Chapter 8 Billie
Billie
He comes.
I open the door before he knocks a second time.
He's there. Still in what he was wearing at my door two hours ago, the cold off the street coming in around him, and he's looking at me with an expression I haven't seen on his face before.
I am still wound tight from the call and he knows that because he watched it happen and I know that he knows and neither of us says a word about any of it.
I have been waiting for this moment for weeks.
"You're forty-eight years old," I say.
He doesn't look away.
"Yes."
"You've known me since I was born."
"Yes."
"My dad is your best friend of thirty years."
"Yes." The word carrying everything it means. Choosing to carry it anyway.
"Are those objections," I say. "Or are you just making sure I know what I'm doing?"
"The second one," he says.
"I know what I'm doing."
He crosses the threshold in the biggest “fuck it moment” known to history. He cups my face in both hands and kisses me and I was wrong about everything.
I want to be clear about this: I have been doing this work for a while. I know the sounds and the shapes of desire. I know every escalation, every register. I have been genuinely, professionally confident about all of this.
His mouth is on mine and none of that applies.
He kisses me slowly. It’s the kind of slowness of a man who has been waiting a very long time and is not rushing the first sixty seconds of finally having what he's waited for.
Both hands warm on my jaw. His thumbs tilting my face up.
He tastes like outdoor air and something underneath it that I'm going to spend a lot of time thinking about later and I make a sound I didn't plan and grip the front of his shirt in both fists.
My knees do something unreliable. Briefly and without my permission. I am choosing not to examine this because I've had functioning knees for twenty-one years and I refuse to believe that Declan Maguire's mouth is where they decide to retire.
"Hi," I say, against his mouth.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. The edges of a smile. The rare one. I've seen it maybe twice in my entire life and it hits somewhere the kissing hadn't reached yet.
"Hi," he says.
Then he walks me backward through my apartment.
I'm not keeping track of the geography very well.
His mouth is on my throat and then my jaw and then my mouth again.
His hands are in my hair. I am recording everything with the attention of a woman who has been waiting for this and is not going to miss a single second of it: the warmth of his chest against mine, the size of his hands when they move to my waist, how it feels to be wanted by someone who wanted you for months before they'd admit it.
There's my bed behind my knees.
He pulls back and looks at me.
I look up at him. The silver at his temples catching the light, the gray in his stubble, the dark eyes that have been holding mine across dinner tables for years and are holding them now from about eighteen inches away and I’m suddenly forgetting how to breathe.
This is Declan Maguire, says the part of my brain that is still technically functional. In your bedroom. Looking at you like that. Your dad is going to love this development.
The rest of my brain has stopped listening to that part entirely.
"Billie." His voice low.
"I'm good," I say. "I'm really good. Please don't stop."
"I just want to look at you."
Nobody has ever said that to me and meant all of me. Not the performance version, not the constructed version, not BrattyBaby or my dad's good daughter. He means the lamp on my face and my hair wrecked and whatever's happening in my expression right now that I cannot control.
He takes the hem of my shirt and pulls it over my head in one smooth motion, and I reach for his shirt, and my elbow catches him somewhere between his ribs and his jaw, and I say "shit, sorry" and then I laugh.
Can't help it. One short surprised sound because I have fantasized about this moment in considerable detail and in none of those fantasies did I elbow him in the neck.
He kisses the laugh right off me and I stop caring about graceful entirely.
He is unhurried in a way I was not prepared for.
I want to be clear about what "not prepared for" means in this context.
I have thought about this. In detail. With the imagination of someone who has been performing sex on camera for eighteen months and owns a frankly impressive collection of battery-operated research equipment.
I thought I had a thorough mental model of what Declan Maguire in my bed would be like.
I did not have a thorough mental model. I had a rough sketch and the real thing is oil painting.
He takes his shirt off and I run my hands across his shoulders and his chest and the planes of his stomach, the dusting of silver hair on his chest, and the reality of him is different from any version I'd built.
Solid in a way that registers in my hands before it registers in my brain.
Warm in a way that makes me want to press against him just to get more of it.
His hands on me are careful and purposeful and they know exactly where they're going in the way that only comes from decades of paying attention to what someone else needs. Not guessing.
The silver at his temples when he leans over me in the lamp light.
The gray in his stubble against my throat when he puts his mouth there.
His hands moving down my stomach. I've watched my own body on camera hundreds of times and I've never felt what his hands feel like and there is a difference, there is an enormous, humbling, slightly devastating difference between a performance and a man who knows what he's doing touching me like I'm something he's been thinking about for longer than he'll say.
I make a sound.
Something in his expression goes very certain. His hand slides between my thighs, his fingers find my clit, and I make another sound, better than the first. He says “Good girl.” low against my ear.
Oh.
Those two words land somewhere in the center of my chest and then drop straight down at speed and my whole body responds before my brain catches up and I say "oh" out loud because apparently that's a thing I'm doing now.
Having verbal reactions to praise from a forty-eight-year-old man in my bed like it's the most natural thing in the world.
It kind of is. It's the most natural thing I've ever felt and I have a lot of questions about that and I'm going to save all of them for a time when his fingers aren't doing what they're currently doing, which is moving in a slow, deliberate circle around my clit that makes thinking in full sentences a genuine challenge.
I am absolutely losing my mind, says the functioning part of my brain. Also please don't stop.
He works me up steadily. Two fingers inside me, his thumb on my clit, learning my pace with the patience of a man who has all night and no interest in rushing.
His hands are bigger than mine. His fingers curl in a way mine physically can't, reaching something I didn't know could be reached, and I have been wound tight since I ended that call and he reads that immediately, the way he reads everything, and he uses it.
