Caleb
She’d been under for an hour and I was nowhere close.
I couldn’t stop thinking about my father’s club. What they had been up to eighteen years ago.
Which meant my father was the only man alive who could tell me whether the math was real. I couldn’t quite figure out how to ask my father…that.
So I made myself quit. No use to her wrung out by morning. I matched my breathing down to hers and held it there like a count, and somewhere in the holding the dark took me too.
I came up out of sleep slow, and the first thing I knew was her.
Sometime in the dark we’d both moved. I had her from behind now, the long line of her backed into me head to heel, her ass tucked warm into my lap, and the hand I’d spread over her heart the night before had wandered in my sleep and come to rest full over her breast, holding the soft weight of it like it had every right to be there.
My cock was hard against the curve of her ass and had been a while by the feel of it, nothing between us but the thin cotton of her shorts, and every slow breath she took rocked her back into me like her body had made its mind up in her sleep about something the rest of her hadn’t caught up to yet.
I went still. The clock on her side read a few minutes past six.
Her window faced the wrong way and took the morning secondhand, thin and grey-gold off the white of next door’s wall, and in that light, I lay there with my hand full of her and my mouth near the back of her neck and did the arithmetic on how long a man could hold this still on purpose.
Not long, it turned out. She stirred — breath changing first, the same way it had on the floor, a sound that wasn’t a word yet — and pressed back into me before she was awake enough to know she was doing it, and I felt the exact second the rest of her came online behind it.
I braced for the flinch. A month of her had taught me what to expect: the hand going up to the hair, the reach for the face she put on for the world, the half-second where she gathered herself back into the woman who managed everything.
It didn’t come.
She turned in my arms instead, slow, until she was facing me, and looked at me out of two days of wreckage with not one piece of it hidden — no reach for the mirror, nothing smoothed over.
Just her, blinking up at me in the grey light like waking against me had always been true and she was only now getting the news of it.
“Hi,” she said. Rough with sleep.
“Hi.”
I don’t know what she found in my face. I’d quit governing it the second I felt her turn.
But whatever was on it pulled her quiet, and her hand came up flat to my chest and pressed — deliberate, an answer to a question nobody had said out loud — and the want stood up in me so loud I could hardly hear the house around it.
I’d been holding this a long time. I could go on holding it; I knew how in my sleep.
But she’d chosen this. Eyes open, her own bed, the plain morning light, no shock in her and no cold.
What I’d decided somewhere she couldn’t see still stood: the night she’d torn herself open in front of me was not the night I’d take all of her.
That I’d keep. The rest I could put in her hands this morning, and be glad to.
I brought my hand up to the side of her face and kissed her.
Nothing like the night before. That had been a kiss with my hand on the brake the whole way through.
This was the other thing — slow, and then deep, and I didn’t reach for the brake at all.
Her mouth was sleep-warm and slow under mine, and then it wasn’t; she came up into it with a small surprised sound against my mouth, like she’d braced for the careful version and got handed the real one instead.
Her hands found my chest. They moved, the flat of her palm warm over a rib and two fingers tracing the line of it down, learning me on purpose.
Every place she touched answered before I’d told it to.
I’m not built to lie still and be handled.
I held still and let her do it anyway, and the work of holding still was a thing I could feel in my own jaw — and that was its own brand of new.
She broke off to look. Came up on an elbow over me and went quiet, her eyes dropping to my body and reading it the way she reads everything, fast and sure.
Her fingers found the long scar under my collarbone and stopped there.
Then she traced it the whole way down, slow, the pad of one finger following the old raised seam of it, and the sound that got out of her when she did wasn’t a word and wasn’t one she chose to make — low and undone.
I caught it and put it somewhere it would keep.
I already knew it was going to outlast most of what I’d ever owned.
“You don’t have to give me the stories,” she said, her fingertip still resting where the scar ran out.
“I’ll give you whatever you want, beautiful.” It came out lower than I’d meant it to. “Just — not this morning. This morning I’ve got better to do than tell you how I got cut.”
