29. Lo
— ? —
Lo
I wake up to his mouth on my shoulder.
His hand is already on my hip, thumb stroking that same slow path it always does, like he’s been doing it for a while and didn’t want to wake me until he did. I’m in his roping shirt. I fell asleep in it. I always do, on the nights he leaves it on the chair like a suggestion.
“Morning,” he murmurs into my skin, and I can feel him smiling.
“What time is it?”
“Early. We’ve got maybe twenty minutes before she figures out she’s awake.”
I laugh into the pillow, quiet, because twenty minutes is a lie we tell ourselves every morning and somehow it keeps being true enough.
The monitor on the nightstand is a soft, empty hush.
Down the hall, Hattie is still asleep. Biscuit is a golden lump at the foot of the bed, snoring like he’s paying rent.
Jesse’s mouth moves from my shoulder to the side of my throat. His hand slides from my hip to the bare skin under the shirt, warm, certain, and I turn toward him because six years of this has made the turning automatic.
“Come here,” he says.
“I’m right here.”
“Come closer.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to kiss my wife good morning, and she’s approximately six inches too far away.”
“Six inches seems like a you problem.”
“It’s an us problem. Marriage means shared problems.”
“Marriage means you could move six inches yourself.”
“I could. But then I’d miss the part where you pretend to be annoyed before you give in.”
“I don’t pretend to be annoyed. I’m genuinely annoyed. You’re very annoying.”
“And yet you married me.”
“Temporary insanity. The courthouse didn’t require a mental health screening.”
He laughs, low, and closes the six inches himself.
When he kisses me it’s slow and sweet and tastes like the coffee he must have had before I woke up.
His hand spans my hip under the shirt. I’m not wearing anything else.
He finds that out the same way he finds it out every time, a little sound in his throat like it still surprises him.
“Twenty minutes,” I say against his mouth.
“I’m efficient.”
“You’re optimistic.”
“Same thing.”
I pull back just enough to look at him. Morning light is filtering through the curtains, catching the gray at his temples, the lines around his eyes.
He’s thirty-five now, and he wears it well.
The boy who sang me a terrible song on a tailgate has grown into a man who shows up every day, who keeps his promises, who puts his family first.
It took us a while to get here. But we got here.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
“That you need a haircut.”
“Romantic.”
“I’m a very romantic person. I just express it through constructive criticism.”
He grins, lazy and warm, and then the grin changes. His hand tightens on my hip. He kisses me again, deeper, and the conversation stops being a conversation.
His hands know where to go. My hands know where to go. Six years of marriage has made us fluent in each other, and we speak the language without thinking.
He pushes the shirt up. Not off. He likes it on me, I’ve known that since the first time I stole one, just up, bunched under my breasts, so his mouth can get to my stomach, the underside of one breast, the place just below my navel that makes my hips lift without my permission.
His stubble scrapes. I feel myself get wetter for it, heat gathering low and obvious, and he makes a sound against my skin like he can tell.
“Jesse-”
“I know. Clock’s running.” He’s already moving, already sliding down, already hooking his hands behind my knees. “Come here.”
He pulls me to the edge of the mattress and gets on his knees on the floor.
Looks up at me like he’s asking. He’s not.
He already knows. This isn’t our wedding night (that was a hallway wall and fumbling with my grandmother’s zipper before we ever made it to a bed), but the way he’s looking at me is the same.
Like I’m the answer to a question he didn’t know he was asking.
He hooks my thighs over his shoulders and licks into me without preamble.
The first slow drag of his tongue makes my hips kick, and his hands pin them, calluses catching on my skin.
He’s good at this. He’s been good at this for six years and he still acts like he’s learning me, like there’s a new map every time.
He licks into me, unhurried, thorough, the flat of his tongue and then the point of it, right where I’m already swollen, and I’m so wet he has to be tasting it, has to know I woke up like this, with his hand on my hip and his mouth on my shoulder.
I get a fist in his hair. He makes a pleased sound against me that I feel more than hear.
He sucks. Slow, then less slow. One of his hands leaves my hip so he can sink two fingers knuckle-deep, and the stretch of it, thick, familiar, crooked just right, punches a breath out of me that I swallow back down.
He curls them. Licks over where I’m clenched around him.
The slick of it is obscene in the quiet and I would be embarrassed if I had any blood left for embarrassment.
