Chapter 21 #3
And then his mouth is on me and the argument is over.
Whatever I was going to say converts into my fingers twisting in his hair, my heel sliding along the mattress, my spine lifting off the bed by degrees.
Every sound I can’t make stays in my body and compounds there, and he is in no hurry whatsoever, patient and filthy and precise, easing off exactly when I start to climb and then building me back up again until I’m shaking with the effort of silence.
“You’re holding your breath,” he murmurs against me, and I can hear how much he’s enjoying himself. “Breathe, sugar. I’ve got you all night.”
“I will end you,” I whisper at the ceiling.
“Mm. Promises everywhere tonight.”
When the wave finally builds past bearing, I clamp my own hand over my mouth, hard, and he reaches up without stopping and peels it away and replaces it with his palm.
“Give it to me instead,” he whispers.
I do. I come apart against his mouth with his hand catching every sound I own, wrung out and arching and utterly silent while the house sleeps on around us, and it is more, not less. Everything stays between us. Everything is ours now.
He kisses his way back up my body while I’m still trembling, looking indecently pleased with himself, and I decide the man has held the ball long enough.
I push him over.
He goes willingly, the way he does everything with me now, flat on his back in the strip of moonlight, arms surrendered above his head, watching me with his heart completely undefended in his face.
“Your turn to be quiet,” I tell him, and set about ruining him.
I take my time about it, and I’m not gentle, and I’m not fair.
I use my mouth on his throat, his chest, the taut ridges of his stomach, the trail below his navel, and I use my hands where I’ve learned he can least survive them, wrapping him slow and firm and working him until his hips lift, until his breath goes ragged, until this enormous composed man is biting down on his own forearm with his eyes screwed shut and a flush crawling up his neck.
“Callie.” Strangled. Reverent. “Sugar. You’re going to kill me.”
“You have excellent medical staff.”
“They can’t fix this.” His hands find my hips, gripping like a man losing an argument with himself. “There’s no cure for you. Come here.”
There’s the nightstand, the foil packet torn open with the same deliberate care he gave the toothbrush cups, no wasted motion, no hesitation.
His fingers are steady as he rolls the latex down, but his breath isn’t.
I watch the way his throat works, the way his pulse jumps in the hollow beneath his jaw.
Then he’s between my thighs, the heat of him pressing me open, the length of him filling me inch by inch until my back arches off the bed and my nails dig into his shoulders.
His forehead drops to mine, his exhale ragged against my lips.
My heels lock behind his hips, pulling him deeper, and neither of us looks away.
We don’t have to. His eyes are dark, pupils blown wide, and I can feel and see the exact moment he bottoms out—the way his lashes flutter, the way his mouth goes slack with the effort of holding still.
“Hi,” he murmurs, voice rough, his hips already rocking in shallow, testing thrusts that make my thighs tremble.
“Move,” I whisper, half a laugh and half a plea.
He moves.
Long, deep, rolling strokes, no rush in him anywhere, one hand sliding under the small of my back to tilt me into an angle that pulls a gasp up my throat that his mouth arrives just in time to take.
We find a rhythm: everything measured, everything held at a simmer, pleasure banked instead of spent, and it turns out that restraint is its own kind of wildness, that keeping it slow when both of us are this far gone takes more than letting it fly ever did.
The whispered nonsense spills between us in fragments, trading turns.
“You feel—“ he starts, and doesn’t finish.
“I know. Shh.”
“The headboard—“
“Is fine. Don’t you dare stop.”
“Never.” His mouth at my ear, wrecked and warm. “You’re it for me, you know that? This. You. The socks in the hallway. All of it.”
“Nate—“
“You don’t have to say anything. I just needed it on the record.”
The end gathers slow, from a long way off, like weather rolling in over open water, and when it breaks it takes us both at once, my face pressed into his neck, my teeth against his shoulder, his whole body going rigid above mine, and the sound he makes is barely a sound at all, a low broken exhale crushed into my hair that I feel straight through my sternum.
That one’s mine too. I’m keeping all of them.
Afterward we lie tangled in the dark, his heart slowing under my ear, his fingers tracing lazy routes on my spine, and the quiet of the house settles over us, full instead of hollow: two boys asleep in rooms that ratified themselves, a dinosaur on guard duty, small socks in a drawer that has been empty for years.
And I think, tucked against him in the dark, about the woman who stood in a parking lot two months ago, late again, armored to the teeth, certain she had this man solved, and I think about the article with my name on it making its way across the state tonight, and the fact that for once, nobody had to ask me to be anywhere.
I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Early, even.