19. Emily #2
He kisses his way back up, mouth on my tits again for another slow round of sucking and licking that leaves them wet and sensitive.
Then he strips off his own clothes and settles over me, his cock hard and heavy against my thigh.
Our eyes lock as he lines up and pushes in, slow and steady, stretching me inch by inch.
I feel every thick part of him, the way he fills me completely, and my hands find his, fingers intertwining above my head.
He lowers until our foreheads touch, breath mingling.
“You’re beautiful,” he says again, voice quiet and filthy-sweet.
“So fucking perfect like this.” He starts moving, deep thrusts that drag against every sensitive spot inside me.
I wrap my legs around his waist and meet him, mouthy even while pleasure builds.
“You always say that when you’re inside me. ”
“I’ll keep saying it until you believe it,” he answers, hips rolling slow and deliberate.
We stay like that, eyes on each other, hands locked, foreheads pressed together while he fucks me with long, reverent strokes.
Kisses break between us, soft and deep, his tongue in my mouth matching the rhythm below.
My breasts press against his chest, nipples rubbing with every shift, and the friction adds to the heat building again.
He thrusts deeper, pace still unhurried, and at the peak his rhythm stays steady until the words slip out low and raw.
“I love you.” They hit me hard, rising in my own throat, but fear clamps down and what comes out instead is “I know.” His hips falter for a second, a single hitch that tells me it lands wrong, but he recovers and buries his face in my neck.
He keeps moving, thrusts turning a little harder as he chases the finish, saying my name against my skin.
“Emily. Emily.” He comes with a groan, pulsing hot inside me, and I follow right after, clenching around him while we hold tight.
For a minute neither of us moves. His weight is warm and heavy on me, our hands still tangled, his heart going hard and slow under my ear. It should be perfect. It’s so close to perfect. And I went and put a crack right down the middle of it with two stupid words.
I know. Like he’d told me the weather. Like he’d reminded me to grab my coat.
I felt his rhythm stutter when I said it. Just a hitch, there and gone, before he caught himself. But I felt it. I did that. He handed me his whole heart out loud and I handed him back a receipt.
“Hey.” His voice rumbles under my ear, careful, too careful. “Can I ask you something, and you don’t have to answer?”
“Yeah.”
“Did I do something wrong? Just now. You went somewhere.”
And my heart cracks clean down the middle, because of course he thinks it’s him. Of course the one time I freeze, the man who spent ten years sure he wasn’t allowed to want me assumes he’s the one who messed it up.
“No.” I push up onto my elbow so I can see his face, and his eyes are doing that braced thing, getting ready to be let down and pretending he’s not, and I hate that I put it there.
“God, no. You did everything right. You always do. That’s not it.
” I press my hand flat to his chest. “I feel it, okay? All of it. It’s huge.
It scares the hell out of me how huge it is.
But the words just won’t come out. They jam up.
And it’s not about you, it’s me, my brain is all jumbled up.
So I freeze. And I hate that I do it to you. ”
Something in his face eases, slowly. He reaches up and covers my hand with his.
“We’re taking it slow,” he says. “Remember? You don’t owe me anything, Em. Not even the words. I’d rather have you stuck and honest than smooth and lying.”
And that’s the worst part. If he’d gotten mad, if he’d pushed, if he’d done the Henry thing and punished the I know with a week of cold silence, I’d know what to do with that.
I’ve got a lifetime of practice taking a hit.
What wrecks me is him being gentle about the exact spot where I’m most broken.
I lie back down on his chest so he can’t see my face, and I let him hold me, and I think the words as loud as I can think them, I love you, I love you, I love you, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why they only come easy inside my own head.
***
I wake up first. Morning light coming gray-gold through the curtains, the city making its early sounds outside, and Richard asleep beside me, on his back, one arm flung over his head, dead to the world.
Still here.
I notice it like you notice the sun came up.
Not the marvel it was that first morning, the shock of waking up warm with an arm around me.
Somewhere in these weeks it stopped being a miracle and started being a fact, a plain good ordinary fact of my life, that I go to sleep next to him and wake up next to him and the bed is warm on both sides.
I don’t examine it too hard. I just let it be true.
The guilt sits in me anyway, low and familiar.
He gives and gives. The books, the flowers, the patience, his whole heart out in the open every day, and what does he get back?
A frozen I know and me having a meltdown on a perfectly good couch.
Tara’s voice in my head from last time: you’re allowed to have good things, Em.
Am I, though? Or did Henry break that part so completely that I can’t hold a good thing without dropping it on purpose, just to get the breaking over with before someone does it to me?
Richard stirs. Blinks up at me, sleep-soft, no boardroom anywhere on him. “You’re staring,” he mumbles, my own line handed back to me.
“I’m admiring.”
He smiles, slow. And I decide, right then, that I’m done letting the fear win every single round.
“Last night,” I say. “When I said I know. That was a chickenshit thing to say and we both know it.”
His mouth twitches. “I wasn’t going to use that word.”
“I’ll use it. I was a chickenshit.” I prop up on my elbow. “I want to say the real thing. I keep getting right up to it and bailing, and I’m sick of it, and I’m going to try right now, so just, give me a second.”
“Take all the seconds you want.”
“That’s not helping, the pressure’s the same either way.” But I’m almost smiling, and so is he, and for a second it’s easy.
So here it is. The perfect opening. No clock, no pressure, gold light, a man looking at me like I hung the moon. I love you. It’s right there. It’s been right there for weeks. All I have to do is say it.
I open my mouth.
And I chicken out. Again. What comes out, in the exact spot where the three words go, is:
“You’re really good to me.”
I hear it land. You’re really good to me.
Like he’s a decent umbrella. His face doesn’t fall, he’s too kind for that, but something behind his eyes goes quiet and shuts a door, and he says, “Yeah. I try to be,” in a voice working hard to sound fine, and he kisses my forehead and gets up to make coffee.
And I lie there listening to him be good to me in the kitchen, and I have never hated what Henry turned me into more than I do right now.