Chapter 90 #4
He sat back for a moment and looked at me—that gray gaze, steady and unhurried, taking me in—and then his hands went to the buttons of my shirt and worked them open one by one, the same way he worked a stuck drawer or a stiff hinge, patient and certain of the outcome.
When he pushed the fabric back off my shoulders, I felt the firelight on my skin and his eyes on my skin, and both of those things were warm in ways that were entirely different and entirely the same.
He unhooked my bra with one hand. Of course he did.
“Show-off,” I said.
Something shifted in his face. Not quite a smile. Better than a smile. He lowered his mouth to my breast and took his time there—his tongue, then the graze of his teeth, then the heat of his mouth closing over me—and my back arched off the sofa cushions and I stopped being clever about anything.
I got his belt open. The button, the zipper, my hand inside, and he went still and breathed out hard against my skin when I wrapped my fingers around his cock—hard, hot, heavy in my palm.
“Sylvie.” Different this time. Lower, like it had cost him something.
I stroked him slowly, base to tip, learning the weight of him, my thumb sliding through the slick already gathered at the head, and felt the control go out of his hands where they gripped my hips.
“Keep doing that and this ends early,” he said, rough.
“That a problem?”
“For my dignity.” He caught my wrist, gentle, and moved my hand away. “Not yet.”
Then his hands were at my jeans—and there was a brief logistic interlude involving the sofa cushions and someone’s boot that we did not handle gracefully at all, and I laughed, and he laughed, and then the last of it was gone and he was looking down at me in the firelight, bare and unhurried and entirely focused, and not laughing anymore.
“Okay?” he said.
“Very okay,” I said. “Come here.”
He kissed his way down instead. The inside of my wrist. The space below my ribs.
The crease of my hip, slow and deliberate, and then he settled between my thighs and put his mouth on me, and I forgot about being patient.
I tasted salt where I bit down on my own knuckle.
His hands held my hips—not pinning, just there, the way he held everything he was working on—and his tongue worked me open, unhurried, thorough, reading what made me shake and going back to it, again and again, until my heels pressed into the cushions and I was saying his name in a way I hadn’t planned on, until the word came apart in the middle.
He stayed with me through it, gentling me, his mouth soft now, until I was wrung out and trembling and pulling at his shoulders.
“Please,” I said.
He didn’t make me ask twice. He came up over me, braced on his forearms, and I reached down and guided him, and felt him go still at the first press of it.
Then he pushed in—slowly, all the way, until there was nothing left between us—and we both went still for a moment, the held breath of something that has been a long time coming and is finally, completely here.
His forehead dropped to mine. His eyes were open. I kept mine open too.
“I’ve got you,” he said. Low. Just that.
And my walls weren’t there anymore. I’d let them go because he made it safe to.
I felt everything. Not the old terror of being swallowed whole.
Just him: his wanting, the care underneath it, the steady thing in him that had been holding a temperature for a year for a woman he’d never met.
He started to move, deep and slow, and I moved with him, my hips rising to meet his, and his breath broke against my throat.
“You feel—” he started, and didn’t finish, and didn’t need to.
I pulled him closer and stopped keeping track of where I ended.
He took me to the edge again like that—slow, then not slow, his hand sliding under the small of my back to change the angle, his mouth at my throat.
“There,” he said, rough, when it made me gasp.
“Right there.” My name coming out of him rough every time I tightened around him.
When it took me the second time I said things into his shoulder I wouldn’t be examining later, and he followed me over with a sound I felt more than heard, his whole weight coming down, his face buried in my hair.
We stayed there, in the warm wreckage, until the fire had burned down and the moon had moved and the cat had relocated from the armchair to the rug with an air of profound resignation.
Later—the fire lower, the room soft with it—I was drifting.
His heart beat under my cheek, slow and steady.
The quilt from the back of the sofa, June’s quilt, the one she’d made from squares of fabric, each coming from somewhere—a dress, a curtain, a shirt she’d loved—came around my shoulders.
His hands, careful. Then his arms, lifting me, and I was too warm and too far gone to do anything but let him.
June’s bedroom. June’s pillow. The smell of the cottage and him and October.
“Sleep,” he said, against my hair.
The cat landed on the end of the bed with a thump.
I lay in the dark with his warmth against my back and his breathing slowing toward sleep, my magic open all the way to the greenhouse, the foundation vine, the spring on the hillside—all of it, nothing braced against. And I slept.