4. Lo
— ? —
Lo
The zipper defeats him completely.
We’re barely inside the house. The front door isn’t even latched. My back is against the hallway wall and my husband of six hours is behind me, swearing under his breath at two inches of metal teeth like they’ve personally insulted his bloodline.
“It’s stuck,” Jesse says, fingers fumbling at my spine. “Or broken. Or possessed.”
“It’s a zipper. Zippers don’t get possessed.”
“This one might be.” His forehead drops to the back of my neck, breath hot through my hair. “Okay. Maybe a little performance anxiety. In my defense, this is a very intimidating zipper.”
I turn to face him. The hallway is narrow and he fills all of it, six-foot-four of nervous cowboy in a rumpled white shirt with the tie already gone, looking at me like I’ve handed him a bomb and asked him to defuse it with his teeth.
“It’s your grandmother’s dress,” he says, before I can tease him, and the panic gives way to something tender enough to hurt. “She wore it in 1962. And now it’s you, and it’s our wedding night, and I’ve been hard since you said I do, and I cannot get this fucking thing off you.”
I reach up and touch his face. His jaw is rough. He shaved this morning, but that was twelve hours and one wedding ago, and his eyes are the same impossible blue that made me lose my breath on a rodeo tailgate four years back.
“You know what Granny would say. That your hands are shaking because you love me, and that’s exactly how it should be.”
“My hands aren’t shaking. They’re vibrating. With excitement. Different thing.” He grins, and some of the tension breaks, and then it doesn’t, because he’s looking at my mouth. “Hold still. I’m trying again.”
This time when he pulls, the zipper glides down smooth and easy, and the dress loosens around my ribs, cool air kissing the line of my spine.
“There,” he breathes, triumphant and destroyed.
“You conquered a basic clothing fastener. Very heroic.”
He pushes the dress down my arms with a reverence that doesn’t match how badly his hands are shaking. The satin pools at my waist, and he helps me step out of it, then drapes the whole antique heap over the hall table with more care than I’ve ever seen him show a living thing.
Then he turns back to me. Slip, stockings, my grandmother’s ring. That’s all I’ve got left, and he looks at me like he’s starving.
“Mrs. Cooper,” he says, like he’s tasting it. “Lo Cooper. My wife. I’ve been thinking about how that would sound for four years.”
“And how does it sound.”
“Like coming home.” He cups my face, thumbs brushing my mouth. “I have to tell you something. I’m nervous. Not about the zipper - about this. I built it up since the tailgate, and now you’re my wife, and I’m terrified I’m going to mess it up.”
I take his hands. They’re still shaking. “I’m nervous too. I’ve also been wet since you said I do, so if you don’t get on your knees I’m going to start mocking your follow-through.”
He stares at me. Then he grins, helpless and filthy, and goes to his knees in the hallway like his body made the decision without him.
“Yes ma’am.”
He pushes the slip up to my waist and looks at my panties like they personally ruined him, white, soaked, stuck to me. “I’ve thought about this since the tailgate. Four years. I’ve jerked off to the idea of how you’d taste more times than I’ll ever admit in a court of law.”
“That’s a lot of times.”
“It’s an ungodly amount.” He hooks his fingers in the silk and drags it down, slow, like he’s unwrapping something he’s not sure he’s allowed to touch. “Look at you. Wet on your thighs already. That’s for me.”
“Don’t get cocky.”
“Baby, I’m on my knees with your cunt in my face. I’m past cocky. I’m religious.”
Then he puts his mouth on me for real.
It’s slow and obscene and reverent, the way a man is reverent when he’s been starving and someone finally sets down a plate.
He licks a long stripe up the center of me and groans into it, hands clamped on my hips, to hold me still, or himself back, I can’t tell, and then he sucks my clit into his mouth with a wet sound that echoes off the hallway walls.
“Oh my God.”
“Mm. Say my name. Not God. I did the work.”
My hand fists in his hair without permission and he makes a punched-out noise like that’s the thing he wanted most. When he pushes two fingers into me, thick and slow and curling, my knees buckle. He catches me, hauls one leg over his shoulder, and keeps going.
“There she is. Use my face. I’ve got you.”
I ride his mouth in a hallway with my wedding dress over a table and my panties around one ankle, and I do not care. He goes slower, meaner, working that spot inside me like he found it on a map years ago, and the sight of my husband on his knees with his face buried in me is what does it.
I come with my hands in his hair and his name in my mouth, ugly and loud. He drinks it, licking me through it, gentle and dirty at once, holding me up when my leg gives out.
“Okay,” I gasp. “You’ve made your point.”
He sits back on his heels, wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist, ruined and smug and so in love it should be illegal. Then he’s picking me up like I weigh nothing and carrying me to the bed. “I want to fuck my wife in a bed like a man who owns furniture.”
Our bedroom. His boots by the chair, my bag on the floor where I dropped it this afternoon. He lays me down like I’m breakable and stands there, chest heaving, cock tenting his slacks.
“Come here,” I say.
“Give me a second. If I come here right now I’ll last about four seconds, and I’d like to be a mythic lover, not a cautionary tale.”
