23. Christine #3
He takes his time. Learns my body again. The hunger in his face makes my stomach flip. He spreads my thighs with both hands and just breathes there for a second, like he’s steadying himself, and then his mouth is on me. His mouth traces paths that make me forget my own name.
He kisses me there the way he kisses my mouth: deep, intent, like he has been starving for this exact taste.
His tongue finds me, slow and flat at first, dragging through the wetness that’s already gathered, and I jolt so hard my hips lift off the bed.
His hands pin them down. He groans into me like he’s the one coming apart.
“God. Christine. You taste-” He doesn’t finish.
He just goes back, licking into me, circling my clit with the tip of his tongue until my fingers are in his hair and I’m not sure if I’m pulling him closer or trying to survive it.
He slides one finger into me, then a second, curling them, and the stretch is small and perfect and not enough.
Wet sounds fill the room. My own breathing.
His. The filthy, tender noise of his mouth.
“Please,” I gasp. “I need-”
“I know.” He kisses the inside of my thigh, then higher, then my clit once more, lingering, before he rises over me.
I catch his shirt in both fists and pull. Buttons. Fabric. I need skin. I need him. The shirt hits the floor and there it is.
Always yours.
My fingers find it first. Trace every letter of the tattoo like I might smudge the ink. He goes still above me, breathing hard, watching my face like the next second might unmake him.
Then I lean up and put my mouth on it.
I lick along the curve of the A, slow, wet, following the script with my tongue. I can feel the salt of his skin, the heat of him.
“Christine-”
“I know.” I kiss the words again. His trousers are gone; I don’t remember when.
He’s hard against my hip, hot, thick, and when I reach down and wrap my hand around him he drops his forehead to mine and swears, quietly, like a prayer he’s trying not to say too loud.
I stroke him once, twice, spreading the wetness at the head with my thumb, and his hips jerk into my fist.
“I know what you need.”
He settles between my thighs. The head of him notches against me, sliding through the slickness, and we both go still. He looks at me. I nod. He pushes.
Just the first inch, and my mouth opens on a sound that isn’t quite a moan. He’s thick. Thicker than memory. The stretch burns in that sweet, impossible way, my body remembering and not-remembering at the same time, fluttering around him as he feeds himself into me in one long, shaking press.
And then he’s inside. Fully. So deep I can feel him in my throat, in my teeth, in the backs of my knees. We both stop breathing.
This is better than I remember, I think. This is-
“Perfect,” he breathes, forehead pressed to mine, barely moving, just feeling me. “You’re perfect. God, Christine, you’re so-”
He can’t finish. He just kisses me, deep and desperate, and starts to move.
Slow at first. Savoring. Every stroke deliberate, like he’s memorizing the way I feel around him. My legs wrap around his waist. My nails drag down his back. He groans into my neck and I feel it everywhere: in my cunt, in my chest, in the places his hands are gripping too hard.
“I love you,” he says, and it sounds like a prayer. “I love you. I never stopped. I never-”
“Show me.”
He does.
Faster now. Deeper. His hand finds mine, pins it above my head, fingers intertwined.
The other grips my hip, angling me just right, so that every thrust drags the thickest part of him over that spot inside me that makes my vision white out.
The slap of his body into mine. The creak of our bed.
His breath punching out of him each time he bottoms out.
“That’s it,” he breathes. “That’s it, sweetheart. Let go. I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.”
I break apart in his arms - clenching around him so hard he chokes on my name, pleasure ripping through me in long, helpless waves, my thighs shaking against his sides. He fucks me through it, slower, deeper, like he can’t stand to miss a second of how I feel coming on his cock.
He follows moments later, buried to the hilt, my name on his lips like a benediction, pulsing inside me, holding me like he might fall through the bed if he lets go.
After, we lie tangled together in the dark.
His hand traces lazy patterns on my back. My head rests on his chest, rising and falling with his breath. The city hums outside our windows, but in here everything is quiet. Still. Ours.
“I forgot,” I whisper.
“Forgot what?”
“How good we are together. How right this feels.” I tilt my head up to look at him. “I spent so long being angry. Being hurt. I forgot that underneath all of it… this. Us. This is what we were.”
“This is what we are.” He kisses my forehead. “And I’m never letting us forget again.”
I smile. Close my eyes. Let myself drift in the safety of his arms.
For the first time in years, I sleep without dreaming.
