Chapter 51
Autumn
I don’t know what I think would have changed in a month, but he looks exactly the same, which is to say like a seven-course Michelin-starred meal to a starving gourmet.
It’s funny seeing him in the context of my own apartment, my own world.
Like, I knew he was big, but there’s something about seeing him fill the entire doorway of my apartment that makes my thighs go hot and slightly wobbly.
Of course, I was wobbly to begin with. That post—
“That post,” I say, which is maybe not the best beginning, but it’s the best I’ve got. “Tucker.”
And then, because it seems like the thing to do, I throw myself into his arms, and he catches me, and we squeeze each other so tight. Well, I squeeze him so tight. With all my strength. He holds back, because neither of us wants me to end up with a cracked rib.
“I’m sorry,” he says into my hair, a brush of heat and sensation.
“For what?”
He releases me so he can look at me full on. Which is a lot. His eyes are pale blue and beautiful, and there’s so much feeling behind them that it makes my swirling chest feel like understatement.
“A lot of things,” he says. “For walking away from doing the hard work with you. I’m as bad as the last guy.”
“Oh, no. No. The last guy had been in my life for a year and had promised to marry me, and he walked away for good. You’d been in my life for a week and promised me nothing, and look!
You’re here! That said”—I’ve realized suddenly that you really shouldn’t look a gift apology in the mouth—“apology accepted.”
“I will never walk away from you again.” He flinches a little. “If you—if you want me to stay, that is. I mean, and if it turns out that we, you know, go the distance. I mean, I—I will never turn my back on trying to work things out with you.”
It’s not all perfect and polished, but it’s real, and I know he means it, and seriously, someone should have told me that you could feel a million things at once and that they might not all fit in your body.
“I missed you,” he says. “That’s the first thing I was supposed to say.
I missed you, and I don’t want us to be in different places.
I want us to be together. I want to go to bed with you and wake up with you and watch you get dressed and undressed.
I want to be your date to whatever you need a date to—your real date—and I want to eat baked goods with you and play dirty party games with you and… have tons of sex.”
I smile. “That’s a lot of words for you.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m trying to do better with words. Since they’re super useful for saying what you mean.”
“My turn,” I say. “I shouldn’t have asked you to do something you already said you didn’t feel ready to do. And I’m so glad you feel ready now, and I promise not to—to ask for too much from you.”
“I like when you push me,” he says. “I don’t know how long I would have been where I was if you hadn’t pushed me. You push me and I’ll push you. And we’ll both try to be better.”
“I’m in therapy.”
“I know. I’ve been reading your Poststack.”
“I didn’t know it was possible to be angry and sad and ashamed and afraid all at the same time.”
“I did,” he says, with something that’s almost a smile. “But I didn’t know it was possible to be all those things and also happy.”
That’s it. That’s the breaking point of what I can hold in my body. “Tucker,” I say helplessly, and he gets it right away. He scoops me up and shuts the door to my apartment behind us.
“Bedroom?” he asks.
“Down the hall on the left.”
He carries me there and sets me down gently on the bed, peeling me out of my clothes with more patience and care than I’d have if our situations were reversed.
And in fact, when I go to try to get him out of his, I nearly rip his T-shirt.
And then I spend a good long while running my eyes and then my hands and tongue over the gorgeous swell of his pecs and the defined ridges of his abs and—having gotten his jeans unbuttoned and unzipped, despite the shaking of my hands—the fucking awesome dip of his hip muscles into the V of his groin.
“Autumn,” he groans, because my tongue has found where he’s so, so hard for me.
And then, like his own control has snapped, he pushes me down on the bed and grabs for the condom he set on the nightstand.
He sheathes himself handily. My knees fall open for him, and he lines himself up and presses in.
Slowly. So we both get to savor the feeling of me opening to him.
And when I resist him, not meaning to but because bodies are bodies, he pauses and spends a long time circling my clit with a lazy finger, watching my face until I have to close my eyes against the sun-glare of his affection and need.
He gives me the last few inches with a thick, satisfying thrust, and we both grunt with the pleasure of it. And then we’re moving, me rising to meet him, him falling to meet me.
It goes on for much longer than I expect, until time gets liquid and sticky and I lose track of myself and him and the room and the world.
The longer we move together, the tighter my body draws, and the tighter my body draws, the faster he moves until he falls out of rhythm completely and the two of us go over the edge together, quiet this time, so it’s just the sound of our mingled breaths, the starbursts of sensation, and the feel of being one.