Chapter 17
Declan
Her charger has migrated.
Left side of the nightstand to the right.
It happened sometime on the second day and I noticed it on the third and I am noticing it again now, at six in the morning, because I am awake and she is not and the charger cable is running from the right-side outlet to her phone, which is face-down on the nightstand next to my watch, and the two objects side by side look like something.
Four days.
Her shampoo is in my shower. Not mine anymore — the one she bought and brought over and set on the shelf next to mine like it belonged there.
Her coffee mug is the third from the left in the cupboard.
I know this because I put it there on the first morning and she used it without asking which one and she has used it every morning since.
The gaming headset is on my desk. The Celsius is in my fridge.
There's a hair tie on the bathroom counter and a pair of her socks that didn't make it to the laundry in the hallway.
I could draw a floor plan of my own house with every one of her objects marked. Location, time of arrival, migration pattern. I tell myself this is security awareness. Spatial orientation. Threat readiness.
It is the most transparent thing I have ever told myself.
She fits here. That's the piece I wasn't prepared for.
Not the disruption of her — the fit. The way she exists in this space like the space was waiting for her, like the kitchen counter was always going to have someone sitting on it at midnight and the bed was always going to have someone in it who sleeps on her left side with her face turned toward the window.
Ronan calls at ten.
She's on the couch with her laptop, editing something. I'm in the kitchen. I hear her phone and I hear her voice change. Just the shift from how she sounds in my house to how she sounds for her father. Sunday dinner voice. Steady, warm, managed.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Staying with a friend for a few days while my building does some maintenance thing." A pause. "Dad. It's fine. It's not a big deal."
She laughs. The one that's for him. This version is Ronan's daughter. Safe. Settled.
"Yeah, I'll be home for dinner Sunday. Love you."
She hangs up. I don't move.
She's good at this — has been doing it, in one form or another, since she was old enough to know that managing other people's feelings was a skill she could develop.
I am grateful for the lie and I am aware that gratitude for a woman lying to her father about me is not something I should be feeling and I feel it anyway.
She looks up from the couch. Reads my face.
"Don't," she says.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to think something about the phone call and make a face and then not say it, which is worse than saying it."
She's right. I was.
"He trusts me," I say.
"I know."
"When this comes out—"
"It will come out," she says. Not flinching. "And he'll be hurt and we'll deal with it and it will be awful and I am choosing this anyway. Every morning. Same as you."
I turn back to my work.
***
Nights with Billie might be my favorite thing.
The file is updated and sent to my team.
The immediate threat is being managed. There are things I can do and I have done them and there is nothing else to do tonight and she's on the couch with her legs over the arm and she's gaming on her laptop, not streaming, just playing, the low kill-count version that means she's relaxed.
Her feet are against my thigh. She's been absently pressing her toes into my leg for twenty minutes, completely unaware she's doing it. I am aware of it. I have been aware of it for twenty minutes. I have read the same paragraph four times.
She pulls off a shot and makes the quiet satisfied sound and doesn't look up and I put my book down.
"Come here," I say.
She doesn't look up from the game. "I'm mid-run."
"Come here."
She glances at me. Reads whatever is on my face. Saves the game. Closes the laptop. Comes.
She settles into my lap on the couch like she's done it a hundred times. Legs either side of my hips, arms around my neck, face close. She has not done it a hundred times. She has done it three, maybe four, and each time it has felt like something I've been missing for decades.
I put my hands on her waist. She's wearing my shirt and nothing under it, which I can feel through the fabric when my thumbs find her hip bones.
She kisses me. Slow. Taking her time the way she's learned I like it, which is something that happened in the last four days — she's been learning me.
The way I learned her across seven months of screens.
Except she's faster. She's here, in the room, and she watches my face the way I watch hers and she learns.
My hands slide up her sides under the shirt. Her skin warm. Her ribs under my palms. She shifts on my lap and the movement puts pressure exactly where she intends it and I make a sound against her mouth.
Then she does something I don't anticipate.
She slides off my lap. Turns around. Kneels on the floor between my legs and looks up at me with an expression I have never seen on a woman's face directed at me, which is amusement and hunger and absolute confidence all at once.
"My turn," she says.
She gets her hands on my belt. I reach for her and she pushes my hands away without breaking eye contact.
"No," she says. "Sit there."
She frees me from my pants. Her hand wraps around my cock and her grip is sure and unhurried.
She looks at me. Holding me. Not moving her hand.
Just looking, the way I look at her when I have her pinned and I'm making her wait.
The reversal is precise and deliberate and she knows exactly what she's doing.
"Billie—"
"Shh."
She lowers her mouth.
The first contact is her tongue. Slow. One long slide from the base of my cock to the tip. My hand goes to the back of the couch and grips. She watches me grip it and I see the corner of her mouth curve, which she has no right to be doing with her tongue on me, and she does it again. Slower.
She takes me into her mouth. Not deep at first. Just the head, her tongue working the underside, her lips tight, and the warmth and the wet are doing things to my higher cognitive function that I am choosing not to narrate.
Her hand around the base, working in time with her mouth.
She is unhurried. She is setting a pace that is designed to take me apart as slowly as possible and she is enjoying every second of it.
I know this because she keeps looking up at me, my cock in her mouth, and she watches my face while she works me with the same bright-eyed focus she brings to a high-kill-count stream.