The color climbed her throat at that, and she didn’t fight it down.
“Such as,” she said, flatly. But her thigh had slid against mine and her body had come in that last half-inch, and the plain in her voice did nothing at all to cover what the rest of her had quit being able to hide.
I rolled us. One arm under her, slow, so she went onto her back beneath me like it was the easiest travel her body had ever made, and I came up over her on a forearm and made the mistake of taking in the whole of her at once.
I had to stop. Pull a breath and hold it.
The hand I’d braced beside her head wasn’t steady, and I let it not be steady — no point pretending, to her of all people, that she didn’t do that to me.
“Such as that,” I said, against the corner of her mouth.
I came up off her and sat back on my heels and took the hem of the grey shirt in both hands.
I didn’t pull it. I held it, my knuckles against the warm skin of her stomach, and let her answer however she was going to.
She answered by lifting her arms for me — straight up, no hesitation in it, a woman who’d decided something all the way down.
I drew the shirt up the length of her and dropped it off the side of the bed, and the bra went after it, her own hands at the catch before mine could get there, and then there was just her in the grey-gold light.
“Let me look at you.”
Her arms started to come up — old reflex — and I caught both her wrists, gentle, and laid them back down at her sides.
“No,” I said. “Don’t. You’ve got no idea what you look like right now, so I’m gonna tell you.
Flushed, and bare, and looking at me like you’ve already made up your mind.
I’ve thought about you like this more nights than I’ll cop to — and you’re better than anything I came up with.
” She went pink all over. “Don’t you dare cover that up. Not for me.”
“You’re a menace,” she said.
“You have no idea.”
I came down over her and kissed her again, except this time I didn’t stay at her mouth.
I went to the corner of it, then the line of her jaw, then the spot under her ear that made her breath stutter the first time I lingered there — I filed it — and on down the throat where the color still sat, open-mouthed and unhurried, her pulse going quick under my lips.
She made a low sound and her hand came up into my hair, and she didn’t push me anywhere. She just held on.
I went lower. Took one breast in my mouth and drew the nipple in slow, and the whole of her answered at once — her back coming up off the bed, a breath dragged in sharp and held somewhere she couldn’t seem to let it go.
I stayed until she let it out shaking. Then I gave the other the same, slower, my thumb working the first while my mouth was busy with the second, and learned her: the catch in her throat, her thigh climbing the outside of my hip, the broken little noise that got loose when I closed my teeth careful around the tip. Her fingers pulled tight in my hair.
I kissed my way down the middle of her from there — sternum, the soft of her stomach, the jut of one hipbone under my mouth — and hooked my fingers in the sleep shorts and took them off.
She lifted her hips to help me, active, deciding, on her own steam.
I drew her down the bed by the backs of her knees until her hips were at the very edge of it, and went to the floor on my knees in front of her like a man who’d found the one thing in the world worth kneeling for.
Her eyes went to the ceiling.
“Look at me.” I waited for them to come back. “Eyes here. I want to watch you watching me eat your pussy.”
God help me, she looked — up on her elbows with her hair everywhere and her breath already gone fast — and held my eyes while I lowered my mouth and dragged my tongue up the length of her, slow, through the slick heat of her and over her clit.
She came apart at just that — her head dropping back, the elbow nearly going out from under her, the sound torn out of her something I felt more than heard, low in me and down through my hands.
It just about took the top of my head off.
I took my time. A month of her, a month of paying attention, and it was all paying off now — working her open and slow with my tongue, then closing my mouth over her clit and sucking, light at first, until her hips chased my mouth right up off the bed.
All I knew was her taste, her slick heat.
I felt every sound she made. When her thighs clamped tight at the sides of my head I stayed with it.
When she said a word I’d have bet money she never say with the lights on, I gave her a low “that’s it” against the inside of her thigh.
Her hand came down and fisted in my hair and pulled, not careful with it, and I didn’t care.
“Caleb—” broke out of her, torn clean in half, “I’m—”