18. Perry
Perry
Her house is dark and quiet after the roar of two hundred people, and when the door shuts behind us the whole world narrows down to a lamp, a couch, and Kylie Barnes kicking off her shoes in the dark, looking at me like she still isn’t sure I’m real.
“Okay,” she says. “Ground rules. If your knee gives out, I am not calling your mother to explain it.”
“My knee is a professional. It’s been through worse than you, Barnes.”
“Bold words from a man with a cane.”
“Come here, and I’ll show you bold.”
She comes. She crosses the little dark room to me, and I drop the cane against the wall and get both hands on her before she’s finished arriving, and I kiss her like a man who spent three weeks certain he’d never get to again.
She kisses me back like she means to make the whole three weeks up in one go, both fists knotted in my shirt, and a sound comes out of her, needy and unguarded, that goes straight through me.
I walk her backward until she meets the wall, brace a forearm beside her head, and kiss her slow and thorough until her knees give and she’s holding on to my belt to stay upright.
“Bedroom,” she manages against my mouth. “Now. Before your knee and my willpower both give out.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say, and I mean it more than I’ve meant anything in my life.
It starts frantic. Three weeks of starving will do that.
But somewhere in the first minute it changes, slows, goes deep, since there’s no clock on us tonight.
Nobody’s waking early. Nobody’s slipping out before the neighbors stir.
For the first time since I put my hands on this woman, we have all the time in the world, and the knowing of it moves through me like something holy.
I take my time with her. I have never once taken my time in my life, not really, not with anyone, and now I can’t imagine why I’d rush a single second of her.
I walk her back toward the bedroom, both of us shedding clothes as we go, her fingers working my shirt open and mine finding the zipper at her spine, and by the time the backs of her knees hit the bed she’s bare and gold in the lamplight, and I have to stop and just look.
“Perry.” She reaches for me. “Don’t do the staring thing.”
“I’m gonna do the staring thing the rest of my life. Get used to it.”
She lies back and lets me look, flushed from her collarbone down, and I watch her fight the old instinct to cover herself and lose the fight, and it’s the bravest thing I’ve watched her do, and she has done a great many brave things this month.
“You’re gorgeous,” I tell her, and I mean it as a plain fact, not a line. “I spent twelve years around the prettiest women three states could produce, and not one of them ever once made my hands shake.” I hold one up between us so she can see it tremble. “Look at that. You did that.”
She grabs my shaking hand and pulls it to her breast, and that is the end of talking for a while.
* * *
I come down over her, brace on my good side, mind the bad knee, and I kiss down her throat, her collarbone, the soft weight of her breasts, and I take my time there until she’s arching up off the quilt and saying my name in a voice that comes apart at the edges.
I pay attention to every inch of her on the way down.
The places that hitch her breath. The spot below her ribs that makes her squirm.
The crease of her hip that pulls a whispered please out of her.
I file all of it away. I’ve got the rest of my life to study this woman, and I intend to be thorough about it.
I settle between her thighs like a man come home from a long way off, and I spread her open with my thumbs and put my mouth on her.
She’s already wet, already ready for me, and the first slow drag of my tongue up the length of her brings her hips clear off the bed.
I hold her down and I take my time. I lick into her and up the sides and close my lips around her clit and suck, slow, learning her all over again like I don’t already have her memorized.
She fists a hand in my hair. She grinds up into my mouth.
And when I slide two fingers into her and crook them just so, she breaks apart fast and hard, clenching around my hand, my name torn out of her, and I lick her through every last wave of it.
“I could do that all night,” I tell her, my mouth still on her, and I feel the shiver go through her. “Fair warning. I intend to. But not yet.”
“Perry.” Her voice is already wrecked. “I swear, if you make me wait?—”
“You’ll what?” I press a kiss to the inside of her thigh, grinning against her skin. “Shush me? Try it, librarian.” She laughs, breathless, and then she stops laughing, because I’ve come back up her body and her hand has found me again.
I come up her body while she’s still shaking, and she pulls me into a kiss that tastes like her own pleasure, and she reaches between us and takes me in her hand and lines me up, and I have to lock my jaw to keep from going off right there in her palm.
“Look at me,” she says. “The whole time. I want to see you.”
So I look at her. I push into her slow, inch by inch, both of us going still and stunned at the joining, and I hold her eyes the entire time, and it is the most naked I have ever been with another living soul.
