Chapter 8 #2
She looks at me across the lamp.
I look back.
She stands up.
She does not say anything. She does not have to. She crosses the cabin to where I am sitting in the chair and she puts one hand on each arm of the chair, and she leans down, and she kisses me.
It is — it is different from the first time.
The first time was slow and reverent and weighted with grief.
This is — this is hungrier. This is a woman who has been in my cabin for two hours in a storm with no power and no son and no Della and nothing standing between us, and she has decided, and the deciding is in her mouth, and her hand has come up and gripped the back of my neck, and she is not asking me to follow her lead this time, she is telling me, and the wolf in me — the wolf in me sits up so fast I almost lose my balance in the chair.
I pull her down into my lap.
She comes down. She straddles me, knees on either side of my hips, her hands in my hair, her mouth on mine.
The chair is — the chair is not built for this.
The chair creaks. We do not care. I have my hands on her waist and then on her hips and then I am pulling her down against me and her hips are rocking against mine and I make a sound against her mouth that I have not made before, and she makes a sound back that I have not heard her make, and the storm is howling outside, and the fire is throwing amber light across her face, and I am thirty-nine years old and a woman is in my lap in my own cabin asking me with her body for the second time in three weeks and I am — I am going to take the asking, I am going to take it.
I stand up.
I stand up with her in my arms — her legs around my waist, her arms around my neck — and I cross the cabin to the wall by the woodstove.
I put her against the wall. The wall is warm.
The wall is the wall closest to the stove.
I pin her there with my body and I kiss her harder and her legs lock around my hips and her hands are pulling at my flannel, and I let her.
I let her undo the buttons. I let her push the flannel off my shoulders.
I shrug it off and let it fall and her hands come up under my t-shirt and she runs her palms up the long muscle of my back and digs her fingers in.
I get her shirt off.
It is a thinner shirt than the flannel from the first night.
It comes off easily. I drop it on the floor.
She has a thin grey camisole underneath and I do not bother trying to be patient — I bunch the camisole up under her arms and I run my hand up over her ribs and over her breast and the small drawn peak of her nipple presses into my palm and she arches against my hand and makes a sound.
I bend down. I put my mouth on her through the cotton — the wet warm closing of my lips around her, the camisole going dark and wet between my teeth — and she gasps and her hand comes up and her fingers go into my hair and she pulls me harder against her.
I draw on her. I find the rhythm I learned three weeks ago and I use it without ceremony, and she is gasping against the wall and her hips are working against mine through the layers of denim between us and I can feel the heat of her coming through, the wet of her against the front of my jeans even through hers.
I pull the camisole off.
I have her against the wall in her undone jeans and nothing else above the waist, and her hair is loose, and her face is firelit, and I look at her — really look at her — for one long second before I lean down and kiss her again.
She is — God, she is beautiful, she is so beautiful, the kind of beauty that has nothing to do with the age she is and everything to do with the steel in her eyes and the silver at her temples and the long lean lines of her shoulders.
The burn scar on her left shoulder. The tattoo on her ribs.
The small white scar above her left eyebrow that I have not asked her about.
She says, "Kael. Take this off."
She is pulling at my t-shirt.
I take it off.
I am bare-chested against her, my belt jangling at her hip, and she pulls at my belt with one hand and the other hand is on the back of my neck pulling me down against her mouth, and I get the belt open one-handed because my other hand is at her jaw, holding her head against the wall while I kiss her.
I get the jeans open. She pushes them down with her foot and I kick them off and the boxers go with them, and I am — I am bare against her, against the warm wall, and her jeans are still on and I work them off with one hand.
They go. The underwear goes. She is bare against the wall with my body holding her up.
I lift her again.
I lift her the way I did the first time, with my hands gripped hard under her thighs, and her legs come up around my waist and lock at the small of my back, and she pulls me forward by the back of my neck and I — I press myself against her first, the head of me at her entrance, blunt and hot, and she is already slick, she is so slick I can feel her against me before I am even inside her.
She rocks her hips down. She fits me to herself. Then she pulls me in.
I slide into her against the wall and the wet heat of her takes the full length of me in one slow stroke and I have to brace my forearm against the wood beside her head to keep from buckling.
I make a sound.
She makes a sound.
The wolf in me makes a sound that is older than any sound a man should be making, and it goes up the back of my throat and I do not stop it.
She is — she is wetter than the first time, hotter than the first time, ready, ready, ready in a way that has nothing reverent about it, and I am — I am rough this time, I am rough in the way she is rough with me, her nails are digging into my shoulders and her teeth are at my throat and we are not being careful anymore.
We have been careful for weeks. The storm is stripping the careful away.
I move into her against the wall.
Hard. Slow at first and then harder. I take her weight on my hips and my hands under her thighs, and I drive up into her — the long deep stroke that ends with her shoulders pressed against the wood and her breath punched out of her in a low uh — and then again, and again, finding the rhythm her body is asking for.
She is gasping against my shoulder. Her hand is in my hair and her other hand is gripping my bicep so hard I will have fingerprint bruises tomorrow, and she is — she is meeting me, her hips are working against mine in a counter-rhythm she has figured out in three weeks of nights, the small downward thrust she gives every time I drive up that takes me deeper than I would have gone on my own.
We have learned each other.
We have learned each other in three weeks the way some couples never learn each other in twenty years.
I know exactly the angle that makes her gasp.
I tilt her hips a fraction with my hands under her thighs and the change in angle drags the base of me against the swollen knot at the top of her with every stroke, and she cries out — actually cries out — and her head falls back against the wall and her throat is bare to me and I put my mouth on it.
I bite her there. Lightly. The wolf in me is too close to the surface tonight for there to be no teeth.
She makes a sound that is mostly air and her hand in my hair pulls hard enough to hurt and I do not slow down and I do not soften the bite.
She knows me too.
Her other hand has left my bicep and slid up to the place at the back of my neck where I am undone — the small notch at the base of my skull, the place she found two nights ago in the dark — and she presses her fingertips there and the wolf in me makes a sound that is not a human sound and I drive up into her harder, the rhythm climbing, the depth long, the storm howling against the windows and the amber light shaking on the wall beside her face and we are not being slow, we are not being reverent, we are hungry, we are hungry, and the storm is stripping the careful away.
I get her there with my body and my mouth and the angle of my hips, and I feel it coming before she does — the small rhythmic flutter of her around me, the way her breath catches and goes short, the way her thighs lock against my sides — and I do not slow down.
I drive into her at the same depth and the same angle and the same rhythm, and she — she breaks.
She comes against the wall with my mouth on her throat and her legs locked around me and a long broken sound coming up out of her chest, and her body clenches around me in long hard waves I can feel from base to tip, and her nails go into my shoulder hard enough to draw blood and I do not care.
I almost go with her. Almost. I hold on, just barely, my forehead pressed to the wall beside her ear and my hand braced against the wood and my whole body shaking with the effort of not letting go yet because I want — I want to feel her come twice.
I want to feel her come twice in one night. I want her to have it.
I carry her down to the floor.
I lower us both to the rag rug in front of the stove without leaving her body — I am still inside her, still hard inside her, the slow tight grip of her clenching gently around me as her aftershocks fade — and I lay her on the rag rug with the heat of the woodstove on the side of my face and her hair fanned out around her head and the firelight amber across her bare skin.
Her eyes are dark and dilated. She looks up at me. She says, "Kael."
I move in her slowly this time.