She pulls back. Keeps her hand moving. Looks up at me.
"Good?" she says. The same word I've said to her a dozen times. The same tone. She is playing my rhythm back to me and the confidence of it is staggering.
I can't answer. She takes that as a yes.
She takes me deep. Properly deep. Her mouth is hot and tight and her hand working the base and my hips shift involuntarily and she makes a sound around me that vibrates through my entire body and my hand leaves the couch and finds her hair.
She lets me hold her hair. She doesn't let me guide her.
She sets the pace and it's slow and thorough and devastating and I am watching her, except this is nothing I've ever seen on any screen.
This is Billie Callaghan on her knees on my living room floor taking me apart with her mouth because she decided to and because she can and because she wanted to see what it would do to me.
What it does to me is total. Complete. I am hers.
She pulls back when I'm close and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Looks up at me.
"Not yet," she says.
My own words. My own voice. Aimed back at me from between my knees by a woman who learned my game and is beating me at it.
She climbs back into my lap. Straddles me. Tips her hips and sinks down onto my cock in one slow slide and I grip her hips and stop breathing.
She doesn't move. Just sits there, fully seated, her hands on my shoulders, and looks at me.
Something on her face I haven't seen before.
Not desire, though that's there. Not vulnerability.
Something closer to amusement. She is sitting on my cock on my couch and she looks like a woman who knows exactly what she's doing and is enjoying the view.
“How’s this?”
Fuck, she’s so hot and tight. It’s enough to make my head spin and I forget how to speak.
She rolls her hips. Once. Slow. A test. Watching my face while she does it the way I watch hers when I'm working her apart.
"Good?" she says.
I make a sound that is not a word.
"I'll take that as a yes."
She starts to move. Slow and deliberate, rolling her hips in long circles, and she is in no hurry whatsoever.
Her hands slide from my shoulders to the back of the couch behind me, which changes the angle and puts her above me and she looks down at me with the lamplight behind her and her hair falling forward and I cannot think.
I have spent my entire adult life being the person in control.
In rooms. In conversations. In bed. I have been unhurried and deliberate and patient because that is what I know how to be.
She is sitting on me setting her own pace and I have no input and I am watching her face while she takes what she wants and I have never in my life been this undone by someone going slowly.
My hands go to her hips. She puts them back on the couch.
"No," she says. Smiling. "My turn."
"Billie—" I barely recognize my own voice.
"Shh." She leans down and kisses me, still moving, and bites my lower lip lightly and pulls back and watches what it does to me.
She sits up. Puts her hands flat on my chest. Rolls her hips again, deeper this time, and my cock slides against something inside her that makes her breath catch and her eyes flutter and she adjusts and does it again, chasing it, finding her own pleasure on me, and I am watching her face and she is the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen.
Twenty-one years old. On my couch. In my shirt that's riding up around her waist. Her thighs tense on either side of my hips. Her hands pressing down on my chest. Her eyes half-closed, mouth open, finding the rhythm and the angle that works for her.
I am watching her the way I have watched her for seven months.
Through screens, across dinner tables, in the lamplight of her bedroom.
Except this is different from all of that because she is here and real and on top of me and she is not performing.
She is taking. For herself. And I am hers to take.
My hands find her thighs. She lets them stay this time. I don't guide her. I just hold on.
She leans forward again. Puts her mouth close to my ear. And says, very quietly, very deliberately:
"Daddy."
Not a slip. Not fear. A choice. She says it with her hips moving and the smile still on her face and she watches my reaction with the bright-eyed focus of a woman who has just played her best card and knows it.
My hands tighten on her thighs. My whole body goes taut beneath her.
The sound I make is low and involuntary and she hears it and she does not stop moving.
She rolls her hips slower. Deeper. Taking her time with it, drawing it out, and the deliberate pace while that word is still ringing in my ears is a specific form of torture that I am choosing not to resist because resisting would require some version of composure that I no longer possess.
"Again," I manage.
She says it again. Against my ear. Murmured.
Like it's just how she talks to me now. Like it was always going to be this.
Then she sits up and puts her hands back on my chest and starts riding me properly.
Not slow anymore. Her pace. Her angle. Her rhythm, and it's faster and harder than what I'd choose and I let her have it because I am watching her take what she needs and there is nothing else I want to be doing.
She's close. I can see it— the way her thighs tense, the way her breathing changes, the way her fingers press harder into my chest. I know her tells.
I know them all. She's getting there on her terms, at her pace, using me, and the fact of it is so staggering that I have to grip the couch cushion to keep from flipping her over and finishing this myself.
I don't flip her. She's running this. I let her run it.
She comes with her head tipped back and her hands on my chest and a sound I've heard five times now and each time it rewrites everything. Clenching around my cock, pulsing, her whole body pulling tight, and I feel every second of it.
She opens her eyes. Looks down at me. Flushed. Wrecked. Still smiling.
I grip her hips. Pull her down. Drive up into her and come with my face pressed to her throat and my arms around her and a sound that has nothing controlled in it, nothing managed, nothing deliberate.
Just a man who has been taken apart by a twenty-one-year-old woman on his couch and is not coming back from it.
Her hands in my hair. Her breathing against my ear. Her body still pulsing faintly around me.
I am done pretending this could ever be something I over come. She is mine and I am undeniably hers.