19. Nora #3
He guides me down onto the mattress, and we settle onto our sides, facing each other. I drape my top leg over his hip, hooking my heel behind him to pull him closer.
He groans, a low vibration in his chest, as he slides his hard cock inside me in one smooth, deep thrust. I gasp, my fingers digging into his shoulders, my head tossing back against the pillow.
“God, you feel like coming home,” he whispers against my neck, his breath hot. “Like every night I thought I’d never get.”
He begins to move, his hips grinding into mine with a slow, rhythmic pressure. Because of the way I’m angled, every push buries him deeper, hitting that sweet spot that makes my toes curl. I wrap my arm around his neck, pulling him down so I can moan directly into his mouth.
“Please,” I whimper, my hips tilting up to meet him. “Right there… don’t stop.”
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs, his voice thick with lust. “I’ve got you, baby. You feel so good.”
The friction builds, a slow-burn heat that radiates from where we are joined.
He picks up the pace, his thrusts becoming shorter and more urgent, the wet rhythm of our bodies loud in the quiet room.
I can feel him pulsing inside me, his muscles tightening as he pushes me further into the mattress. I moan his name, a broken sound, as the first wave of my orgasm crashes over me, squeezing him tight.
He breaks with my name caught in his teeth, shoving deep one last time and spilling hot inside me, his body shuddering against mine.
We stay like that for a moment, breathing in sync, our hearts hammering against each other.
But the hunger isn’t gone; it’s just shifted. His mouth starts moving again before his breathing settles - my shoulder, my collarbone, the birthmark, always the birthmark, pressed to his lips like punctuation.
His hands relearn me at half speed, palms dragging warm down my sides, over my hips, unhurried now that the first fever has broken, and under them I feel my body wake back up one nerve at a time.
“We have a wedding to plan,” I murmur into his hair, not meaning a word of it.
“Mm. Long engagement.” His teeth graze my throat. “I have a list to get through first. It’s alphabetized.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“You married into it.” His hand slides between my thighs, finds me still soft and swollen and ruined for him, and the laugh dies in my mouth.
“Provisionally.” He shifts, sitting up and crossing his legs on the bed.
I look at him, my eyes heavy, and slowly lower myself onto his lap.
I slide down his length, feeling him already hardening again inside me. I wrap my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck, pulling him in until there’s no space left between us.
We aren’t moving fast now. We are just swaying, a slow, intimate grind that feels more like a conversation than an act. He buries his face in the crook of my neck, kissing the sensitive skin there while his hands roam my back, pulling me flush against his chest.
“I love you,” he breathes, the words vibrating through my entire body. “I love you so much.”
“I love you too,” I sob softly, clinging to him as we rock together, the intimacy of the position making me feel completely seen, completely held.
It builds slow this time, glacial, geological - his hands spread across my back, my hips rolling in his lap, the pressure inside me climbing degree by degree while our foreheads stay pressed together and neither of us closes our eyes.
When I start to shake he doesn’t speed up. He holds the pace, holds me, murmuring against my mouth - there she is, right there, come home - and the climax takes me apart gently, wave after long wave, my whole body clenching around him while I gasp his name into the space between our lips.
He follows a moment later with a shudder that runs the length of him, his arms crushing me close, his face buried in my neck, and we stay locked together through all of it, swaying, wrung out, one thing.
When we finally collapse, the afterglow leaves me floating. He doesn’t let me go. He pulls the duvet over us, tucking my head under his chin and wrapping his arms around me like I’m the most precious thing he’s ever touched.
The scent of him - soap, sweat, and skin - is the only thing I want to breathe.
He murmurs into my hair that he heard me earlier. Every word of it.
“And?”
“And I’m painting the mailbox this weekend.” His arms tighten, anchoring me to him. “You’ve been home for weeks, Nora. I’m just making it official.”
***
Morning arrives smelling like waffles.
I follow the smell downstairs in Theo’s shirt and find chaos: batter on the counter, batter on the floor, a light dusting of flour on my daughter’s nose, and Theo at the waffle iron wearing yesterday’s trousers and an apron that says WORLD’S OKAYEST COOK.
“Mommy!” Lily is kneeling on a barstool, supervising. “We’re making waffles. Theo does them wrong but I’m teaching him.”
Mommy. Just like that. Dropped into a Tuesday morning like it’s always lived there. My eyes sting and I blame the flour.
“Wrong how?”
“It only makes squares.” Deep six-year-old disgust. “Waffles are supposed to be shapes.”
“She’s demanded a dragon.” Theo waves the spatula at a plate where a waffle wears a lopsided sprawl of banana slices - too many legs, one lonely blueberry eye. “I want it noted that I attempted a dragon. What we have achieved is more of a… committed blob.”
“It has a tail,” Lily says loyally.
“It has a tail,” he agrees, solemn as church.
I pour coffee and lean against the counter and watch them - my daughter directing, this man obeying, the morning sun coming through windows I get to wake up behind now - and something in my chest unclenches that has been clenched for two years.
Maybe longer. Maybe since a birthday party in a garden.
Lily plants the last strawberry herself, with help, to great ceremony. And then, spearing her first bite, with the devastating timing children save for exactly the wrong-right moment:
“Theo. Are you going to be my new daddy?”
The spatula stops.
The kitchen goes very quiet. Theo looks at me over her head - one long look, asking permission and offering everything, both at once - and I give him the smallest nod, because my throat has stopped working.
He comes around the counter and crouches to her level, flour and all.
“Here’s what I’m going to be,” he says. “I’m going to be the guy who makes your waffles wrong.
And drives you to school. And learns the dragon voice - badly, your mom does it better, we all know it.
I’m going to be here every single morning, for as long as you’ll have me.
” He tucks a flour-dusted curl behind her ear.
“You’ve got a daddy. That’s his job to figure out, not mine to take.
But you and your mom are stuck with me forever, and I’m not going anywhere. Ever. Does that work?”
Lily considers this with the full gravity of her office.
“Can you do the dragon voice now?”
“I absolutely cannot. Your mother holds the copyright.”
“Mommy. Do the dragon for the waffle.”
So I do the dragon voice for a waffle at eight in the morning in a sunlit kitchen, and my daughter shrieks with laughter, and the man prying the next committed blob out of the iron looks at me across the flour like I hung the sun-
-and this, I think. This is what I came back from the dead for. Not the reckoning. Not the ruin.
This.