Chapter 10 Declan
Declan
Icall her.
"Hey." Her voice. The real one. The one I can no longer pretend I don't know how to find.
"I need to come over," I say. "We should talk."
A pause. Not surprised. "Okay."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"Okay," she says again, and there's a quality to it. Not this morning's okay, the one carrying four things at once. This one is waiting. She knows what this call is.
It takes me nineteen minutes. I don't examine this.
She opens the door before I knock. Same as last time. As if she hears me coming up the stairs before I've made any sound.
Oversized shirt. Bare feet. Hair up in the inexact way she wears it when she isn't performing for anyone. She steps back and lets me in without ceremony.
"Coffee?" she says.
"No."
She doesn't push it. Sits on the arm of the couch and watches me cross to the window. I need something to look at that isn't her. The street below. Late afternoon. The neighborhood going about its business.
I turn. She's watching me with the look she gets when she's running her own read on a situation. Patient. Precise. I've seen it across dinner tables for years. I understand it differently now.
"I came here to stop this," I say.
She waits.
"I've been telling myself that for two days." I stop. "I drove over here to say it out loud and I can't make myself mean it. That's the problem."
She's quiet for a moment. Then she uncrosses her legs and stands up. Crosses the room in a few steps. Unhurried. No drama. She puts her hand flat on my chest, just that, just her palm over my sternum, and looks up at me.
"Declan."
"Billie—"
"I know." Her hand doesn't move. "I've had my own version of it."
"You're twenty-one."
"I know how old I am."
"Ronan—"
"I know." No waver. "I know all of it. I've known all of it since March and I'm still standing here." Eyes on mine. Steady. "You drove nineteen minutes to tell me things I already know. I'm not sure that's what you came here for."
I look at her.
Her hand on my chest. Her face. The freckles the filter hides. The mouth that has said my name in registers I haven't stopped hearing for two days.
I know what happens next. I've known since I pulled out of my driveway. I built the whole drive around not looking at it directly, and I'm done.
I cup her jaw. I kiss her.
She makes a sound against my mouth. I've been hearing it in my head since the first night and the reality is nothing like memory.
Nothing. I walk her back toward the bedroom with my hands in her hair and she goes, pulling at my jacket, and I shrug it off somewhere in the hall and hear it land.
The list is in the inside pocket. Seventeen items, handwritten.
I don't think about the list.
She turns at the bedroom doorway. Mouth already reddened. Expression clear. Want, and something steadier underneath it.
"You're staying," she says. Not a question.
"Yes."
She takes my hand.
She reaches for me the moment we're through the door. Hands at my shirt, moving fast.
I catch her wrists.
Not pinned. Just held. She goes still. Looks up at me.
I'm unhurried about everything. Always have been. Decades of knowing what I want and having the patience to take it the right way. I bring her wrists together in one hand and watch her face. Something shifts in her expression. Startled for one second. Then not.
"Turn around," I say.
She turns.
I set her wrists at the small of her back. Not restrained. Placed. I lean close to her ear.
"Keep them there."
A beat. Her fingers curl inward against her own spine. Staying.
I take the hem of her shirt and pull it over her head. Her arms come up to let it go, then return to the small of her back. I put my mouth to the back of her neck and she makes the sound I've been hearing since the first night. The real one. The one she doesn't plan.
I run my hands from her shoulders down the full length of her back. Slow.
She is never not thinking. I can feel it. The active quality of her attention, even now. It should be distracting. It isn't. It makes me want to take her apart more thoroughly, just to see what happens when she runs out of thoughts.
I turn her back around.
"Hands on the headboard," I say. "When we get there."
She arches an eyebrow. "Are we making rules."
"Yes."
"That speech you came to give didn't exactly land."
"No."
The corner of her mouth. She sits back on the edge of the bed and reaches behind her, both hands finding the headboard rails and wrapping around them. She looks at me with an expression that is entirely a challenge.
"Like this."
"Like that."
I take my shirt off. She watches. I cross to her and I don't rush.
Her throat first. My mouth on the pulse point that jumps when I get close.
Then lower. Her collarbone. The freckles across her chest that her filter smooths away.
I am studying them now at the range I've wanted since I understood what I wanted.
My hands on her waist. Her ribs. The soft curve of her stomach. She holds the headboard.
"Declan!"
"Not yet."
I get my hand between her thighs and her whole body shifts forward, chasing. Her knuckles go white on the headboard rails. I work her slowly. Two fingers. My thumb on her clit. The same deliberate pace that has nothing to do with restraint and everything to do with watching her unravel by degrees.
She's wet. Wetter than I expected, which tells me she's been thinking about this longer than the twenty minutes since I arrived. I use that. I keep the pace where I want it and she rocks against my hand and bites down on the sound she's trying to hold.
"Don't," I say.
"Don't what."
"Don't keep it quiet."
She makes the sound. Full. Unguarded. Mine.
