47. Grisha #2
I put my mouth on her then, in no hurry at all, learning the rhythm of her the same patient way I'd learned everything else about this woman, and felt her whole body go tight and then loosen in waves under the attention, her fingers curling harder into my hair with every pass.
She was slick and warm, achingly responsive, arching whenever I found the exact spot that made her breath break apart, and I stayed there, unhurried, until her thighs were trembling against my shoulders and her voice had dissolved into fragments of my name and sounds that had stopped meaning anything.
"Grisha, please." Her hand tugged at my shoulder, urgent now, all the patience she'd been holding onto finally giving out. "I need you. All of you. Now."
I came back up over her, my own restraint fraying fast, and kissed her deep enough to taste the both of us on it, her legs already wrapping around my hips like she couldn't stand one more second of distance between us.
"I have you," I told her again, my voice rough, barely recognizable as my own.
"I'm not going anywhere. Not tonight, not after tonight, not ever again. "
"I know." Her hand found me in the dark, guiding, her touch alone nearly enough to finish what her mouth had started on me a minute before. "Stop making me wait for it."
I guided myself to her entrance and paused there, watching her face the whole way, unwilling to miss a single second of it, and felt her hips tilt up toward me in open, unguarded want.
I pressed just the head of myself against her first, slow, feeling how impossibly wet and swollen she already was for me, and watched her whole face open at even that much, her breath catching hard in her throat.
Her hips pressed up harder in answer, an unmistakable demand that needed no words behind it.
I pushed into her slow after that, giving her every inch of it gradually, and felt her whole body arch to meet me, a sound breaking out of her that she didn't try to muffle this time, nothing left between us worth hiding behind.
She was tight and slick and unbearably warm around me, stretched to take all of me, and I stopped there fully seated inside her, forehead against hers, both of us breathing hard, because some feelings needed a moment before a body could be trusted to move through them without breaking apart.
"Don't stop," she said against my mouth, her legs locking tighter around my hips. "Don't you dare stop now."
I didn't. I kept my rhythm deliberate at first, watching every flicker that crossed her face, and felt her meet me stroke for stroke, her hands mapping my back like she was memorizing the shape of me the same way I'd spent the whole walk upstairs memorizing hers.
I pulled back nearly all the way and pushed in again, deeper this time, and the sound she made against my ear was enough to strip whatever patience I had left down to almost nothing.
"Like that," she breathed, her nails finding my shoulders. "Exactly like that. Don't you dare go gentle on me now."
"I've been gentle with you all night." I braced one forearm beside her head and drove into her harder, feeling her whole body answer every thrust with one of its own, her breath breaking into short, open sounds against my throat. "Tell me if this is what you meant."
"Yes." The word came out of her wrecked, half moan and half laugh, her hips rising to take everything I gave her. "Harder. I'm not going to break."
Whatever composure I had left finally gave way to something hungrier, her nails digging into my shoulders and holding on hard enough that I welcomed every mark she left, proof for tomorrow that tonight had actually happened and hadn't just been something I'd imagined out of eight years of wanting exactly this without letting myself call it that.
I changed the angle once, hooking my arm beneath her knee to pull her hips higher against mine, and felt her whole body go rigid at the new depth of it, a sound tearing out of her with nothing left in it that resembled a word.
"I love you," I told her, my voice wrecked, my mouth against her throat where I could feel her pulse hammering under my lips, my rhythm never breaking.
"I love you. I have loved you since before I let myself use the word, and I am done, completely done, pretending there's a version of my life that doesn't have you standing in the exact center of it. "
"Grisha." She said my name again, softer this time despite the pace we'd built, both hands framing my face so I had to look at her, at the whole unguarded shape of what was happening between us with nothing left held back on either side.
"I love you too. I have from the moment you decided to tell me the truth in a garden instead of protecting me from it. "
I felt her start to come apart under me, her whole body tightening around mine in a way that stole whatever control I had left, her back arching off the sheets, her voice breaking apart into something raw and wordless.
The candlelight caught her ring as her hand flew to grip my forearm, small and steady even now, and something about that single detail broke whatever restraint I still had left.
I drove into her faster, chasing the same ragged edge she was already falling over, and felt her shatter beneath me with my name torn out of her one final time, her whole body drawing tight and then loose around mine, pulling me over the edge right behind her in a release that left nothing in me still standing, both of us shaking, both of us finally spent, nothing left in either one of us worth holding back.
I gathered her in against my chest after, both of us still catching our breath, the candles burning low and steady around us, and pressed my mouth to the top of her head the way I did when words weren't quite ready yet.
I lay there a while just feeling her breathing even out against me, deciding how to say the thing I'd been carrying around unsaid for weeks, maybe longer, because some truths took a body a long time to build up the nerve for even after the heart had settled the matter on its own.
I had spent eight years being careful with every sentence that touched Elena, rationing them out like they might run dry if I spent them wrong.
Tonight I didn't want careful. Tonight she'd earned every unguarded word I had left in me.
"I need to tell you something," I said finally, into her hair, "and I need you to actually hear it, because I've spent eight years saying almost everything except the true version of this."
"I'm listening." She tucked herself closer against my side, her hand flat over my heart like she was checking it was still going, which it was, faster than it had any business going for a man lying still.
"When Elena died, I decided the only thing left for me to be was useful.
A shield. Somebody who caught what fell so nobody ever had to ask what was left of the man underneath it.
" I said it plainly, no decoration, the way I'd learned only recently how to say the things that actually mattered.
"I stopped being anything else on purpose.
I told myself it was strength. It was actually just easier than grieving the version of myself I'd also buried that same week, the one who used to want things besides other people's safety. "
"Grisha."
"You gave that back to me." My voice caught, and I let it, because she'd earned the unguarded version of me a long time ago and I was done rationing it out one careful sentence at a time.
"Not just love. I want to be clear about that, because I know it sounds like the easy word to reach for.
You gave me back a person I thought I'd buried right alongside her.
Someone who wants things. Someone who gets to have a garden that isn't just a hiding place, and a face that isn't always doing math on the nearest exit, and a future he actually lets himself picture instead of managing one week at a time like it might get taken from him if he looked at it too directly. "
She was quiet a moment, her thumb moving slow over my chest, and when she spoke her voice had gone thick. "That's the best thing anyone has ever told me they got from loving me."
Her breath went slow and even against my skin, like she was setting something down she'd carried a long time before she trusted herself to speak again.
"I spent two months deciding I was safer needing nobody twice in one lifetime.
You made that feel like the smaller life instead of the safer one.
I don't think I ever thanked you properly for that, for making me want things again instead of just managing what I already had. "
"You don't have to thank me for it. It's the truest thing I've ever told anyone.
" I tipped her chin up so I could see her face in the candlelight, her eyes bright, her mouth soft, the ring on her hand catching the last of the flame one more time.
"I'm not haunted anymore, Tasha. I told her that myself, a week ago, standing at her grave, and I meant it then.
I mean it more right now, lying here with you, than I have ever meant anything in my life.
You didn't just give me a future. You gave me back the man I was always supposed to become, before grief convinced me that man had to disappear to keep everyone else safe. "
"Good." She pressed a kiss to my chest, right over my heart, slow and certain. "Because I intend to keep him. All of him. For a very long time."
"That," I said, pulling her closer, feeling the whole quiet, finished shape of the house settle around us like it had been waiting years for exactly this kind of silence, "is the only plan I have ever fully trusted."