Chapter 30 #2
That night is the first one the whole pack sleeps under one roof with our names finally on the same piece of paper, and after the supper and the dishes and the long ridiculous bedtime negotiation that ends, as it always ends, with Cooper asleep with the cat on his feet and the goat indignant on the porch, the house goes quiet around us, warm and lit and ours, and I find that there is one more thing my body has been waiting all spring to do.
Because the bond with Asa closed in my dark yard a week ago, gentle and total, the last stone of the arch, and it has been singing in me ever since, beeswax and woodsmoke banked low under everything.
But the closing of a wound is one thing and the having of a man is another, and I have not yet had him, not the way I have had the others, not on purpose, in the clear, with no fever in the room to do any of the choosing for us.
And I am not a woman who leaves a thing half-finished anymore.
I find him last, the way he came to me last. He is in the doorway of the nesting room, of course he is, the careful one, the one who has spent a year guarding everybody’s threshold and standing on his own.
He has his shoulder against the frame and the porch light coming up the stairs behind him and that still watchful face, and when I take his hand and draw him in, over the threshold, all the way into the middle of the room, he comes, but I feel the old wall in him, the lifelong brace of a man who has only ever let himself be wanted as a thing the family needed.
“You don’t have to,” he says, low. “You’ve had a long week. I’m not owed?—“
“Stop.” I put my hand flat on his chest, over the deep steady drum of him.
“Nobody’s owed anything in this house. That’s the whole point of us.
I’m not here because you’re owed. I’m here because I want you, Asa Mercer, the deepest match I will ever have, and I have wanted you since a rainstorm on your porch in the fall, and I have waited longer for you than I have waited for anything in my life, and I am done waiting.
So. Do you want this? Look at me and tell me true. We don’t lie in this family.”
And the big careful man looks at me with his whole grief-scoured face gone open at last, and he says, rough, like the word costs him everything and he is glad to pay it, “God, yes. Yes. I’ve wanted you so long I quit letting myself know it.”
So I take the wall down brick by brick, the way I take everything down in this family, with my hands and my mouth and the plain stubborn fact of not leaving.
I undress him slow in the lamplight and he lets me, and his scent comes up thick when I get him bare, beeswax and woodsmoke flooding the warm room, rich and heady.
He is broad and scarred and beautiful, my last one home, cock heavy and already hard, flushed dark at the head and leaking for me.
I press my mouth to the bond-mark over his pulse where my teeth set it a week ago and feel him shudder all the way down.
My hands map the planes of his chest, the strength in his arms, then lower, wrapping around the thick length of him, stroking slow and reverent until he groans low in his throat.
His hands when they finally come to me are not careful in the bracing way anymore.
They are careful in the worshipping way, slow, certain, a man handling the one thing he never let himself ask for.
He lays me back in the nest and learns me the way he learns his bees, patient, attentive, reading the weather of me.
He kisses down my body, mouth warm and deliberate, until he settles between my thighs.
I am already slick and aching, my pussy flushed and wet with long wanting.
His tongue finds me, broad and steady, licking through my folds, circling my clit with perfect, unhurried focus until I am fisting my hands in the quilt and saying his name, *Asa, Asa*, the way I built a road of every other name in this family, laying it down so he can never lose the way to me.
He brings me over once with his mouth, deep and thorough, two thick fingers sliding into my heat and curling just right while his tongue works me through the crest, until I am shaking and open and crying out for more.
Only then does he move up the length of me. I reach down and find him hard and ready, velvet-sheathed steel, and I guide him to my entrance. We both go still at the enormous quiet fact of it.
“Yes?” he asks, even now, even here, the most careful man in Georgia.
“Yes,” I tell him. “Come home, Asa. All the way.”
And he pushes into me slow and deep, stretching me open around his thick cock until he is buried to the hilt, the deepest match I will ever have settling into the deepest part of me.
We both make a sound at the rightness of it, the last lock in the house turning, the arch taking its weight.
He moves in me with his forehead against mine and his breath ragged, a whole year of withheld want pouring out of him at last—long, rolling thrusts that drag perfectly against every sensitive place inside me.
I take all of it, wrapping my legs around his hips, telling him more, there, like that, deeper.
The careful wall is gone for good now, there is only Asa, only the deep steady drum of him driving into me while my walls flutter and grip around his length and the beeswax-and-woodsmoke bond blazes up bright between us.
When his knot starts to swell, thick and hot at the base, catching at my entrance, I moan, “Yes, that—knot me, stay in me, you’re not going anywhere ever again.
” He drives deep and the knot locks us together, stretching me full around him, and he comes with a broken sound, pulsing long and hard inside me, flooding me with heat as the bond sings complete.
I hold the whole unwalled weight of him to me as it takes him, his cock still twitching deep within while we stay locked tight.
After, knotted and warm and unhurried, he tucks my head under his jaw where the scent is strongest and he says, wrecked and wondering, “I spent a year sure the kindest thing I could do for this family was hold still.” His hand spreads warm over the small of my back.
“Della was right. She’s always right. The kindest thing was to let myself be let in. ”
“You’re in,” I tell him, against the drum of his heart. “All the way in. The arch is closed. Go to sleep, my love. The whole house is holding.”
And somewhere down the hall there are three other men I am bonded to for the rest of my life, my gold blaze and my green warmth and my quiet chosen one, all of them home, all of them mine, and a boy asleep with a cat on his feet, and a goat keeping his furious vigil on the porch, and me in the warm lit center of the most loved I have ever been, every door in me open and every light on at last. I do the old terrible arithmetic one more time, lying there in the dark with my last one home and held.
It comes out whole. It comes out four bonds and a boy and a future and me, finally, counted in.
I am in the picture. And the picture, at long last, is full.