“Jesse.” It’s not a warning. It’s not anything but his name. “Jesse, come up. Come here. I want-”
He doesn’t stop. He works me with his mouth and his fingers until my thighs start shaking on his shoulders, until I’m rocking onto his tongue with no rhythm that could be called dignified, and then he does this thing with the press of his fingers and the suck of his mouth at the same time, and I have to slap my own hand over my mouth because the sound that wants out of me would wake the baby, the dog, two towns.
I come like that. On his knees at the side of our bed, his mouth on me, my hand clamped over my own mouth and failing anyway, a broken noise leaking out around my palm, my hips jerking against his face, wet enough that I can feel it on my thighs, on his chin, everywhere.
It goes on. He stays with it until I’m twitching, until I have to pull at his hair for real.
He wipes his mouth on the inside of my thigh and looks up at me, smug and undone and still hard, I can see it, and I laugh, breathless, because of course he looks like that. Of course.
“Come here,” I say. “Now. Please.”
I drag him up by the shoulders. He comes up over me, mouth wet, eyes dark, and I can feel him through his boxers, hard against where I’m still pulsing.
I get a hand in the waistband and shove.
He helps. Then it’s just skin, the weight of him, the heat of him, the head of his cock riding the slick he’s worked out of me, and I hook a leg over his hip and pull.
He feeds it to me slow.
The stretch of it. God. It’s been a few days and he’s a lot, still, every time.
Wet enough that it doesn’t hurt. Full enough that my breath stops halfway out.
He works deeper by degrees, watching my face, one forearm braced by my head, and when he’s all the way in he stops and just breathes there, forehead against mine, like the fact of it still takes him apart.
“I love you,” he says against my throat.
“I know. Move, Jesse, move-”
He does. Slow and deep and reverent, that’s the word, even though I would never say it out loud.
Every stroke drags. I can feel how slick I am around him, the easy filthy slide of it, the way I clench when he’s buried deep and lingers a second too long.
The roping shirt is rucked under my arms. His hand finds my breast under it, thumb on my nipple, and I make another sound I shouldn’t.
“Quiet,” he whispers, smiling against my throat. “You want quiet.”
“Then stop-” I lose it when he rolls his hips, a grind that puts pressure right where I need it. “Stop doing that.”
“No.”
He fucks me like we have time. We don’t.
We both know we don’t. It starts unhurried and it doesn’t stay that way, his rhythm going tighter, my other leg coming up, his hand sliding down to hold me there so he can get deeper, and I can feel him shaking with the effort of keeping it slow.
I love him like this. I love him wrecked and trying to be careful and failing at careful the same way I’m failing at quiet.
“I love you.” Against my throat. Again. The words going thinner, just breathing. “Lo. I love you. I love-”
I clap my hand over my own mouth. He knocks it away and kisses me instead, swallowing the sound, and then my hand is back because I can feel it building again, low and mean and inevitable, my body pulling tight around him.
He feels it. Of course he feels it. He gets a hand between us and puts his thumb on my clit, not even a rhythm, just pressure, and I come with my palm mashed to my lips and a noise getting out anyway, clenching down on him so hard he groans into my neck like he’s been punched.
“That’s it. That’s - fuck, Lo-”
He follows me. Deep, hips stuttering, coming inside me with his teeth set in my shoulder and my name in pieces.
I feel it, the heat of it, the way he holds himself in me through it, the wet overflow when he finally stills.
My hand drops from my mouth. I’m breathing like I’ve been running. He’s shaking.
We stay like that.
Then he’s kissing me, lazy and spent, still inside me, the two of us grinning against each other’s mouths because we got away with it and we both know the clock is about to collect.
“Hi,” he says.
“You’re heavy.”
“You’re welcome.”
I laugh. He laughs. He kisses the laugh off my mouth and then the monitor on the nightstand crackles, a burst of static, and down the hall Hattie starts up with the particular authority of an almost-one-year-old who has discovered the power of volume.
“BA!” she announces. “BA BA BA!”
The dog is losing the argument. I can hear Biscuit’s tags, the traitor-whine, the scramble of ninety pounds of golden retriever trying to look innocent.
Jesse drops his forehead to my shoulder and laughs, helpless, still catching his breath.
“She’s getting louder,” he observes.
“She gets that from you.”
“I’m not loud.”
“You literally sing for a living.”
“BA! BA BA! MAMA! DADA!”
He kisses me once more, slow, like we have all morning. We don’t.
“Mine,” he says.