Chapter 24 Abbie #3
He keeps going. Fingers pumping. Tongue circling.
The swing rocks with every movement of his head, chains singing a soft metallic rhythm that feels obscenely like accompaniment.
My palm mashes back over my mouth. My thighs clamp around his ears.
The orgasm builds low and mean, coiling behind my navel where our baby is already the size of a raspberry and somehow already rearranging my entire life.
When I come, I come silent and shaking, tears pricking the corners of my eyes from the force of holding the sound in. He works me through it with devastating gentleness, slowing, softening, pressing open-mouthed kisses to my inner thighs while I twitch and gasp behind my hand.
Between one crest and the next almost-crest he pulls back just far enough to speak, lips wet, voice sandpaper.
"Tell me if anything feels different," he says. "The pregnancy. Pressure. Anything. I'll adjust. I'll stop. I'll crawl inside and make tea. Just tell me."
"It feels—" I search for honesty through the haze. "Sensitive. More. Like every nerve got turned up. Don't stop. Don't you dare make tea."
"No tea," he promises, solemn, and then his mouth is back and his fingers are back and I'm gone again into the slick heat of it, palm crushed to my lips, swing rocking, oaks whispering like gossiping bridesmaids.
My second orgasm sneaks up less violently than the first and somehow wrecks me worse, a long, rolling wave that leaves me slumped against the swing's backrest with tears actually slipping free this time.
He notices. He always notices. He rises enough to kiss the salt off my cheekbones without asking me to explain.
"Okay?" he checks.
"More than." I laugh wetly. "You’re going to be impossible after this, aren’t you?"
"Almost certainly," he says.
Then he sits back on his heels, mouth shining, looking unfairly proud of himself for a man kneeling on outdoor wood.
I lower my hand. My voice comes out ruined.
"That does not count as slowly."
Gray thumbs the shine off his lower lip, stands, and cups my face with both hands. He kisses me, I taste myself on his tongue, and the kiss is soft again, almost polite, which is somehow filthier after what he just did.
"Next time I'll go slower," he offers, solemn as a contract. "Take my time. Hours, maybe. Walls. A bed. Possibly a locked door if you're feeling traditional."
"Don't you dare." I fist his henley and pull him back down until our foreheads touch. "You may keep the walls joke. You may not downgrade what just happened. I came on your tongue on a porch swing with a pregnancy test watching. That's the opposite of a downgrade."
"Noted." His smile is small and real and a little stunned. "For the record, I would have gone slower if you'd asked."
"I know." I fix my dress with hands that still tremble. "I didn't ask. I wanted this. Open air. Risk. You on your knees because you couldn't stand not to be."
"I couldn't." He says it plain. "The second you kissed me like that I was gone. Pregnant or not. Slowly or not. I've been starving for you since we separated, Abs. A porch and a dress and your hand over your mouth was never going to be enough to stop me once you said yes."
I laugh, really laugh, unsteady and relieved, and the sound echoes out over the canyon and gets swallowed by the wind. He sits beside me on the swing again. Our shoulders touch. The test sits on the table, two lines still pink, still impossible, still ours.
"So," I say, after a minute. "Walls next time. Maybe."
"Maybe," he agrees. "Or another porch. I'm flexible."
"You're incorrigible."
"You're pregnant with my kid and you just came on my face in public. I think we're past incorrigible."
I lean into him. His arm settles around my shoulders. Below us the canyon road keeps carrying strangers who have no idea what just happened on this porch, and for the first time since the second line appeared, the future feels less like a cliff and more like a road we might actually walk together.
He picks up the test again, turns it in his fingers like a coin he can't believe he won, then sets it down carefully.
"I'm going to be so annoying about this," he warns. "Prenatals. Appointments. Building cribs at 2 a.m. because I can't sleep."
"You're already annoying."
"Worse, then." He kisses my temple. "Much worse. You've been warned."
"I'll survive." I catch his hand and press it flat to my stomach, still flat, still secret, already everything. "We will."
"Slowly," I say one more time, mostly to hear myself say it.
"Slowly," he echoes. Then, quieter, against my hair: "Except for my mouth. My mouth has never agreed to that timeline."
I dig my knuckles into his ribs. He yelps, then grins, and the swing creaks us into the afternoon like it has all the time in the world.
Before we go inside he helps me stand, steadies me when my knees wobble, and looks so unbearably pleased about the wobble that I have to shove his chest.
"Stop looking at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you won a raffle."
"I did win a raffle." He nods at the test on the side table. "I've got the ticket right there."
I roll my eyes, fix my hair with my fingers, and let him walk me to the door with his hand warm on the small of my back. The porch swing keeps creaking behind us in the wind, empty now, chains still singing like they haven't gotten the message that the show is over.