Chapter 16 #2
She started at my neck and went down, slow, thorough.
My shoulders, one at a time, her hands strong from years of work, finding knots I didn't know I was carrying and staying on them until they gave.
My chest. My arms, all the way to each hand.
She washed my hands like they were something—finger by finger, the palm, the scarred knuckles, taking her time, her head bent over the work.
The old scars got no ceremony and no avoidance either; the loofah went over them like they were any other ground.
Something about that undid me worse than tenderness would have.
Then, she moved lower, and slowed down.
Her hands went under the water, soap-slick, and found me.
I was already hard—had been since the balcony.
She washed my cock the way she'd washed the rest of me, which is to say thoroughly, and with pride in her work, and at a pace designed by a merciless woman.
Long, slick strokes. Her fist easy and then snug.
Her thumb learning the head of me until my hands found the tub's rim and gripped.
She watched my face the whole time, satisfied, queen of her own hot country. Just when my breathing got ragged enough to embarrass me, she gentled, and patted my thigh under the water like a woman finishing a chore.
"Clean," she announced.
"You're a menace. I said it yesterday and I'll stand by it."
"My turn."
We traded places in a slosh of water and laughing, and I washed her.
Her hair first. She handed me the cup she kept on the tub's edge.
I poured the water through it, slow, one hand shading her eyes the way you do, and then worked the shampoo through it from her scalp to the ends, taking my time, her whole body going loose against me by degrees.
She made a sound low in her throat that wasn't language.
I rinsed it clean, cup by cup, careful. Then, I took the soap and started at her neck and went south.
Her shoulders. The long muscles beside her spine, which had spent fifteen years standing and carried it all right there—I worked them until she groaned and went boneless.
Her arms. Her hands, finger by finger. She watched me do it with her cheek against the tub's rim and her eyes half shut.
Her breasts, soap-slick and heavy in my hands, until her breathing changed.
The soft of her belly. Her hips. Down each leg to her feet, which I washed one at a time, thumb deep in the arch.
She said a word that wasn't church-appropriate and melted another inch into the water.
By the end of it, we were both clean and neither of us was calm.
I stood her up.
The water came off her in sheets, steam rising off her skin.
I turned her around by the hips, gentle, and she knew—she was already going, already bending, sure of herself in a way that would have been unthinkable to the woman with the shirt a day before.
She set her hands wide on the far rim of that tub, and arched her back.
She looked at me over her shoulder through the wet rope of her hair.
"Well," she said. "You wanted to see the tub."
I knelt down in the water behind her, spread her with my hands, and I put my mouth on her.
She cried out at the first pass, her head dropping between her arms. I took it slow.
Slower than slow. The water lapping at my thighs, her body steaming above it.
I learned her from behind the way I'd learned her from the front—long and flat and patient, no hurry anywhere in me, tasting the clean of her and the heat under it.
I used my mouth and then my tongue and then, when her sounds told me to, my fingers with it, sliding into her slick and curling while my tongue kept its work.
She pushed back against my face, demanding.
I gave her everything she demanded at exactly the pace I'd chosen, which drove her beautifully out of her mind.
"Clint—God—"
I held my rhythm. Steady as a heading. Her thighs started trembling against my hands.
Her knuckles went white on the rim. The sounds coming out of her bounced off the tile and filled the whole steamed room.
I felt the storm gather in her from way off, the same as before. I didn’t vary one degree, and it came.
She broke, loud.
Her whole body bowed and bucked and I held her hips and stayed with her, working her through every wave of it, gentling as she came down, until she was breathing in big, ragged pulls with her forehead on her hands.
"Stand," she said, when she had words again. Hoarse. Certain. "Your turn. Stand up."
We swapped. Her rules. Her house.
I stood in that tub with the water at my calves and steam rolling off me. She settled onto her knees in the water, and took me in hand, and looked up the length of me.
"Slow," she said. Not a question. A promise.
Then, her mouth.
She kept it exactly as advertised. Slow as syrup.
She took me in inch by inch, wet heat and the working pull of her, one hand snug at the base, moving with her mouth in long, twinned strokes, and her other hand flat on my thigh, feeling the muscle jump.
She pulled off to drag her tongue up the underside, root to head, then took me deep again, cheeks hollowing.
I made a sound I have never once made in daylight.
My hand went to her wet hair—holding on, the way she'd held my forearm at the refrigerator.
The steam. The lap of the water. Her eyes coming up to mine and staying, checking her work, pleased with it, merciless.
She built me the way I'd built her. Patient. Thorough. Bringing me to the edge and easing off, twice, three times, until my legs were iron and my breathing was gravel and her name was most of my vocabulary.
"Sasha—I'm—"
She hummed around me. I know. And she didn't ease off.
She took me all the way through it. I came with my hand fisted in her hair and my head back and her name breaking off the tile, pulsing into the wet heat of her mouth.
She stayed with me, swallowing, working me slow through every last wave the way I'd stayed with her until there was nothing left in me anywhere, until I was empty and rung and swaying on my feet in that ridiculous, magnificent tub.
She let me go and sat back on her heels and looked up at me like a woman who had never once lost a negotiation in her life.
"Clean," she announced.
I laughed. I sank down into that water and gathered her in. We settled together—me against the sloped end, her back against my chest, the water up around us both, her head on my shoulder.
We soaked. The steam drifted. The morning light came through the window soft and pearly and lay on the water. Her fingers laced through mine on her stomach, under the surface. Her breathing went long and slow, and mine followed it down.
I was happy.
I noted it the way I note everything, and then, for once, I didn't file it.
I let it stand there in the open. A man in a queen's tub in a city he'd known three days, holding a woman who negotiated like her grandmother was watching, warm to the bone, nowhere to be.
If the road wanted me, it could come knock.
I closed my eyes.
I don't know how long they were closed. A minute. Less. Long enough for the water to go glassy and her weight to settle full against me.
Then, something nicked the edge of my senses.
Small. Wrong. A sound that didn't belong to the building—thin, insect, mechanical, a whine down at the floor of hearing, coming from a direction that should have held nothing but gulls and sky.
My eyes came open.
They went straight to the window.
And there, six feet off the glass, hanging dead-level in the morning air with the harbor spread out gold behind it, was a drone. Matte gray. Rock-steady in the breeze coming off the water, which takes skill, or money, or both.
Its camera was pointed straight at us.