24. The Real Thing #3
"Up." My voice is gone. "I want to see you when I come. On top, amore. Your turn."
We rearrange, slow, languid. I am on my back. She climbs over me, her hair a curtain around her face, lamplight catching one shoulder, her chest still heaving. She lowers herself onto me in slow motion, and both of us groan.
She sits there for a moment, fully impaled, eyes closed, learning the angle. Then she rolls her hips once, and my eyes nearly cross.
"My turn." She says it down at me, soft, certain. "Watch me."
I watch her.
She rides me slow, hands flat on my chest. Hips rolling.
Belly soft and rising over the place where I am inside her.
Her tits in the lamplight, swaying with the rhythm.
Twenty years of looking, and the only entry that ever mattered is right here, riding me slow.
I can see where we connect from this angle.
Her pussy is swallowing me on every downstroke.
The wet shine of her glossing me on every rise.
My hands climb her body languidly. Hips. Belly. Palm flat against the place where the third of us lives. Up to her tits. I pinch her nipples, and her breath catches. Then my hand slides up to her throat, light, the weight of it only, not pressure, the way I learned she likes it on the roof.
"Look at you riding me." My voice is wrecked. "Look at you taking what's yours."
"Mine." She rolls her hips down on me, slow. "Whose child?”
"Yours. Ours."
"Say it the way I can't publish."
"Your filthy fucking cock," I groan, "is going to put another one in you the second the federal building gives us a minute alone."
She lets out a sound that is half laugh, half moan, and rolls her hips harder.
"Promise."
"On my life."
She bears down on me, her hand finding mine on her hip, lacing our fingers, bringing them up to her mouth.
Kisses my knuckles. Then puts my hand back on her hip and rides me with intent.
Slow. Deep. Eye contact that doesn't break.
I can feel her pulse through her pussy, feel myself swelling inside her, my balls drawing up, the pressure climbing.
"You feel," she breathes down at me, "like the only true thing I’ve ever written."
That undoes me.
"Come with me." My voice has gone bare. "One thing tonight that isn't strategy. Come with me, amore. Adesso. Now."
"With you." She bears down again, taking me to the root. Her pussy is already rippling around me.
I come inside her with my eyes locked on hers and my hand flat on her belly.
Twenty years of withheld surrender emptied into her at once, pulse after pulse, deep, hot, filling her up.
She comes a heartbeat later, hand over mine on her stomach, her mouth open in a silent shape that takes my soul out of my body and gives it back changed.
I feel her go around me in long, slow waves.
We both keep coming. She rides me down, down, down, until she falls forward onto my chest, my softening cock still inside her, both of us shaking.
We don't move for a long time. I stay inside her, wanting to stay until the federal building eats us tomorrow.
Her ear over my heart. My hand on her back.
The lamp is burning low. Outside, the city has begun its slow turn toward gray, and somewhere in it, a federal building is opening its doors for the day that ends one of our lives and begins another.
Her breathing slows to the deep, honest rhythm I'd know anywhere now.
"Strong scene," she murmurs into my throat, half asleep, deadpan, and exhausted. "Best one I've ever written."
"Co-authored," I murmur.
She doesn't open her eyes. "Editor's pleased."
I laugh. It cracks. She lifts her head just enough to look at me, smiles, and settles again.
I should be sleeping, but I can't.
Because in eight hours the journals reach the federal building, and the protection they buy still comes with a name she hasn't been told to wear.
Witness security. A new state, a new face, a new identity stacked on the three she already carries.
Somewhere in that paperwork, Bianca Cross stops existing, and the woman who wrote for ten million readers a place to feel safe never publishes another word.
Two names to be erased now. Three of us, two erasures. The math I do in the dark is worse than it was an hour ago because the child she has just given me will be born under a name her mother does not yet know is coming.
She stirs against my chest, half asleep, finds my hand in the dark, and laces her fingers through mine like she's signing something.
"Whatever you're not saying," she murmurs, eyes still closed, "say it before the feds do. You promised me no plays behind my back. Don't make a liar of the church."
Then she's asleep, trusting me with the one secret I have left.
I lie in the dark, two steady heartbeats under my hand now: the one I have loved for months and the one I have loved for an hour.
Doing the cruelest arithmetic of my life.
How to tell the woman I love that saving her means erasing her, and that the daughter she carries will never know what her mother was before.