I sit up, grab his belt, and yank him forward between my knees. “Then let me help with the clothes, mythic lover.”
I get his slacks open and shove them down, and his cock slaps up against his stomach, thick, flushed, leaking at the tip. I wrap my hand around him and he jerks like he’s been shocked, scorching under my palm, a bead of precome spilling over my thumb when I stroke him once.
“Lo,” he warns, ragged. “If you keep looking at it like that-”
He gets the shirt off, buttons ping, I think he rips one, and then he’s on me, all that bare skin and weight, kissing me like he’s still tasting me on his own mouth. I wrap my legs around him. His cock drags through the mess he made of me, and we both curse.
“Condom-” he starts.
“I’m on the pill. I told you. If you stop to have a logistics meeting I will kill you.”
“Right. Married. Mine.” He laughs, shaky, forehead dropping to mine. “I’m never gonna be anywhere but here. I need you to know that before I get inside you, because once I do, the only words I’ll have left are fuck and your name.”
“Then get inside me.”
He notches against me and pushes in, and the rest of the sentence dies.
It’s slow. It’s a lot. He’s thick enough that the stretch burns in a way that drops my mouth open, and he watches my face the whole time like he’s memorizing it, arms braced on either side of my head, shaking again.
“Fuck, you’re tight. Look at you taking it.”
“Don’t narrate like a nature documentary.”
“Can’t help it.” He bottoms out and stays there, buried, throbbing, and the huge awkward cowboy is gone. What’s on top of me now is focused and wrecked, saying my name against my mouth like a prayer.
“Move.”
“If I move I’m going to embarrass myself.”
“Then embarrass yourself. I married you. I already know you’re a disaster.”
He laughs, gutted, and then he fucks me. Deep, steady, no showboating, just the long grind of him dragging out and sinking back to the hilt, the headboard knocking the wall, so deep I feel it in my throat.
“Feel that,” he rasps. “Made for me.” He shifts the angle and hits something that arches my back off the bed, then stays there and works it until I’m clawing at his shoulders. “There. That’s mine - say it.”
I drag his ear to my mouth. “It’s yours. I’m yours. Now fuck me like you mean the vows, Cooper.”
Something in him breaks in the best way. He hitches my thigh higher, folds me open, and the next stroke is so deep I see white, still steady, that’s the thing, he doesn’t get sloppy, he just gets sure, his mouth at my throat: Lo, my wife, you feel like coming home.
He’s grinding now, cock buried, pubic bone on my clit, and I’m shaking apart under him. “I’m never gonna be anywhere but here,” he says against my forehead. “This bed. You. That’s the whole of it. You feel me?”
“I feel you. Don’t stop-”
“Never.” When I come the second time it’s with my whole body believing him, clenching around him, nails in his back, his name a broken thing in my mouth.
He follows with a groan wrenched out of him, spilling into me in hot pulses I can feel, holding my face and saying Lo like it’s the only word he kept.
He doesn’t pull out. He stays, heavy, forehead on mine, still twitching inside me, and for a long while there’s only breathing.
“You okay?” he asks finally, suddenly young again, the nervousness leaking back in. “I didn’t hurt you-”
“If you apologize for your dick I will divorce you before sunrise.”
“Noted.” He kisses me, softer now. “Where do you want to be in ten years.”
“Right here.”
“Fifty?”
“Jesse.”
He presses his forehead to mine, voice raw and certain. “I mean it more than I’ve ever meant anything. I’m not going anywhere.”
I believe him. I believe him while he cleans me up with his ruined white shirt and gets shy about it, while he pulls me onto his chest and I fall asleep to his heartbeat and the smell of starch and the ranch through the open window.
***
The phone lights up at one in the morning.
I’m not asleep. I’ve been lying here for hours, staring at the ceiling, listening to the house settle and trying not to think about what happened at the bonfire. Jesse’s back is a wall between us, six inches of mattress and five years of marriage and a distance that feels wider than both.
Sloane.
The name glows on his screen. One in the morning, and Sloane is calling my husband from the guest room down my own hall.
Jesse stirs. His hand reaches for the phone, checks the screen, and I watch his shoulders tense in the dim light.
“Yeah,” he whispers into the phone. Quiet. Careful. The voice of a man who doesn’t want to wake his wife.
He thinks I’m asleep.
“No, it’s fine. I’m awake.” A pause. “I know. I know. We’ll deal with it tomorrow.” Another pause. “Sloane, I said I’d handle it. Just give me a few days to figure out-”
I can hear her voice through the speaker. Tinny. Urgent. Going on and on. Jesse makes small sounds of agreement.
“Yeah. Yeah, I understand. Look, I can’t really talk right now. She’s right here.” Pause. “No, she’s asleep. I just don’t want to wake her. I’ll call you first thing in the morning. I promise.”
He hangs up. He sets the phone face-down on the nightstand. He lies there for a moment, tension radiating off his body like heat.
Then his breathing evens out, and he’s asleep within minutes.
I lie next to him in the dark, in the same bed where he once put his forehead on mine and promised he’d never be anywhere but here. Where he went to his knees in a hallway because he couldn’t wait. Where I believed him with my whole body.
I’m still in that bed.
But here feels very far away.