14. Solenn #2
By the time I’m lying there in nothing but underwear I am shaking hard enough to be embarrassed about it. My clit is throbbing in time with my heartbeat. I can feel how wet I am and he hasn’t even gotten there yet.
“God.” His voice is in pieces. “Look at you. Soft. Full. Glowing. Mine.”
“Don’t look too hard.”
“I’m going to look at all of it.” His hands come over the curve of my belly again, where our daughter is currently doing something enthusiastic about the commotion. “I want to know all of this.”
“That’s very poetic for a man who reviewed chapter eighteen.”
“I’m improvising. And I’m hard as hell watching you like this, in case you were wondering.”
Then he puts his tongue along a silver line low on my hip and I nearly come off the mattress. Bright clean pleasure spikes straight to my core.
“Sensitive?”
“Everything is sensitive. It’s a whole thing that happens. Hormones. Blood flow. I’m basically a walking live wire.”
“Good. Means I get to hear every little sound.” He follows another stretch mark.
Then another. Mapping me while I hold onto the sheets with both hands and refuse, on principle, to beg.
His tongue is hot. He kisses the underside of my belly, nuzzles the crease of my thigh, breathes me in like I’m his favorite smell in the world.
“Liam.”
“Still here. Not going anywhere. Never again.”
“I need-”
“I know, baby. I know exactly what you need.”
His fingers hook into my underwear and take it down my legs with almost ceremonial care, and then his mouth is exactly where I have been out of my mind about for days.
I stop having thoughts of any kind. Just sensation. Just the wet drag of his tongue through my folds, slow and thorough, like he is finally home.
He was not joking about slow.
Long licks from entrance to clit, soft sucks. The flat of his tongue pressing firm where I need pressure, then circling when I start to shake. He’s learning me from the beginning, changing what he’s doing based on what comes out of me, going back to anything that makes me lose the thread.
When I gasp he does it again, deeper. When I get a hand in his hair and pull, the sound he makes against me nearly finishes it on the spot.
“Still with me?” he asks, lifting his head just far enough that I can see my wetness on his mouth. Hottest picture of my entire life.
“If you stop I will end you.”
He laughs into my thigh and gets back to work like a man on a mission. Two fingers slide into me easy because I am soaked, curling just right while his mouth seals over my clit and sucks in steady pulses.
I am making sounds I did not authorize. My free hand finds his shoulder, nails digging in. He groans like he loves it.
It builds slow, then not slow, then rising past anything I can hold onto. He pins my hips gently with one forearm so I can’t chase or escape, forcing me to take every wet stroke, every curl of his fingers, every filthy praise he mutters between licks.
“So sweet. Always so sweet for me. Look at this body. Perfect. Come on my tongue so I can taste how much you missed this.”
That does it. The orgasm rolls through me hard and almost mean, nothing in the world except his hands keeping me steady and his mouth staying exactly where I need it through every last shake and clench and broken cry.
I soak his chin. He licks me through it like he never wants to stop, humming praise against my oversensitive clit until I finally tug his hair because I might actually die.
When it lets go of me I have no bones left at all. Just heartbeat and aftershocks and the ridiculous urge to cry or laugh or both.
“All right?” He’s coming back up my body, kissing as he goes.
“I’ve forgotten my name. And possibly how legs work.”
“Solenn Alston.” He settles beside me carefully, pulling me in so my back rests against his chest, one big hand splayed protectively over our child. Still fully dressed. “The woman I’m in love with. The one carrying my whole world.”
“You’re still dressed.”
“Tonight isn’t about me.”
“What if I want it to be about you? What if I want you inside me?”
He makes a sound behind me that is not entirely human.
“Then tell me that another night.” He kisses my forehead, then the spot behind my ear that makes me shiver.
“Tonight I only wanted to be good at something in this apartment. Wanted to take care of my girl. Show her how fucking thankful I am she exists. That she asked. That she’s growing our baby and letting me back in. ”
I laugh into his arm, which hurts in the best available way. My body is still humming. My brain is already replaying his tongue on those stretch marks and the way he said my seed took root like it was dirty poetry.
We stay there a long time and neither of us says anything, and it isn’t awkward, and that’s the part I’ll think about later. Along with how hard he still is. And how soon another night can possibly be. And how I already want his mouth again.
Then he shifts to get up.
“Don’t.”
He goes still. “Are you sure?”
“Get in the bed, Liam.”
“Just sleeping.”
“Get in the bed.”
He toes off his shoes. Pulls his shirt over his head, and I get a full unobstructed look at what I have been declining to think about for days, and I make an executive decision to think about it.
He gets under the covers and arranges himself around the shape of me with real care, one arm over my hip, his hand spread flat and warm where our daughter is.
“Comfortable?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me if you need-”
“Stop asking and hold me.”
He holds me.
***
I wake in the dark.
The apartment is quiet. His heart is going steady under my ear and his arm hasn’t moved off me all night.
We’re divorced.
The thought arrives from a long way off, soft, almost polite. We’re divorced. I packed two suitcases and got on a plane and signed my name in front of a judge, and I stood up in that courtroom and said things I meant.
I lie here in the dark and I try to bring back one of them.
Any one. The thing I was so certain of that I built five hundred miles of distance out of it. His arm tightens.
“Go to sleep,” he mumbles into my hair.
“I wasn’t awake.”
“Liar.”
I smile against his chest, in the dark, in my own bed, and I can’t do it. I made that word final for a reason. And I cannot remember what it was.