18. Eloise #2
His mouth twitches. The ghost of it. The almost-smile that costs him nothing and gives me everything.
“I can do that,” he says.
“I know you can.”
The papers drop from my other hand. They scatter across the kitchen floor, pages separating, tabs catching the light, the careful architecture of an exit I no longer need spreading across the tile in a mess I don’t bother to pick up.
His eyes follow them down. Then come back to me.
And the look on his face is a thing I will carry for the rest of my life. Not gratitude, not relief, not the calculated composure of a man who got the outcome he wanted.
Just love. Uncategorized, unlabeled, the raw and total version that doesn’t fit in a parenthetical or a contact name or any system Oliver has ever built to organize his feelings.
He kisses me.
Not the way he kissed me in the photobooth, sudden and impulsive. Not the way he kissed me that first night, answering a hunger that had been building for months.
This kiss is slow. His mouth against mine with the deliberate, unhurried attention of a man who has nowhere to be and has decided that here, this mouth, this woman, is the only destination that matters.
His hands stay on my face. His thumbs trace my cheekbones and the tracing is tender and precise and my eyes close against it because the tenderness is almost harder to take than the heat.
I pull back an inch. “You saw me see your phone.”
“I saw you see my phone.”
“My Elle. With a heart emoji.”
“You taught me where to find it.”
“You use it on one contact.”
“I only need one contact.” His mouth finds the corner of mine. “The rest of them can have their names.”
My breath catches. His lips trace my jaw, moving down.
Slow. The morning light is everywhere, the sun through the kitchen window falling across both of us, and there’s nowhere to hide in daylight, no shadows, no dark rooms, no night to soften the edges.
Just his mouth on my skin and the sun on my face and the full visibility of two people choosing each other with their eyes open.
His hands leave my face. Travel down. Find my waist, my hips, the hem of the shirt I slept in. He doesn’t pull it off. His palms slide beneath the fabric and settle on my belly, both hands, fingers spread, holding the curve of me with a reverence that stops my breath.
Twenty-one weeks. The belly is not a suggestion anymore.
It’s a presence, a geography, the visible evidence of the life we made the night before he left, and Oliver’s hands rest on it as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist and the only real thing in the room is the skin beneath his palms and the heartbeat underneath it.
“You’re going to stare a hole through me,” I whisper.
“I’m looking.” His thumbs move against my skin, tracing the stretched curve, the new topography of a body that’s changed since the last time he held it. “There’s a difference.”
He drops to his knees.
Not the way a man drops when he’s performing a gesture. The way a man drops when the thing in front of him is sacred and the only appropriate response is to be below it. His knees hit the kitchen floor and his hands stay on my belly and his mouth finds the skin just below my navel and presses.
The kiss is warm. Lingering. His lips against the taut skin, breathing into me, and the intimacy of it cracks my chest in a place I didn’t know was still closed because a man on his knees in front of his pregnant wife with his mouth on her belly in the morning light is a thing I didn’t know I needed and the not-knowing makes the having so much worse.
“Oliver.” His name comes out unsteady.
He looks up at me from his knees. The angle.
His face tilted up, his hands on my body, the morning sun behind me, and his eyes are open and full and holding nothing back, and the looking up is the most vulnerable position Oliver Ellington has ever allowed himself to be in.
CEO, boardroom, billion-dollar decisions, and he’s on the kitchen floor looking up at me as if I’m the only projection that matters.
His hands slide to my hips. His mouth moves lower, his lips tracing a path down the curve of my belly, following the line of it, kissing skin that has never been kissed because this body is new, this body is different, this body is carrying his child and he is treating every inch of it as a discovery he plans to document thoroughly.
I’m shaking. Not from cold, not from fear.
From the specific, full-body tremor of being seen in daylight by a man who is not looking away from the parts of me that have changed and is not adjusting around them or accommodating them but worshipping them with his mouth open and his eyes closed and his hands firm on my hips.
He guides me backward. Two steps, three. The counter presses into my lower back and his hands find the waistband of my shorts and his fingers hook the elastic and he pauses. Looks up.
“Yes,” I say, before the question forms. “Yes.”
He pulls them down.
Slow, deliberate, the way he does everything that matters, his fingers trailing the outside of my thighs, and the shorts drop to my ankles and the air hits my skin and the vulnerability of standing in my kitchen in morning light with nothing below the hem of a sleep shirt while Oliver kneels in front of me is so total, so complete, that my hands find the counter behind me and grip.
He lifts my left leg. Places it over his shoulder.
His hand wraps around my thigh, steadying me, and his other hand grips my hip and the grip is firm enough to anchor and gentle enough to undo and I am standing on one leg in my kitchen with the sun on my face and Oliver Ellington between my thighs and the absurdity and the intimacy and the want are all the same feeling.
His mouth finds me.
The first touch is slow. Testing, learning, the approach of a man who reads everything before he commits and commits completely once he’s read enough.
His tongue is warm and careful and the care is Oliver, the precision is Oliver, the focused, consuming attention of a man who has decided that this, right here, is the only task on his agenda and he intends to exceed expectations.
My head falls back. The ceiling blurs.
He finds the rhythm. Not fast, not urgent.
Steady, deliberate, the kind of rhythm that builds pressure without rushing it, and his hand on my thigh tightens and my fingers are white against the counter edge and the morning is very quiet except for the sounds I’m making and the sounds are not sounds I planned on making, not sounds I’ve heard from my own mouth in this kitchen or any kitchen, and I don’t manage them.
I don’t calibrate. I don’t organize my response into a shape that’s appropriate or contained.
I just feel it. My hand leaves the counter and finds his hair and my fingers curl into it and the curl is the first honest grip I’ve given Oliver Ellington in our entire marriage, the kind where I’m holding on because letting go means falling and I don’t want to fall yet, not yet, not until the thing he’s building with his mouth reaches the place it’s building toward.
He adjusts the angle. Tilts his head, reads me the way he reads everything, with his entire focus, and the adjustment sends a current through me that makes my thigh tighten against his shoulder and my spine arch and the arching pulls a sound from my throat that I will not describe and cannot repeat.
“Don’t stop.” The words come out ragged. “Oliver, don’t stop.”
He doesn’t stop.
His mouth works with a patience that would be infuriating if it weren’t so precise, each motion purposeful, each pause a recalibration, the same man who tabbed a recipe book and memorized an avocado aversion and drove across the city for a lemon tart now applying the full weight of that attention to the task of taking me apart and the taking apart is thorough and the thoroughness is devastating.
The pressure builds.
Low, deep, spreading from where his mouth is through my belly and into my chest and the building has no ceiling and no schedule and no endpoint I can predict because Oliver is not performing, he is listening, his entire body tuned to the frequency of mine, and every sound I make is information he’s using and the using is so precise that the pleasure tightens into a knot in my center and I can feel the edge approaching and the approaching is slow and certain and unstoppable.
My hand tightens in his hair. My breathing fractures into pieces.
He gives me one more motion, slow, firm, and holds it there, and the holding is what does it. The stillness at the exact right moment, the way a man who has spent his life in motion finally learns the power of staying exactly where he is.
I break. My body bows forward, my hand in his hair, my other hand gripping the counter, and the release rolls through me in a wave that starts where his mouth is and reaches the top of my skull and every room of my body between.
I say his name. Or I think I say his name. The sound that comes out of me isn’t language, it’s the unfiltered expression of a woman who has spent her entire life giving and is finally, fully, being given to.