24. Chapter 24 Home #2
I drew her shirt, my shirt, over her head slowly, my hands tracing the sides of her waist as it came free, feeling the change in her body with the attention I gave everything that mattered to me.
The small new curve of what we had made.
I pressed my palm flat against her stomach for one moment before I moved.
She looked at me in the dim light.
I kept moving.
I kissed the line of her throat, then the hollow beneath her collarbone, the soft skin below her breast. Her breathing changed, the shift I had started recognizing instinctively, the way it went shallow when I found what worked. I moved lower and she exhaled sharply and her hand found my hair.
"Trevor—"
I brushed my mouth against her temple. "Tell me if anything feels wrong," I said quietly.
"Don't stop," she said.
I didn't.
When I finally moved over her I found the angle that worked for her now, her hips tilted slightly, my weight on one forearm, one hand at her hip guiding.
When I pushed inside her I went slowly, inch by inch, feeling every detail of it.
She was impossibly wet. Warm and soft, swollen around me in a way that was different from before ,fuller somehow, more sensitive, her body gripping me tighter from the first stroke in a way that made my jaw lock and my breath stop completely.
The sound she made was different too. Like something that had moved past the place where she still tried to hold herself back.
I stilled for one second just to feel it ,the slick heat of her wrapped around my cock, her pulse against me, the way her body had changed and was still changing and was mine in every version of itself.
Then I moved.
I moved with attention rather than urgency ,not slow exactly, but deliberate, reading every shift in her breathing, every tightening of her hand at my shoulder.
She said more with the directness she brought to everything and I gave her more — deeper, the angle I had learned made her exhale sharply, my cock pressing into exactly the place that made her hips roll toward me without permission.
She was so wet now that every stroke was slick and full, loud in the room, her body taking me completely with each one, I stayed right there, giving her exactly that, feeling her get tighter and wetter around me with every thrust until she was gripping me like she couldn't get enough.
Her nails found my shoulder.
The city outside indifferent to all of it.
She came apart quietly ,her whole body going still for one suspended second and then releasing all at once, clenching around my cock in long deep pulses that I felt through my entire body.
She flooded around me, hot and slick, her orgasm gripping and releasing me in waves while her face pressed into my neck, my name left her throat soft and surrendered, completely unguarded.
I followed with her name on mine and stayed where I was afterward, careful and deliberate, until she breathed.
After, she lay against my chest with my arm around her, my hand resting over the curve of her stomach while my thumb moved absentminded circles there, the small new weight of what was coming, the thing Cole had already started introducing to strangers as "the baby" whenever he remembered he wasn't technically supposed to yet, the thing neither of us had planned for and that had somehow become the center of everything anyway.
I was not afraid of any of it.
I had spent a decade making sure there was nothing left to be afraid of and it had not worked.
She had not fixed it either ,she had simply stayed unbothered in the middle of my fear until the fear ran out of reasons.
She said, "Ask me something."
"What?"
"Anything. I want to answer something."
She was quiet for a moment in the way she was quiet when she was actually thinking. Then: "What do you want? Not for Cole, not for the firm. For yourself."
I lay still for a long moment.
The city was outside the window doing whatever cities did and I was not in it, was not managing it, was not accountable to it in any direction.
"This," I said. "I want this to be what my life is."
She said, "Good."
She closed her eyes. I kept mine open a little longer, looking at the dark above us, looking around a room that had finally stopped feeling empty.
When she was breathing slow and even against me, I reached for my phone on the nightstand, one-handed, careful, and opened my calendar.
I scrolled past the Tuesday board pre-read, past the Meridian closing, past the standing calls I could run in my sleep, and I added one item. Not to a meeting slot. To every evening going forward, seven o'clock, recurring, no end date.
I typed: HOME.
Not a note to anyone. Not something optimized or controlled. I set it for every day of the week including Saturdays,put the phone face-down on the nightstand and closed my eyes.
I did not explain it to myself.
I already knew what it meant.
Cole appeared in the doorway at five in the morning, still in his pajamas, carrying one of Elise’s prenatal vitamin bottles like evidence.
The clip-on tie was still fastened at his collar.
Apparently, he had slept in it.
"I've been thinking," he said, without preamble. "The baby should sleep in my room."
"Go back to sleep, Cole."
He considered this seriously. "I'll think about it," he said, and disappeared.
I lay in the dark looking at the ceiling with Elise still warm and motionless beside me.
I felt a kind of steadiness I had not known since before the firm nearly collapsed, before Cole's mother, before I had learned what it cost to depend on people and had them disappear anyway.
Not the absence of fear.
Something that had replaced it entirely. Something that had no boardroom vocabulary and needed none.
Certain.
I felt certain.
And somewhere, someone was still watching.
I just wasn't afraid of it anymore.
That, for me,Trevor Turner, was everything and also the most dangerous thing a man in my position could feel. Certainty had a way of being tested. I knew that better than most.
But I lay in the dark with her warm beside me, Cole asleep somewhere down the hall in that ridiculous tie, HOME in my calendar every day until there was no more calendar.
I let the certainty stand.
Whatever was coming could find me here.
I wasn't moving.