16. Imogen #3
I push the shirt off his shoulders and he lets it drop, and then he’s bare from the waist up in the gold light, all that held breath and locked muscle, and I flatten my palm against his collarbone and drag it slowly down the center of him, and I feel every muscle he has go rigid under my hand.
“My turn,” I tell him.
His eyes drop to the zipper at the back of my neck. One brow lifts. A question he won’t ask out loud.
“Yes.”
He steps around behind me. His fingers find the zipper pull at the nape of my neck and he draws it down, slow, so slow I feel every separate tooth give way, the cool air finding the line of my spine one inch at a time.
Then his mouth follows the path his fingers made. A press of his lips between my shoulder blades. Lower, against the notch of my spine.
Lower still, unhurried, worshipful, until the black dress lets go and pools around my feet and I’m standing in the gold morning in nothing but a scrap of lace, and his mouth is at the small of my back, and my eyes have fallen shut without asking me first.
“Fuck, Imogen.” The words hum against my skin. His hands settle on my hips, fingers spanning the bones, his grip firm enough to hold me steady and loose enough that I could step out of it in a heartbeat if I wanted.
I don’t want.
I turn inside his hands. His eyes travel up the whole length of me, slow, and the way he looks at me is not the way a man looks at a thing he owns. It’s the way a man looks at a thing he was sure he’d lost for good and cannot quite believe he’s being allowed to put his hands on again.
Reverent. Ravenous. Undone.
“Come here,” I whisper.
Hendrix lifts me as though I weigh nothing.
My legs wrap around his waist, his hands close over the backs of my thighs, my arms wind around his neck, and the shock of skin against skin after months of careful distance is so total and so immediate that a sound tears out of me I will never in my life admit to making.
He carries me to the bed and lays me down on the white sheets and settles his weight over me, and for one breath we both go completely still.
His forehead drops to mine.
Our noses brush. His breath is warm across my lips, and the inches left between us are charged with everything we shed to get here, the armor and the anger and the year of cold mornings and every wall that took weeks to build and seconds to fall.
“I missed you.” His voice fractures on the word missed, and the crack goes through me harder than any touch could. “Every day. I missed the sound of you moving through a room. I missed your terrible opinions about my sentences. I missed the way you steal the covers and deny it.”
His lips graze mine, barely there. “I missed the way you taste. I missed all of it.”
“Then stop missing me,” I tell him, “and be here.”
His mouth finds the spot beneath my ear, the one he’s always known unravels me, and my spine bows up off the sheets.
His hand traces down my ribs, his thumb dragging over the curve of my waist, learning me again with the obsessive focus of a man checking every remembered detail against the real thing and finding it better than he kept it.
Hendrix works the lace away, and his mouth follows his hands, down my throat, across my collarbone, down the center of my chest, and everywhere his lips land my skin lights up and reports back, and the wanting stops being a warmth and becomes a demand.
His hand slides between my thighs and I hear myself say his name in a voice I don’t recognize.
He takes his time. He takes his time the way he never once took his time with our marriage, with a patience that shades into devotion, reading every sound I make, every catch of breath, every helpless roll of my hips, adjusting, learning, giving me exactly what I need a half-second before I know to ask for it, until the pleasure winds so tight and so high that my hands fist in the sheets and my breath comes apart.
“Please,” I breathe.
“Please what?” His mouth is at my hip, and I can feel him smile against my skin, and I could kill him for it, and I have never wanted anyone more in my life.
“Please don’t make me wait. Not for this. I’ve done enough waiting.”
The last of him breaks at that, the last of the control, and he rises over me and settles between my thighs, braced on his forearms, the whole warm weight of him pressed against me from chest to hip, and the last barrier between us is gone.
“Look at me.” His voice is low and wrecked. His hand comes up to cradle my jaw. “I want to see you. I don’t want to miss a second of it.”
I open my eyes. He’s right there, close enough that his breath is mine, his gaze locked onto me, and when he finally moves, slow and deliberate and careful, joining us in a way that makes my whole body shudder, he doesn’t look away.
Neither do I.
We hold each other’s eyes through the first breath of it, the stretch, the adjustment, the moment the entire year of distance collapses into nothing at all and the closeness of it is so complete it nearly overwhelms me.
My fingers thread up into his hair. His forehead drops to mine.
We move together, finding the old rhythm of two people relearning a language they used to speak without thinking, and the fluency comes back faster than either of us expects, because the body remembers everything the mind spent months trying to bury.
It isn’t only heat. Every roll of my hips into his is a sentence I don’t have the courage to say out loud. Every time his mouth finds mine it’s an apology that runs under the words we already spoke.
We aren’t only reconnecting. We’re finishing the conversation our bodies have been trying to have since the night I dragged a suitcase out the door, the one that says I never once stopped wanting you, the one that says I am so afraid of how much this means, the one that says do not let go this time, do not you dare let go.
He builds the pace and I meet it.
My nails drag down the length of his back and his breath stutters hot against my throat, and the sound he makes, ragged, helpless, my name breaking on every exhale, is the sound of a man who has held himself together with white-knuckled control his entire life and is finally, finally letting all of it come apart.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I cry.
From the sheer crushing weight of being touched by someone who knows me, who knows this body, who knows the exact pressure my spine wants and the exact tilt of my hips and the exact spot beneath my ear that empties my head of everything.