18. Izzy #2
He kisses me back the way the letters read. Careful and desperate, like every touch is an apology he doesn’t know how to say out loud.
When we finally break apart, his forehead stays on mine, and his heart is slamming right through the coat, and the porch light hums above us.
“That’s one thing off the list.” My voice is wrecked and I don’t care.
“How long is the list?” His thumb moves against my jaw.
“Long. Years long.”
“Good.” He wraps me all the way in, my cheek against the cold wool over his chest, both of us swaying slightly on the stoop where we ended, which is apparently also where we start. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”
I stand in the circle of his arms and listen to his heart refuse to settle, and the list unrolls itself in my head, all the unsaid things, and underneath them the one thing that isn’t words at all.
“I’m not ready to go home.” I say it into his coat. “Either home. Mine or yours.”
“Okay.” No push in it. His hand keeps moving slow between my shoulder blades. “I’ll walk you back in, then. Your mother made up the guest…”
“I’m not done with tonight, Wilson.”
His hand stops.
He pulls back far enough to find my eyes under the porch light, and he searches them the way he read those letters, twice, carefully, making sure of every word.
“Izzy.” His voice has dropped to bare gravel. “Tell me exactly what you need, and it will be yours.”
“A hotel.” My heart is everywhere at once, wrists, throat, ears. “Somewhere that isn’t ours or theirs. Strangers on an island, remember? Strangers get hotel rooms.”
The room is high above the park and we don’t turn on the lights.
The city glow comes through the window and that’s enough. Enough to see his hands shake on my coat buttons, enough to watch him stop and close his eyes when the coat slides off my shoulders.
“Still angry?” He whispers it against my temple.
“Yeah.” I fist his collar and bring his mouth to mine. “Kiss me anyway.”
He does. Slow at first, waiting for me to change my mind. Then deeper when I grab his shirt. Then desperate when I yank him closer and he realizes I’m not going anywhere.
We stumble backward, his hands on my face, and my legs hit the bed.
He freezes.
I can feel him breathing hard against me, and when his eyes find mine, he doesn’t look away.
“Tell me to stop.” His voice is rough, barely holding together. “If you want out, say it now. Because I’m about ten seconds from not being able to.”
“Don’t stop.” I pull his shirt free from his pants. “I mean it. Don’t.”
He groans and buries his face in my neck, mouth dragging down to my collarbone. We undress each other badly, fumbling, and I laugh when his cuff button refuses to cooperate.
“This fucking thing.” He tugs at it, getting nowhere.
“Hold still.” I undo it slowly, taking my time, watching his jaw clench while I work.
The shirt drops. I flatten my palm against his chest. His heart is slamming. I feel it in my teeth.
“Izzy.” My name comes out broken. “I missed you. So much. You don’t even know.”
“Then show me.” I go for his belt. “Quit talking.”
He does.
His hands move down my back, my waist, unhooking my bra with fingers that won’t stay steady. When it falls he just stops. Staring. Chest heaving.
“Jesus.” He exhales hard against my skin. “How did I stop noticing you? How the hell did I let that happen?”
“Wilson, don’t do this right now…”
“I’m serious, Izzy.” He takes my face in both hands and makes me look at him, and his eyes are fierce and completely focused on me. “I looked at you every day for years and I stopped actually seeing you. I was so goddamn blind. I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
“Then see me now.” It comes out rough and I don’t care anymore. I grab his wrists and drag his hands down to my breasts because I’m done waiting and I’m done being careful. “Right now. Stop talking and pay attention.”
His eyes go dark and hungry, and my stomach flips.
He does.
His thumbs brush over my nipples through the fabric and I gasp, my back arching without my permission, pushing into his touch like my body has been starving for this for months.
He groans low in his throat, this sound that goes straight through me, and dips his head to take one into his mouth through the thin cotton.
His tongue circles slow and deliberate and my knees almost give out from under me.
“Fuck.” The word rips out of me. “Wilson, please.”
“I know.” He pulls the fabric aside and his mouth is on my bare skin now, hot and wet and so good I can barely think. “I know, baby. I’ve got you. I’m right here.”
“Bed, Wilson.” I can barely get the words out because his mouth is short-circuiting my brain. “Move. Now. I need you to move.”
He backs me up with his hands everywhere at once, my hips, my waist, my thighs, and we collapse onto the mattress in a tangle of limbs and heavy breathing.
His mouth never stops moving, trailing down my neck and across my collarbone and lower and lower until I’m squirming underneath him.