***
For three weeks, the ordinary days hold.
Isabella learns to roll from her back onto her stomach and then screams about it, outraged by the consequences of her own ambition.
I call Nadia and we talk for two hours and she cries and then I cry and then she asks, carefully, whether I’m still any good at seating charts.
Benedict takes the four a.m. feeding without being asked, and one morning I find him asleep sitting up on the living room floor with his back against the couch and our daughter wide awake on the play mat beside him, patting his knee like she’s checking he still works.
It is so ordinary that it frightens me. I keep listening for the sound of him leaving.
He doesn’t leave.
Then, on a Tuesday, the phones start.
***
The nightmare starts with his phone.
Just when everything seems perfect - just when I’ve started to believe we might actually have this, might actually get to keep it - the buzzing starts.
His phone first. Violent, insistent, the kind of notification avalanche that means something has gone very wrong. Then mine. Then his again.
“What-” I’m still half-asleep, reaching for consciousness like it’s something I can grab.
Benedict is already sitting up, already reaching for his phone. The light from the screen illuminates his face, and I watch the color drain from it like water from a sink.
“What is it?”
He doesn’t answer. Just hands me the phone.
The headlines are brutal:
“THE REAL BENEDICT MORGAN: Former Employees Speak Out”
“He Ruined My Life: Victims of the Morgan Empire”
“COLD, CRUEL, RUTHLESS: Inside the Reign of Terror at B-Morgan Industries”
I scroll, heart pounding. Stories flood every news site. A former assistant claims he made her cry daily. An ex-partner says Benedict destroyed his company and laughed about it. A fired executive describes him as “soulless, incapable of human emotion.”
Some of it is exaggerated. Some of it is clearly fabricated - details wrong, timelines impossible, quotes that don’t sound like anything he would say.
But some of it… has a grain of truth.
And at the center of it all, an “anonymous source close to the Morgan family.”
I don’t have to guess. Halfway down the third piece there’s a text message the reporter says came from Benedict’s personal phone, and I have seen it before - in a brown envelope, on my mother’s kitchen counter, flagged in the margin as a forgery.
Whoever handed that to a journalist was working from the same folder I am.
Pauline.
I look up. Benedict is sitting on the edge of the bed, head in his hands. The line of his spine is curved like he’s trying to protect himself from a blow.
“Hey.” I move to him, wrap my arms around him from behind. Feel the tremor running through his body. “We’ll figure this out.”
“Christine, this is-” His voice is ragged. “They’re calling me a monster.”
“They don’t know you.”
“What if they do?” He turns to face me, and his eyes are wild.
Shattered. “What if that’s who I really am?
I was cold. I was ruthless. I destroyed competitors without thinking twice.
I missed our daughter’s birth because a deal mattered more than you.
” His voice cracks. “What if I’m not changing?
What if I’m just pretending? And one day I’ll be that man again and I’ll hurt you and Isabella-”
“Stop.”
I kneel in front of him. Take his face in my hands. Force him to look at me.
“The man they’re describing? I married him.
I know him. I lived with him for six years.
” My eyes hold his, steady. Certain. “And I’m choosing to stay with the man you’ve become.
That man gets up for night feedings. That man learned to fix a shower from YouTube.
That man sits in my mother’s kitchen and calls her Mom. ”
“Christine-”
“You were drowning. You didn’t know how to ask for help. That doesn’t make you a monster.” My voice breaks. “It makes you human. And I will not let that woman - or anyone - rewrite our story.”
He breaks.
Sobs into my lap like a child, his whole body shaking, and I hold him the way he’s held me through every nightmare and every doubt and every moment I thought I couldn’t do this anymore.
“We’re going to fight this together,” I say. “Do you hear me? Together. I’m not running. Not this time.”
From down the hall, Isabella starts to cry - hungry, probably, or just sensing that something is wrong.
I pull back. Wipe his tears with my thumbs.
“That’s our daughter. In our home. In the life we built.” I kiss him once, firm and sure. “Now pull yourself together, go make her a bottle, and let me handle this.”
“Handle it how?”
I reach for my phone. Find the contact for the journalist who’s been requesting comment for weeks.
I’d like to make a statement, I type. Tomorrow. On the record. Tell me where and when.
I hit send.
Look at Benedict.
“You spent months fighting for me. Fighting for us.” I stand, pull on his shirt - my shirt now - and head for the door. “It’s my turn to fight for you.”