"Declan!"
"I've got you."
I've got you. Low. Certain. The voice he uses when something matters.
The voice I've heard at Sunday dinners and in doorways and now here, in my bed, with his fingers inside me and his thumb working my clit and his mouth close enough to my ear that I can feel his breath.
The experience gap between us is so wide it's almost funny.
He knows exactly what he's doing and I am discovering in real time what it feels like to be the focus of that, and the discovery is making me fall apart faster than I have any interest in admitting.
I come embarrassingly fast. Clenching around his fingers, pulsing, my thighs pressing together on his hand.
I was already most of the way there when he walked through the door and he knew it and went straight for it like a man who has been paying attention, and the sound I make is not one I've ever made on camera. Those sounds were a performance.
This is Declan's hand and his voice in my ear saying “That's it, sweetheart, I've got you.” and I press my face against his shoulder and I let it happen completely. My orgasm rips through me like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. My whole body trembles and I let out a sob.
When it's over I'm breathing hard and gripping his arm.
"Good girl," he says again, softer. His thumb is still moving, drawing it out.
"Don't," I say, into his shoulder. "Say that again and we'll be here all night."
"Is that a threat or a promise?"
I pull back and look at him. He is looking back with the expression of a man who has just learned something he fully intends to use at the worst possible moment.
I've done it now, says my brain. I've handed him a loaded weapon and I am completely fine with that, which tells me everything I need to know about my decision-making capabilities tonight.
Declan is far from done with me. He holds both my wrists above my head in one hand.
I didn't see this coming and I should have. The reality of it: my wrists caught easily, no effort, his hand warm and firm and not letting go. Something in my brain goes very quiet and something lower goes very loud and this is all so new.
"Okay?" he says.
"Extremely okay," I say. "Please."
"Please what, baby girl?"
I close my eyes. I open them again. "I hate how much I like that."
Declan presses his mouth to my throat. My collarbone.
The freckles across my nose, and he takes a moment there, his mouth soft, and the gentleness of it does something completely different from everything else.
Something that catches me in a place I wasn't guarding.
I've been ready for desire and intensity and the physical reality of him.
I was not ready for tenderness, and tenderness is what undoes me.
Then he settles between my thighs.
"Mine," he says quietly. “You’re mine.”
There is a flash. My dad's kitchen table. Sunday dinner. The pot roast and the gravy. All of it pressing through at once: who this is, what it costs, whose friendship is the foundation of my family's life.
It's there. I let it be there. I don't push it away and I don't drown in it. It sits alongside the wanting and they coexist, because that's what's real. The cost is real. The wanting is real. I am choosing the wanting with my eyes open.
Then Declan's voice, low in my ear: "I've got you. I'm right here."
And his hands are on me and the head of his cock is pressing against my entrance and the weight of everything else recedes to somewhere manageable because he is right here and I wanted him right here and that's enough for right now. I say his name.
He goes slowly.
He goes so slowly.
I'm a virgin. That's the piece of information that I have been carrying around with considerable dignity for twenty-one years and that nobody in my life suspects because I run a successful adult content platform and own more vibrators than some retail stores.
I know my body. I know what I like. I have just never wanted a man enough to bother finding out what the real thing felt like, which is a sentence I could only say out loud to about three people without getting a lecture, and one of those people is currently inside me.
There is a fullness. There is a moment where my whole body goes quiet around the reality of him, and it's more than I expected. Not pain, not exactly. Just a lot. A new sensation my body is working out what to do with. His hand comes up to cradle my jaw.
"Okay?" Low. Close.
"Keep going," I say. "Declan. Please keep going."
He does.
He finds a rhythm, careful at first, then deeper when my hips start moving to meet him, and his hand moves between us, his thumb working my clit while his cock pushes in, and the sensation makes me gasp.
He's thick enough that I feel every shift in angle.
When he rolls his hips a certain way I make a sound that I have never made on camera, not once, because I didn't know it existed until right now.
Oh, says my brain, which has remained operational throughout all of this with the tenacity of a Duracell bunny in a crisis. So that's what all the fuss is about.
"That's it," he says against my ear. Low and certain. "Right there. You feel that?"
"Yes!"
"Good girl. Take it."
I take it. My whole body is wound tight and climbing and he knows exactly how to keep me there, right at the edge, his thumb relentless and his cock filling me and his voice in my ear.
He watches me figure out what I need and gives it to me, adjusting when I adjust, following when I move.
The patience isn't passive. It's active, it's him paying total attention in real time, and there is nothing about this that is what I expected.
I expected good. I was unprepared for known.
The silver at his temples in the lamp light when he looks down at me.
His dark eyes on my face.
He has looked at me like this across a hundred Sunday dinner tables and I thought it was just how he looked at people and it wasn't. It was always me.
"God. Declan."
"Good girl."
The praise moves through me and my hips snap forward before I've decided they should and he groans.
Low and real. The first uncontrolled sound he's made.
The sound of a man whose composure has cracked, and I did that, I took the composure of Declan Maguire and I broke it, and hearing it is the single most satisfying thing I've experienced in my twenty-one years on this planet.
I grab his face and kiss him and he makes the sound again into my mouth and I decide right then that I am going to spend considerable time and energy making him make that sound on a regular basis. This is now a life goal. I'm putting it on the vision board.
He comes apart first. Pressing deep, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, and I feel every second of it, the pulse of him, his hands tightening on my hips, the rough sound against my skin.
Then his hand is between us again and he is thorough.
Extremely thorough. His thumb on my clit, pressing and circling, his cock still inside me, and I follow him over the edge with my thighs shaking and my face pressed into his neck and the sound I make is mine.
I’m his.