His hand tracks down my stomach slow, so slow it’s almost cruel, and stops at the waistband of my underwear.
He looks up at me, breathing hard, his lips swollen and his hair a mess from my hands. Waiting.
“Can I?”
The fact that he’s asking, even now, even with both of us this far gone and desperate, undoes me in a way that has nothing to do with sex.
“Yes.” I lift my hips toward him because I can’t help it. “God, yes. Please. I need you to touch me so bad it hurts.”
“Tell me where.” His fingers hook under the elastic but don’t move, and I want to scream at him. “I want to hear you say it.”
“You know where.” I’m shaking now and I can hear it in my own voice. “Stop teasing and touch me, Wilson. I mean it.”
He smiles against my hip, this slow wicked smile I feel more than see, and it makes me want to kill him and kiss him at the same time.
“Say please again.”
“I swear to God if you don’t…”
His hand slides down and finds me exactly where I need him and the rest of the threat dies in my throat, replaced by a sound I didn’t know I could make.
He drags them down slow, kissing my hip, my thigh, the inside of my knee, taking his time like we have all night and he’s planning to use every second of it. Then he’s between my legs, just looking at me, and the intensity on his face makes my stomach flip and my cheeks burn.
“I see you.” He murmurs it into my thigh, pressing his lips against the soft skin there. “I see you, Izzy. God, you’re so beautiful it makes me angry at myself. How did I ever stop looking at you?”
“You were an idiot.” I try to sound casual but I’m too breathless to pull it off. “We’ve established this.”
“The biggest idiot.” He agrees, and then his mouth finds me and I come up off the bed so hard my back arches completely, hands grabbing at the sheets because I need to hold onto anything.
He’s unhurried about it, tongue working slow circles while his fingers slide inside me, crooking up to hit the spot that whites out my vision. I’m gasping, one hand tangled in his hair, tugging hard enough that it has to hurt but he just groans against me like he loves it.
“Wilson, I swear to God, if you don’t…” I don’t even know how to finish that sentence because my brain has stopped working.
“If I don’t what?” He pulls back just enough to speak, his breath hot against me, fingers still moving in that maddening rhythm. “Use your words, Izzy. You’re usually so good with them.”
“I’m going to kill you.” I tug his hair harder. “I’m going to actually murder you and they’ll never find the body.”
“That’s not very romantic.” He presses a kiss right where I’m most sensitive and I nearly come off the bed again. “Try again. What do you need?”
“You inside me, you absolute menace.” My voice breaks on it and I stop caring about dignity. “Right now. Please. I can’t wait anymore, Wilson. I need you.”
“Well, since you asked so nicely.” He climbs up my body, dragging his mouth along my stomach, between my breasts, up my throat, until he’s hovering over me with that stupid handsome face I’ve missed so much.
He lines himself up and then stops. Forehead against mine. Both of us out of breath and we haven’t even started yet.
“I love you.” It costs him to say it, I can hear it in his voice, rough and cracked open. “I never stopped loving you, Izzy. Not for one single day, even when you probably wished I would.”
“I never wished that.” I cup his face in my hands because I need him to hear this. “Not once. I wished you’d show up. I wished you’d see me. But I never stopped wanting you to love me.”
“I’m here now.” He turns his head and kisses my palm. “I see you now.”
“Then prove it.” I hook my legs around his hips and pull him closer. “Stop talking and show me.”
He pushes in and everything stops.
Neither of us moves. Neither of us breathes. Just this. Just feeling him inside me again after so long apart, and my eyes are stinging and I don’t even care because this is everything I’ve been missing.
“Izzy.” He whispers my name like it’s the only word he knows. “Jesus Christ, I forgot. I forgot how good this is, how good we are together. I’m such a fucking idiot.”
“Yeah, you are.” I pull him down and kiss him hard. “Now move before I lose my mind.”
He starts to move, slow and deep, and I dig my nails into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
“Faster would be good.” I bite it out against his neck because the slow pace is killing me. “Just a suggestion.”
“Patience.” He keeps the rhythm brutal and slow, pulling almost all the way out before sinking back in deep. “I spent years rushing past the good stuff. I’m not rushing this.”
“Wilson, I appreciate the sentiment but I’m literally dying here.”
“You’re so dramatic.” But he’s smiling against my throat and I can feel it. “Always so impatient.”
“You married me knowing that.” I dig my nails in harder. “Now speed up or I’ll flip us over and do it myself.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?” He pulls nearly all the way out and pushes back in just as slow, watching my face the whole time with that infuriating smile.