then my temple. My cheekbone. The scar on my lower lip — she traces it with her tongue and my back arches involuntarily.
She moves down. Throat. Collarbones. The sampaguita tattoo. She spends time here — tracing the petals with the tip of her tongue, and the sensation of being read like topography makes my skin prickle into goosebumps despite the humidity.
She reaches my breasts. Takes one nipple into her mouth — tongue flat, then circling, then the edge of her teeth. My hands fly to her hair.
She catches them. Pins them above my head. One of her hands is large enough to hold both of my wrists against the pillow.
"Hands stay here."
"That's not—"
"Tala." My name in the voice she uses before a difficult shot. Low, certain, carrying the specific weight of a woman who is about to give you information that will change the outcome. "You spent all night touching me. This morning is mine. Your hands stay where I put them."
I leave my hands above my head. Not because I'm obedient. Because the instruction, delivered in that voice, in this light, from this woman, has short-circuited the part of my brain that argues.
She resumes. My breasts. My ribs. My stomach — she presses her mouth to the hollow beside my hipbone and her breath is hot against skin that is increasingly sensitive to everything.
She moves to my inner thigh and kisses the crease where leg meets torso, and I feel the wetness between my legs responding to proximity, to anticipation, to the specific torture of a mouth that is near but not where I need it.
"Nerys—"
"Patience."
"I don't have—"
"You do." She lifts her head. Looks at me from between my thighs.
Her expression is calm and focused and her eyes are very dark.
"You proved it on the sixteenth hole at Kiawah.
You aimed center-green when everything in you wanted to attack the pin.
You waited for the wind to do the work." She presses her mouth to my inner thigh again. "Wait for me."
She brings me to the edge.
The first time, she uses her tongue — long, slow strokes that build pressure in a steady rhythm until I can feel the orgasm assembling at the base of my spine like a wave gathering offshore.
My thighs begin to shake. My breathing becomes rhythmic and desperate.
I'm close — so close that the distance between where I am and where I need to be feels like inches rather than miles.
She stops. Lifts her head. Moves up my body and presses her mouth to my throat and holds me.
"Breathe." Her hand strokes my hair. "You're doing so well. I know this is hard."
"It's not hard, it's — I was right there—"
"I know. You'll be there again. Stay with me."
She waits until my breathing stabilizes. Until the urgency retreats from desperate to manageable. Then she goes back down.
The second time, she adds her fingers — two, sliding into me while her tongue resumes its slow pressure, and the combination is so precise and so devastating that my hips buck off the mattress and my hands leave the pillow and grab the headboard because I need something to hold that isn't her hair.
She builds me again. The wave gathers. My body tightens around her fingers. I can feel every individual nerve ending she's stimulating — her tongue on my clit, her fingers curving inside me, her free hand pressing my hip flat against the bed.
She stops. Withdraws. Moves up and holds me.
"Nerys, please, I can't—"
"You can. You're almost there. One more."
She kisses my forehead. My closed eyes. The corner of my mouth. Her hand moves through my hair with the steady rhythm of a woman who is in no hurry despite the fact that the person beneath her is vibrating with need.
"You're beautiful like this," she says against my ear. "When you're not performing. When you're not chasing. When you're just here, wanting something and trusting me to give it to you."
The third time, she doesn't stop.
Her fingers press into me — two, curved forward, finding the spot that makes my vision white out around the edges.
Her thumb settles on my clit and circles in slow, even pressure.
Her mouth moves to my breast, tongue on the nipple, and every point of contact becomes part of a single coordinated system — her hands, her mouth, her body anchoring mine against the mattress.
The orgasm builds. She doesn't retreat. She stays with it — adjusting speed, adjusting pressure, reading my body the way she reads a green, making micro-corrections based on the sounds I'm making and the way my hips are moving and the rhythm of my breathing.
I'm going to come. I can feel it arriving — not the quick, functional orgasms I've been having for years, the ones I chase and catch and dispose of like completed tasks.
This is something else. Something with depth and weight and the specific quality of a wave that's been gathering across open ocean and has finally found the shore.
"Please," I say.
The word leaves my mouth and I hear it and I don't recognize my own voice.
I sound young. Unarmored. Desperate in a way that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the fact that this woman has dismantled me three times in twenty minutes and I am lying beneath her asking for mercy.
I have never said please during sex. Not sincerely. Not as anything other than a performative addition to the dirty-talk rotation. Not like this — stripped bare, meant absolutely, directed at a woman whose patience has turned me into someone I don't know how to be.
"Please what?"
"Please let me — I need to—"
"Come for me." Her fingers press deeper. Her thumb circles faster. Her mouth is at my ear. "You've earned it."
I come.