Chapter Four #3
I got us to the bed. Laid her down on the quilt and stood over her for a second, just looking. Nell Chambers, hair spread on my pillow, flannel shirt open, body flushed and wanting, looking up at me with nothing left of the boardroom. Just heat and need and her.
"Get down here," she said.
I got down there.
I settled between her thighs and kissed her deep. Her legs wrapped around my hips, the head of my cock nudged against her entrance, and she lifted her hips, trying to take me in. I pulled back.
"Not yet."
"Why?"
"Because I want to hear you ask for it."
Her eyes flashed, indignant and turned on in equal measure, which was a combination I was learning to love. "I'm not going to beg."
"I didn't say beg." I kissed her jaw. Her throat. The space between her breasts. "I said ask."
I worked my way down her body, mouth and palms, kissing her ribs, her stomach, the jut of her hip bone. She was squirming, her fingers in my hair, her breath ragged.
"Cliff."
"That's my name." I kissed the crease of her thigh. "Not what I'm looking for."
"I want you." Her voice cracked on it, the composure finally shattering, and the raw honesty of it hit me harder than I was ready for.
"What do you want?"
"I want you inside me. Please, Cliff, I want you to fuck me."
I pushed into her in one slow stroke.
She was tight and hot and wet. The sound she made, my name broken in half, nearly ended me.
I held still, buried to the hilt, my arms braced on either side of her head, and I looked down at her face.
Her eyes were wide. Her mouth was open. She was looking at me in a way I'd never seen from another person, and my chest cracked open.
"Okay?" I managed.
"Don't you dare stop."
I moved. Slow at first, pulling nearly all the way out and sliding back in, and she gasped each time, her nails digging into my back.
I set a rhythm, deep and steady, and her hips rose to meet each thrust, and we found it together, two people whose bodies decided to cooperate even when their heads hadn't caught up.
"You feel incredible," I told her. "So tight. So fucking perfect."
She gasped something wordless and pulled me down to kiss her. The angle changed. I went deeper, and she broke the kiss to cry out, her back arching, her tits pressed against my chest.
I hooked one of her legs higher on my hip. Changed the angle again, tilting up, and found the spot that made her eyes roll back. She grabbed the headboard with one hand and my shoulder with the other and held on.
"There — God, right there — don't stop —"
I didn't stop. I fucked her steady, deep, my thumb finding her clit between us, circling it while I moved inside her, and she was unraveling, her whole body tightening around me, her moans getting louder.
I was talking because I couldn't not, telling her how good she felt, how beautiful she was, how I'd wanted this since the moment she stepped out of that Prius, and she was shaking, close, so close.
"Let go," I told her. "I've got you. Let go."
She came with her whole body, clenching around my cock, her cry filling the room, her nails leaving lines down my back that I'd feel tomorrow.
I held on, barely, my jaw locked, every muscle fighting to keep going through her orgasm because watching Nell Chambers fall apart underneath me was not a thing I wanted to end.
She was still trembling when I slowed my hips. Still pulsing around me. Her eyes opened, hazy and sated, and she looked at me with a softness that punched through every wall I'd built.
"Your turn," she said.
She put her hands flat against me and pushed, and I rolled, and she was on top of me. The view from below, her straddling my hips, the flannel still hanging from her shoulders, her hair wild, her face flushed, would ruin me for every other woman I'd ever look at.
She sank down onto my cock and we both groaned. She rode me with her palms on my stomach, rolling her hips, finding her rhythm. I held her waist and watched her face and tried to commit every detail to memory because this moment was not guaranteed to happen again and I wanted all of it.
"You're staring," she said, breathless.
"I'm admiring."
"Same thing."
"Not even close."
She leaned down and kissed me, and the new angle drove me deeper, and she moaned into my mouth.
I gripped her hips and thrust up into her and she sat back up with a gasp, and the shift, the depth, the friction on her clit, sent her spiraling again.
I felt it building in her. Her thighs tightened.
Her rhythm stuttered. Her breath hitched.
"Again?" I asked.
"I — oh God — I think —"
"That's my girl." I held her hips and fucked up into her, hard and steady, my thumb on her clit.
She shattered for the third time with a sound I wanted to record and play back on bad days for the rest of my natural life.
Her pussy clamped around me and I couldn't hold back anymore.
I came buried inside her, my hips snapping up, her name torn out of me in a voice I didn't recognize.
She collapsed onto my chest and we lay there, tangled and gasping and wrecked.
Neither of us moved for a long time.
Her head was on my chest. My hand was in her hair, fingers moving through it without thinking. The quilt was bunched underneath us and the room was dark except for moonlight through the window, and the river was steady outside.
"That," she said finally, her voice muffled into my skin, "was not in the manual."
I laughed. A real one, low and quiet, and I felt her smile where her cheek rested on me.
"Should we add a section?"
"It would require significant revision. Possibly a complete overhaul of the scheduling framework."
I kissed the top of her head. She made a small sound and pressed closer. My arm tightened around her, and I held her and breathed and did not think too hard about what was growing in me, because thinking would make it real, and real things could be lost.
She fell asleep against me. I could tell from how her breathing changed, long and even, her body going heavy and soft. I lay there with her weight warm and heavy on me and stared at the ceiling.
The cabin was quiet. The river ran outside. An owl called from somewhere up the ridge and another answered from the valley. I lay in the dark with a woman sleeping on me and thought about all the things I was not going to be able to give her.
The vasectomy. The bet with Drew. The lie I was telling every day I didn't come clean.
She wanted a baby. She had a schedule for it, footnoted and organized to the page, and she'd married a man she thought could give her that, and I couldn't give it to her. For the first time, that felt wrong in my gut, and I couldn't put it aside.
I eased out from under her. She murmured, shifted, settled back into the pillow. I pulled the quilt over her shoulders, found my boxers on the hallway floor, and stood in the dark.
My phone was on the kitchen counter. I picked it up. Three bars, the cell booster holding.
I looked up the number. Dialed. It was after hours, but that's what voicemails were for.
"This is Cliff Masterson. I need to schedule a consultation for a vasectomy reversal." I gave my number. Hung up.
My hands were shaking. Not from cold.
I set the phone down. Walked back to the bedroom. Stood in the doorway and looked at her. Nell Chambers, asleep in my bed, wearing my shirt, with a ring I'd put on her finger ten days ago.
I didn't know how to square the call I'd just made with the deal I'd made with Drew. Didn't know how to hold both things at once, the money I needed and the woman I wanted and the lie sitting heavy in the middle.
I didn't try to figure it out. I got back into bed. She shifted toward me in her sleep, her forehead pressing against my shoulder, and I lay in the dark and listened to her breathe and did not sleep for a long time.