Laura #2
I am gasping. Sobbing. This is why I never made love to Larry.
The year of celibacy—of emptiness—ends here, under his tongue, and my body remembers him instantly, weeps for him instantly, my arousal slick and shameless against his chin.
He groans into my flesh, the vibration sending me careening toward the edge, then pulls back just enough to blow a cool stream of air over my swollen, throbbing clit.
“Beg,” he orders. “Beg me to let you come the way only I can.”
“Fuck you,” I choke out.
His fingers thrust deeper, crooking mercilessly. “Beg, Laura. Or I’ll keep you on this edge until Larry is nothing but a bad dream.”
The name should sting. Instead, it’s nothing.
Less than nothing. There is only his mouth, wet and wicked, descending again.
He sucks my clit between his lips and works it with his tongue until my vision blurs.
I shatter apart with a scream that tears my throat, my whole body convulsing, my hands fisting in his hair so violently strands tear, but he doesn't flinch.
By the time he works back up my body, kissing a savage, claiming trail over my stomach, my ribs, the underside of my breast, I’m still shaking.
My heart is a trapped bird. My skin is too small.
When he settles over me, his weight pressing me deep into the mattress, his eyes meet mine, and there is nothing left to pretend.
No walls. No Larry. No correct version of my life arranged carefully around what I actually wanted.
Just this. Just him. Just the infuriating, devastating truth of his body pinning mine.
“Say it,” he says. His cock is hot and heavy against my thigh, bare—he is bare, I realize with a shock that arrows straight to my core—and there is nothing between us but sweat and vengeance and longing.
I know what he wants. “No.” My jaw sets. I need to hold onto this last piece of myself, even while my body has already surrendered everything.
He shifts his hips, just slightly, the precise, gliding threat of his arousal slicking through my folds, nudging against where I am still fluttering from my orgasm, and my breath hisses out through my teeth. “Say it.”
“I’m not—”
“Laura.” My name is a warning. A prayer. A command.
“I want you.” The words tear out of me, honest and furious and shattered all at once. “I want you. I have always wanted you. Are you satisfied?”
“Not yet,” he says, and takes me.
He pushes inside in one long, unforgiving thrust. No hesitation.
No barrier. He fills me to the root, and the stretch burns so perfectly I see stars.
My back arches off the bed, a cry catching in my lungs as he seats himself fully, his pelvis grinding against my sensitive clit, his chest crushing my breasts.
He’s different. That’s the thing underneath the heat and the fury and the total claiming of a man who has decided.
The first time he held something back—some restraint, some damage control, the part of him that knew he was going to send me home and was already constructing the distance. He is not holding anything back now.
He pulls out to the tip and slams back in so hard the bed frame shrieks against the wall.
Then again. And again. He fucks me like the year of distance is a fortress he is dismantling with his body.
He is deliberate, thorough, merciless, angling his hips so that every inward stroke hammers that perfect spot inside me while his pubic bone rasps against my clit.
The rhythm is punishing, glorious, a war drum claiming every inch of surrendered territory.
“Look at me,” he snarls.
I force my eyes open. His face is savage, beautiful, contorted with a need that mirrors my own.
Sweat drips from his jaw onto my chest. “Mine,” he says against my throat.
Low. Certain. The word that wrecked me the first time, that I spent a year trying to unknow the feeling of, to bleach from my vocabulary.
His teeth graze my pulse, biting down just hard enough to mark, to brand.
“This pussy is mine. This mouth is mine. This life you tried to give away all mine.”
“Yours,” I whimper. The word dissolves any lingering ghost of a man who thought he could have this.
“Mine,“ he says again, and this time I don’t argue. I can’t.
My hands grip his back, his shoulders, whatever I can reach, and hold on as he destroys me.
He drives deeper, rearranging my cells, his hand sliding under my hip to tilt me up so he can sink even further, until I am nothing but a vessel for his reclaiming.
He pulls a sound out of me that I’ve only ever made for him—involuntary, broken, tuned to this exact man—and his whole body responds, his muscles locking, his rhythm faltering for a fraction of a second before he growls and regains control.
“Only me,“ he says. Not a question. A demand for the final truth.
“Only you.” Honest. Completely and finally honest. Tears prick my eyes, not from pain but from the exquisite, brutal relief of being known. “It has always only been you.”
The sound he makes at that is not a word.
It is an animal noise of victory and anguish, of a man who has found his home after walking through fire.
He drives deeper, his hand between us pressing exactly the right place with his thumb, and I come apart with his name breaking across my lips like a prayer and a curse.
My orgasm rips through me with the force of a year’s worth of denial, my body clamping down around him, milking him, pulling him into the abyss with me.
His arms lock around me like steel bands, his face burying in my curls, and he follows me over with a roar that he smothers against my neck.
He spills inside me, hot and endless, and in that moment I am branded. I am his. There is no Larry. There was never Larry. There was only ever this man, this moment, this unbearable, perfect truth.
The mountain holds its silence around us.
I lie with my cheek on his chest, wrecked and satisfied in the way of a body thoroughly claimed.
His arm is around me. His hand has found my curls again — that slow, unconscious movement I have thought about more times than I will ever tell him. His heartbeat slows. Mine takes longer.
Outside, the snow presses against the windows, patient and indifferent. Inside, this stone room holds the two of us and the considerable wreckage of the day and the year before it, and I let myself be still inside it for a moment. Just a moment.
“Satisfied?” He asks in a rough-edged careful voice.
I lift my head and look at him.
“No.” I hold his gaze when he turns to look at me.
Clear. Certain. “I am not satisfied.” My hand opens over his chest, over the heartbeat that is not quite steady.
“You can do this to me every day for the rest of my life, and I will not be satisfied.” He goes still under my palm.
“Not until you tell me why. The real why. Not the surveillance, not Artur’s family or the safe house.
” I hold his eyes. “Why you sent me home that morning. Why you came back. What this actually costs you, because I can see it costing you and you won’t say it out loud. ”
His jaw works once.
He says nothing.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him. “You made sure of that.” I settle my head back on his chest, ear over his heart. “So when you’re ready.”
His arm squeezes around me. His heartbeat gives him away. He says nothing. But it says everything.