Chapter Twenty-Six #3
I suck harder, pulling her nipple between my lips, flicking my tongue across the peak, and her back bows off the bed and her hips grind up against my thigh.
I press my thigh between her legs and give her pressure and she takes it, rolling against me, desperate, and I can feel how wet she is through her underwear, soaking the cotton, soaking my skin.
I let go of her wrists. She keeps her hands above her head because she wants them there, because she likes what it does to me when she's spread open and waiting.
I pull her underwear off and they're drenched and she doesn't care and neither do I.
I settle between her legs and she's swollen and wet and I can see her clit and the slick on her inner thighs and I want my mouth on all of it.
I know her body now. I know that she likes my mouth on her neck before I go down. I know that the inside of her thigh makes her squirm if I drag my teeth along it. I know that she gets louder when I look at her, that eye contact while my tongue is on her clit is the thing that pushes her over.
So I look at her.
I press my mouth against her pussy and I look up at her and she looks down at me and her lips are parted and her chest is flushed and her hands are gripping the pillow above her head and she's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my apartment, in my bed, in my life.
I lick her slow. Long strokes, base to clit, tasting her, pushing my tongue inside her and dragging it up through her folds, taking my time because I want to and because the sound she makes when I'm slow is different from the sound she makes when I'm fast. Slow gets me the exhale, the full-body shudder, the "please" that she barely voices.
"Please, Teague. I need more."
I give her more. Faster. My tongue focused on her clit, circling, pressing, and I slide two fingers inside her and she clenches around me immediately, tight and wet and hot, and I curl my fingers forward and find the spot and she arches and grabs my hair and pulls.
"There. Right there. Fuck, don't stop."
I don't stop. My mouth on her clit and my fingers inside her, curling on every stroke, and she's rolling her hips against my face and my hand and she's loud, louder than she was the first time, louder than she was the second time, because she's not trying to control anything anymore.
She's letting herself be in this, fully, fucking my face with her hips, grinding against my tongue, and the sounds she makes fill the apartment and probably the laundromat below and I don't care.
I add a third finger and she cries out and her thighs shake and I feel her tighten around me.
She comes with her hand in my hair and my name in her mouth and her whole body pulling tight and releasing, tight and releasing, clenching around my fingers in pulses I can count, and I feel it against my tongue and I stay with her until she's done, until her hand loosens and her breathing slows and she makes a small, wrecked sound that means enough.
I pull my fingers out gently. Kiss her hip. Her stomach. The spot between her breasts where her heart is still pounding. I settle beside her and she turns into me immediately, face against my neck, one leg thrown over mine, breathing hard and warm.
We lie there. The apartment is quiet. The machines below are running, a low hum, and the streetlight is coming through the window and our breathing is evening out and she's pressed against me from shoulder to ankle.
"I love you," she says into my neck.
"You keep saying that."
"I'm going to keep saying it. Get used to it."
"I'm getting used to it."
She lifts her head. Looks at me. Her face is flushed and her hair is wrecked and her eyes are soft and she's smiling with her whole mouth and she looks like a person who just got everything she wanted and can't believe it's real.
"You smell like me now," she says.
"You smell like smoke."
"We both smell like everything."
She puts her head back on my neck. Her breathing slows.
She falls asleep in three minutes, like she always does, like consciousness is a switch she flips without ceremony.
She's on the left side, phone not plugged in because we didn't get that far, face pressed into my neck instead of the pillow, breathing slow and even and alive.
I stay awake a little longer. Not because I'm worried.
Because I want to be here for this. The quiet apartment, the machines below, the streetlight through the window, the woman in my bed who went inside a burning building today and came out and told me she loves me in my bar in front of Jeff and his Pbr.
I said it back. Out loud. In front of people. I said "I love you too" and the ceiling didn't collapse and the walls didn't close in and the careful, deliberate architecture of my solitary life didn't crumble. It just rearranged. Made room. The way it's been doing since she walked in.
I close my eyes. The koi on my arm is healing under the wrap, swimming upstream through water that moves.
Somewhere in this apartment a pair of white sneakers is lined up by the door and a purple toothbrush is in a cup and a gray hoodie is on the back of a chair and I love all of it.
Every piece of evidence. Every sign that my life on purpose now includes someone else's purpose too.
I fall asleep. The machines below hum their first-cycle lullaby.
We'll sleep late tomorrow and drink terrible coffee and she'll tell me about the crib again, because Zoe tells stories more than once, each time adding a detail she forgot, and I'll listen because listening to Zoe Kimball talk about the things that matter to her is my favorite sound in the world.
Better than the Pretenders. Better than Against Me. Better than the Buzzcocks at full volume on a Saturday night.
Better than anything.