Chapter 30 #2
“When you went quiet,” I say, up at the lights, because that’s easier than her eyes. “Those weeks before everything came out. I thought you’d gone back to Mason.” I make myself say the rest of it. “And I never asked you. I decided it by myself, and I pulled back, and I let you feel me do it.”
Her hands stay exactly where they are against my spine.
She doesn’t tell me it’s okay, or that she understands, or reach for any of the things that would file the edge off it.
She just holds my weight and lets the words sit on the water between us, and I make myself lie there in them and not reach to fix a single one.
“You really believed that,” she says.
It isn’t a question.
“Yeah,” I say. “I did.” A breath. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you are,” she says. “If I don’t want to be with you, I’ll tell you, okay?”
I nod.
And that’s all of it — no absolution, but also no blade.
We float, her arms steady under my back, long enough that the water stops feeling like something that could take me. And eventually, I get my feet under me and stand, water sheeting off me, and she wipes her face with the back of her hand, treading close.
The want is so total I don’t know where to put my hands first, and I—
She splashes me.
It’s just a quick flick that catches me across the face, and the shock of it is so stupid that I laugh, and the sound comes out lighter and dumber than anything has in months. Then she splashes me again, and I catch her wrist and pull, and her mouth is right there, grinning.
I kiss her.
She tastes like chlorine, and I groan with want as I lean into her, but a second later my foot slides on the tile and we both lurch and start to fall. But then her arm whips around my back and holds me up, because she’s watching the water for me now.
She laughs into my mouth, sharp and helpless. “Graceful.”
“Division One athlete.”
“You almost drowned kissing me.”
“Worth it.”
She puts her hands flat on my chest — then I back her to the wall and brace my hands on the tile on either side of her, and she hooks her legs around my waist, the water taking most of her weight so she’s almost weightless against me, arms looped behind my neck.
“Hi,” she says, eyes wide open, not looking away.
“Hi.”
I get my mouth on her throat, and her head tips back against the tile. As I’m leaving my mark, she doesn’t pull away, but presses into me. Her hips roll against me and I feel the heat of her even through the water and my grip goes hard on the tile.
“Okay,” she breathes, “this is not going to work against this wall.”
“Stupid geometry,” I say. “Where?”
“The steps. I planned this.” She’s speaking in short sentences as I suck at her neck.
“You did?”
“Well, sort of.”
We half-wade, half-stumble to the steps, and she goes up onto the broad top step and reclines back on her elbows, the water at her waist. Then, looking me right in the eyes, she lets her thighs fall open a little because she wants me looking.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I’m allowed,” I say, as I kneel into the shallow water between her legs.
I get a hand between her thighs, and she’s slick under my fingers in a way the pool can’t fully account for, and her hips lift off the step. I slide two into her and her breath punches out, and her clit is right there under my thumb, and I work her slow.
“Oh,” she gets out. “Hi.”
“Stop talking.”
“Make me.” She snorts. “No more Halden Girl, remember?”
So I do. Keeping two fingers buried in her, I kiss down the soft inside of her thigh. Then I get my mouth on her — chlorine and salt and the warmer, truer taste of her underneath — and the sound she makes isn’t careful in the slightest.
As I work my tongue and my fingers, I keep my eyes up, watching her. And she’s looking at me, too, even as her hand fists in my wet hair and her hips chase my mouth. By now, I know what she likes, but this time she doesn’t try to keep quiet.
She’s loud and unguarded and refusing to shrink.
“Don’t stop,” she breathes. “Don’t you dare, Rowan—”
The sound of it knocks every last plan out of my head, and when she hooks a heel over my shoulder, shameless, I groan against her. And that seems to set her off, because she comes against my mouth with a cry, her thighs locked around my head and her spine bowing up off the step.
I stay with her through every aftershock until she’s pushing weakly at my forehead because it has gone past too much. “Good?” I say.
She hauls me up by the arms, greedy now, her mouth finding mine while she’s wet and still gasping. “Not bad. Hey, Rowan?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m on the pill,” she says.
“Oh.” It comes out rough. “So I don’t need—”
“That’s the idea.”
“But what about all the strategically placed condoms?”
She laughs and pulls me down. I brace one forearm on the step beside her head and guide myself with the other hand, and when I push into her, we both go still — her lips part, her hand grips the back of my neck, and I feel her stretch around me, tight and slick and warm.
I drop my forehead to hers. “God,” I say.
“Yeah,” she breathes.
I start to move, slow, finding the angle, and the water laps over the step with every thrust. It’s clumsy — my elbow slips into the water by her head and I barely catch myself — but it’s messy and perfect and us.
She sets a rhythm and I follow it; then I set one and she follows that, and somewhere along the way we stop being careful about any of it. She pulls me down by the back of the neck until there’s no space left between us, and the sound she makes when I go deep ignites me.
“Don’t speed up,” she says when I start to. “Keep going, like that.”
So I stay there. Her breath turns ragged on the long strokes, and I watch it build in her — the flush climbing her chest, her nails dragging down my back, her hips chasing mine. She doesn’t let go of me through it all, and we find a new rhythm.
She gets a heel braced on the edge and rolls up into me, and the angle changes, and whatever it does takes the words out of her mouth entirely. I feel her start to tip toward it and haul herself back, like she wants to live at the edge of it a little longer.
Then she can’t anymore.
“Right there,” she breathes.
I get a hand under the small of her back and lift her into each stroke, my mouth at the hollow of her throat, her pulse going wild against my lips, and I hold the rhythm for as long as she needs.
Her legs lock around my hips, her breath goes high and fast, and she comes with her whole body pulling taut and her nails buried in my shoulder, a sound tearing out of her that she doesn’t even try to keep down.
The clutch of her around me is what finishes me — a few more thrusts, graceless now, my face buried against her neck — and I come saying her name, loud and rough. There’s nothing between us, and feeling her like that takes me apart.
For a while neither of us moves. Her chest rises and falls under mine, and the pool laps at the step, and my cock slowly softens inside her. We hold each other, her chin on my shoulder, and my face is in her neck.
“Your elbow’s on my hair,” she says eventually.
“Sorry.” I shift.
“Don’t be sorry.” She kisses me, lazy and warm. “Just relocate.”
I do. “That was good.”
“It was,” she says. “But you have terrible form in the pool.”
I laugh as I ease myself out of her, then sit back on my heels in the shallows. I’m still catching my breath when she slides down off the step and into the water, floating on her back, arms out, eyes closed.
“Hold me up,” she says, without opening them. “You owe me.”
I smile and inch closer to her, holding her the way she held me. Then she lets herself go — weightless and bare, hair fanning around her face, breasts breaking the surface, the whole length of her on the water while I take the weight.
“If you say something tender,” she says, eyes shut, “I’ll go under and take you with me.”
“Noted.”
“You get quieter when you go soft,” she says. “It’s a whole thing. I can hear it.”
“You can hear an expression.”
“Yours, yeah.” She cracks one eye open and looks up at me. “What’s that?”
“What?”
“That face. I’ve never seen that face.”
“It’s my face.”
“No, it isn’t. That’s a new one.” She reaches up out of the water and touches the corner of my mouth. “That one’s mine. I want it every day.”