Chapter 5 — Francis #3
His other hand grips my hip, fingers pressing into the soft flesh there, and he uses the leverage to pull me back onto him with each thrust.
The sound of skin slapping against skin fills the room along with my gasps and his rough breathing.
I can feel sweat running down my spine, can feel my arms starting to shake from holding myself up.
He notices and his hand slides from my breast to my stomach, supporting my weight as he pounds into me.
"Touch yourself," he says. "Make yourself come on my cock."
I slide one hand between my legs and find my clit, already swollen and sensitive. The first touch makes me cry out and I can feel myself clenching around him.
"That's it," he says. "Fuck, I can feel you getting tighter."
I circle my clit faster and the orgasm hits like a freight train.
My whole body locks up, clenching around him so hard I hear him grunt. Wave after wave crashes through me and I'm distantly aware that I'm making sounds, high desperate noises I don't recognize.
He keeps thrusting through my orgasm, prolonging it until I'm shaking and oversensitive and begging him to stop, to keep going, I don't even know what I want anymore.
"One more," he says. "Give me one more and then I'll come."
"I can't."
"Yes you can."
He pulls out and flips me onto my back again.
Before I can catch my breath he's sliding back in, hooking my legs over his shoulders so I'm completely open to him.
The angle lets him go impossibly deep and I can feel him in my stomach, filling me so completely there's no room for anything else.
He fucks me hard and fast, chasing his own release now, and I can see the strain on his face, the way his jaw is clenched and his arms are shaking.
His hand finds my clit again and the pressure is almost too much on my oversensitive flesh but then I feel it building again, impossibly, a third orgasm gathering force.
"Come with me," he says. "Want to feel you come while I'm filling you up."
His thumb presses hard on my clit and that's all it takes. I come undone again, clenching around him, and he drives in deep one last time and holds there.
I feel him pulse inside me, feel the warmth of his release flooding me, and something about the raw intimacy of it makes my throat tight.
We stay locked together for a long moment, both of us gasping for air. When he finally pulls out I feel empty, incomplete, like part of me is missing.
He rolls onto his side and pulls me against him. I can feel his heart pounding against my back, feel the sweat cooling on both our bodies.
"That wound definitely needs new gauze," I say.
He laughs. It's rough and surprised, like he forgot that was an option.
"Probably," he says.
We lie there in comfortable silence. Outside I can hear someone mowing their lawn, a dog barking, normal Saturday morning sounds. Inside this room everything has changed.
"I love you," Knox says.
The words land quiet but certain. I turn in his arms so I can see his face. He's not looking at me, staring at the ceiling instead like he's said something embarrassing.
"I loved you at thirty," he continues. "And I love you now at forty-seven. I don't know how to do this. Don't know how to balance the club and you and all the ways those things might conflict. But I want to try."
"I love you too," I say.
His eyes cut to mine. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. I loved you then and I never stopped. I just learned how to live with it. But I don't want to live with it anymore. I want to live in it."
"That's the same thing."
"No it's not. Living with something means tolerating its presence. Living in it means letting it be the thing everything else is built around."
He kisses me softly, like I'm something precious.
"Come to the clubhouse tonight," he says. "Let me claim you. Make it official."
My stomach clenches. "What does that mean?"
"Means you're mine and everyone knows it. Means if anyone comes for you, they're coming for all of us. Means you're family."
"That's a lot."
"I know. But I'm all in, Francis. If you want me, you're getting all of it. The club, the danger, the family. I can't separate those things. They're what I am."
I think about that. About choosing him means choosing all of it. About how that's exactly what I ran from at twenty-three and exactly what I'm running toward now at forty.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"I'll come tonight. But if anyone gives me shit about being too old or too fat or anything else, I'm leaving."
"No one's going to give you shit."
"You don't know that."
"I do. Because if they did, they'd answer to me."
The possessiveness in his voice should bother me, trigger every feminist instinct I've developed over so many years. Instead, it makes me feel safe in a way I haven't felt since I left Harrisburg.
We stay in bed another hour, talking about nothing important. About his empty house and why he never filled it. About my marriage to Ben and why it failed. About my father's declining health and what happens when he's gone. About whether we're too old to be making decisions this fast.
We agree we probably are.
We do it anyway.