Buried deep in the woman who saw me before I was worth the seeing, with nowhere left to hide and no reason left in the world to want one.
For a moment I just stay there, seated deep, letting her feel all of me, watching her adjust around me with her mouth soft and open.
Then I draw back slow and push in again, and she makes a sound low in her throat that I feel down my spine.
“There she is,” I breathe. I set a rhythm, slow and deep and even, and she meets me on every stroke, hips rising to take me, her hands roaming my back and my shoulders and my face like she can’t choose where to hold on.
I say the truth into her mouth with every stroke, since it’s the only thing I’ve got left to give her.
“I’m not going anywhere.” I roll my hips and she gasps. “You hear me? I’m staying right here. In this town. In this bed. However long you’ll have me.”
“I hear you.” Her nails drag down my back, and something breaks open in her face that is not only pleasure. It’s belief. It’s fourteen years of not letting herself, finally letting go, and the sight of it nearly ends me on the spot.
I kiss the wet at the corner of her eye without slowing, and she laughs, shaking. “Don’t you dare make me cry during sex, Sterling.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I say, and make her cry a little more, the good way, moving in her slow and sure, telling her with my body every true thing I was too scared to say for three weeks.
She frames my face in both hands and makes me go still a second, buried deep in her, and looks up at me with her eyes wet and wide open. “It’s really you,” she whispers. “I keep thinking I’ll wake up.”
I turn my head and kiss her palm. “I’m not a dream, sweetheart. Dreams don’t have a bad knee and a big mouth. I’m the real thing, and I’m staying.” And I feel her believe it, feel it go all the way through her, and she pulls me back down to her.
Then slow stops being enough for either one of us. She digs her heels into the backs of my thighs and hauls me deeper, faster, and I give it to her, forgetting the knee, forgetting everything but the wet heat of her and the sound of her saying my name like it’s the only word left in the language.
I get a hand between us and find her clit, work it in time with the drive of my hips, and I feel her climbing again, feel her going tight and fluttering around my cock, and I’m right behind her now, holding on by my fingernails.
“Together,” she breathes. “Perry. Please.”
And we do. She comes apart under me, clenching down around me so hard I see white, and I go over right behind her with her name in my mouth and her heart slamming against mine, and for one long, shattering second there is no distance left between us anywhere, not a single inch, and I finally understand exactly what she meant by it.
She’s still pulsing around me when I feel her hands go greedy again, not finished, reaching for more of me, and I laugh into her neck, wrecked and amazed. “Give me a minute, woman.”
“No,” she says, and rolls me, minding the knee even now, and settles over me warm and flushed and grinning down like she owns me, which she does. We are not finished with each other for a long, long time.
* * *
After, we’re a tangle of sweat and limbs and slowing breath, and my bad knee is going to file a formal complaint in the morning, and I could not possibly care less. She’s got her head on my chest, tracing slow idle circles over my heart, both of us coming down easy in the lamplight.
“So,” she says into my skin. “You’re really staying.”
“I’m really staying.”
“Every morning. Coffee. Fixed right.”
“Every morning. Right up until you file that complaint.”
She laughs, low and warm, and I feel it move through her whole body and into mine, and I think a man could spend a lifetime chasing buckles clear across the country and never once find a sound half as good as Kylie Barnes laughing against his chest in the dark.
I pull the quilt up over us both. She fits herself along my good side, minding the brace without being asked, drapes a leg over mine, and I get a hand in her hair and just hold her, and I feel my whole restless life go quiet for the first time I can remember.
She’s quiet a while. Then, soft: “I dreamed you for fourteen years, Perry Sterling. And you turned out better than the dream.”
I press my mouth to the top of her head and hold her there.
Outside, Langston has gone quiet, the whole town asleep, the library safe on its square with her mother’s name freshly up on the wall.
I’m lying in the exact place I spent my whole life running from, and I have never once in thirty-one years been anywhere I wanted to be more.
“So did you, Barnes,” I tell her. “So did you.”
She tips her head up and kisses me, unhurried, no fear left in it anywhere I can find, then settles back down over my heart, and her breathing goes slow and even, and I lie there in the dark of the house she grew up in, in the town I grew up in, holding the girl who kept my secret fourteen years while I was too busy being a fool to notice her.
And for the first time in my whole running life, with nowhere else on God’s green earth I would rather be, I stay.