"Good girl."
Her body responds before her brain does. I see it: the way her back arches, the way her thighs open wider, the involuntary forward push of her hips. She's playing to it now. She knows she's playing to it. She doesn't care.
She comes against my hand with her back arched and her knuckles white on the headboard and her thighs clamped around my wrist. Clenching. Pulsing. Her whole body pulling tight and then releasing in waves. I watch all of it.
She's still breathing hard when I get my pants off. Still holding the headboard, which I didn't ask her to keep doing.
She just is.
I get on the bed. Position myself between her thighs. She looks up at me. Flushed. Wrecked. Completely lucid.
She releases the headboard and puts both hands in my hair and pulls me down.
"Now," she says.
I push into her slowly. One long stroke. Unhurried. She makes a sound that starts low and climbs and her hands go straight to the silver at my temples. Grabbing. Pulling me closer. Her thighs lock around me and she takes me completely and her head tips back and I stay there.
Fully inside her. Not moving. Just this.
She has looked at my temples across dinner tables for three years. I know what that look meant. I know it now, with her hands in my hair and her body around mine and her face undone in the lamplight.
One more second. Just because I can.
"Declan." Strained.
"I know."
I pull back and drive in again. She gasps. I find the angle that made her lose sentences last time and I use it. Deliberately. Repeatedly. She stops trying to be quiet.
She says my name. And more. And please. I give her more. I give her please. I keep the pace where I want it, not where she's pulling me. My hands on her hips, holding the rhythm steady while she tries to break it.
"Not yet," I say.
"Declan—"
"Not yet."
She makes a sound that is pure frustration and pulls my hair harder and I nearly lose everything in one go. Not the plan. So I do what works: slow all the way down. Long. Deep. Deliberate.
She makes a different sound. This one almost hurt.
"You're doing that on purpose."
"Yes."
"I hate you."
"No you don't."
She laughs. One short breathless sound, surprised out of her, and I feel it move through her body into mine and I go completely still.
That laugh. In the middle of this, while I'm buried inside her. I was not prepared for it. I have no answer for it. For one full second I am not a man who knows what he's doing. I'm just a man who is finished.
I press my forehead to hers. Breathing.
"Declan—"
"I know." I pull back and drive into her hard. "Hold on."
She stops laughing.
Her hands are back in my hair. The silver at my temples, both hands, gripping. I watch her face when it changes. The moment the last of her composure goes. She has been managing herself this entire time, and then she can't anymore. I see the exact second it happens.
She says my name. Not Declan-in-a-sentence. Just my name. One syllable. Stripped of everything.
My rhythm breaks.
Involuntary. She's taken me apart and she knows it. I see her know it, the flash of satisfaction on her wrecked face. She pulls me deeper and arches up and that's it. That's all of it. Nothing left.
I bury myself to the hilt and hold there and she comes. Clenching hard around me. Pulsing. Her whole body pulling tight. I feel every second of it, feel her pulling me with her, and I go.
Not quietly. Not controlled. My face pressed to her throat. Both hands gripping her hips. The sound I make is not planned. Low. Rough. Wrenched out of somewhere that has nothing to do with composure. Everything I've been holding since I pulled out of my driveway releases at once.
Her hands are still in my hair.
I stay there. Breathing. Not moving yet. Her body still trembling faintly around mine.
Her breathing slowing. My hand on her stomach, rising and falling with it.
Ronan's face again. The kitchen table. Thirty years. I let it sit. I don't move.
"You stayed for that," she says eventually.
"I stayed."
She is quiet. Outside, the street. The lamp on her nightstand. Her freckles in the light.
I reach over to the nightstand where I set my watch. Pick it up.
"You came here to stop this," she says.
"I had a whole speech."
A beat. "How much of it did you get through."
"One line."
She turns her head. "Which one."
I look at the watch in my hand. The face of it. The familiar weight.
"I don't remember," I say.
She looks at me for a moment. Then she makes a sound. Small. Genuine. Surprised. She turns her face back to the ceiling with something that I understand, after a moment, is her trying not to laugh.
I put the watch on the nightstand.
She falls asleep before midnight. On her side. Facing me.
I don't sleep.
The freckles on her left shoulder. I count them in the lamplight because I'm awake and they're there and I have apparently become a man who counts freckles at two in the morning. Eleven. I count them twice to be sure. Eleven.
I am aware this is not a normal thing to do.
I do it anyway. I don't examine what that says about me.
I get dressed at four. Quietly. She doesn't stir. I pick up my jacket from the hallway floor and I feel the weight of the paper in the inside pocket. Seventeen items. My handwriting. I take the list out and look at it in the half-dark.
Reasons this cannot happen.
Number one: Ronan.
Number seventeen: I will not be able to stop.
I fold it. Put it back.
I let myself out.
The road. The dark. The weight of everything I'm choosing and the weight of everything it costs.