Chapter 14 #2
"You are so beautiful." His hand comes up and unhooks the clasp at my back with the slow, sure hands of a man who learned this in another life and never forgot.
The bra falls away. Then his mouth is on me — open, hot — his tongue dragging across one nipple while his thumb rolls the other, and the "so" he never finished he finishes against my breast, with his teeth.
"Oh god."
"Yes."
"Oh—"
He sucks, hard, and my back arches off the bed before I've given it permission.
He laughs against my skin, dark and low — the laugh of a man who's just learned that the woman he's been carrying for three years will come apart from his mouth at her breast alone.
It's the most undone sound I've ever heard him make.
"Tell me what you want."
"I want—"
"Use your words, sweetheart."
"Sweetheart." The word goes through me the way nothing else has in this lifetime.
He's not called me anything — not once at the brownstone, not at the gala.
Maeve. Ms. Callahan. Three years ago, on a folded scrap of paper, extraordinary.
And now, low into my breastbone, his mouth still moving on me: sweetheart. It's the word that breaks me.
"I want your mouth."
"Where?"
"Lex."
"Where, Maeve?"
I can't say it. Thirty-six months of trademark briefs and a one-bedroom apartment, and I can't make my mouth shape the words while his is already moving down my stomach.
He doesn't make me. "I know where," he says against my hip. "I've known for three years."
He drags my jeans and my underwear down and off, and then his hands are on the insides of my knees, spreading me open, slow, the way you open something you've been told to handle with care. Cool air. Then his breath. Then his mouth.
He licks into me like he has all night and intends to use every minute of it — long, flat strokes, then a narrowing focus until he's working the one spot that lifts my hips off the bed, and his forearm comes across my pelvis to pin me down.
I'm soaked. I can hear it, the slick of his mouth on me, and the sound of it undoes something in him, because he groans against my clit, and the vibration nearly finishes me on its own.
Then two fingers, pushing into me slowly, curling to find what his mouth can't reach — and the two together, his tongue and his hand, coax a sound out of my mouth I don't recognize as mine.
"Please—"
"Tell me."
"Please—"
"What do you want?"
"You. Inside. Now."
"Come on, my tongue first."
"Lex—"
"Sweetheart. Come on my tongue. Then I'll give you the rest."
And I do.
It takes me out at the knees. It starts where his mouth is and rolls up through me in a wave that hits the back of my throat and breaks, and I'm saying his name in a syllable that's half a sob, and his hand on my hip is the only thing holding me to the bed.
It doesn't stop. It keeps going, a tide, the slow undoing of the woman I've been for three years — and through it I hear the rough, ragged sound he's making against me, and I understand, in the last clear corner of my mind, that he's making it because he's as wrecked as I am.
He stays where he is until I stop shaking. Then he kisses his way up my body, my own taste on his mouth, and stops at my ribs, his cheek over my heart, and I feel him shaking.
"Lex."
"Give me a second."
He nods against my ribs. Once.
"Then come up here."
He comes up. Gold eyes in the half-light, his face two inches above mine, his thumb at my temple. He's trembling — the man is trembling above me, and I am the only thing keeping him together.
"Now," I say.
"You're sure."
"Now, Lex. I'm asking now."
He notches himself against me and pushes in, slow, inch by inch, and I feel every one of them — the stretch, the thick, relentless drag of him filling me after three years of no one. His forehead drops to mine. His eyes close. The breath leaves him in a shudder that sounds fifteen years long.
"Christ. Maeve."
"I know. I know. I know."
He holds there, buried to the hilt, not moving, until I lift my hips and take the last of him, and he makes a sound I'll remember when I'm old.
"Move."
"If I move I'm going to—"
"I don't care. Move."
He moves. The first stroke is the kind that ruins people — the slow drag out, the deep drive back, the head of him hitting a place that pulls a cry out of me. He shudders. He kisses me like a man handed the one thing he'd stopped letting himself want. Again. The third stroke. The fourth.
"Faster, Lex. I'm not going to break."
"You might break me."
"Then break."
He fucks me harder, then — his hand hooking under my knee to lift it, open me, take me deeper — the bed moving under us, his mouth at my throat, the "yes" he keeps saying like a prayer, the "Maeve" that's stopped being a name.
I feel the second one building where we're joined, tighter and hotter than the first, and he feels it too, because his rhythm goes ragged and his control starts to come apart in my hands.
Then a sentence. Hot. Into my hair. The whole of it.
"I have wanted this for three years."
My back arches off the bed.
And the world is finally perfect.