Chapter 7 #2
He didn't. His mouth moved lower, unhurried, tracing the curve of my breast before his tongue found what his fingers had already discovered, and I heard myself gasp his name into the quiet of the room, hips lifting off the mattress to chase the feeling.
His hand pressed flat against my stomach, steadying me, patient even now, even with his own breathing gone ragged above me.
"Elias." My fingers found his hair, gripping, and he made a low sound against my skin that vibrated straight through me.
He kissed his way back up my body slowly — my ribs, the underside of my breast, the hollow of my throat — until his mouth found mine again, deep and unhurried, his weight settling fully over me, skin against skin, the heat of him pressing along the length of my body.
"Now," I breathed against his mouth, and felt him shudder at the word.
He reached for the nightstand, and I heard the small tear of foil, felt him settle back between my thighs, one hand bracing beside my head, the other guiding himself against me, slow and deliberate, giving me every second to feel him before either of us moved further.
When he finally pushed inside, we both went still — his forehead dropping to mine, his breath catching hard, my own body arching up to take more of him, a low, broken sound escaping us both at once.
"You feel — " he started, and didn't finish, just buried his face against my throat and began to move.
He set the pace slow, deep, deliberate — the same careful precision he brought to everything, every roll of his hips grinding against exactly the place that made my breath stutter, one hand sliding beneath my lower back to change the angle until I was gasping his name on every stroke.
Rain fell steady against the windows. The candle guttered low on the nightstand, throwing shifting gold light across his shoulders as he moved above me.
"Right there," I gasped, nails dragging down his back. "Don't stop, don't you dare stop, right there — "
He didn't stop. His pace built, unhurried but relentless, his mouth finding my throat, my jaw, the corner of my mouth, murmuring my name against my skin like it was the only word he still remembered how to say.
I felt the tension coiling tighter with every deep, grinding roll of his hips, my whole body drawing up toward something I could feel building low and insistent, closer with every breath.
"I'm close," I managed, voice wrecked. "Elias — I'm so close — "
"I've got you." His hand found mine on the sheets, fingers lacing tight, and he angled deeper, harder, one steady, deliberate roll of his hips after another until the coil inside me finally, fully broke.
I came apart with his name breaking against my lips, my whole body clenching around him, back arching hard off the mattress as wave after wave of it rolled through me.
He followed me over a moment later with a low, guttural groan against my throat, hips stuttering once, twice, before he went still and shuddering above me, both of us gasping into the quiet.
He held himself there a moment, still buried deep, forehead pressed to mine, both of us trembling, before he eased down carefully beside me, gathering me against his chest.
He held me through it, both of us shaking slightly, his heartbeat hammering hard enough that I could feel it against my palm where it rested on his chest.
"You're shaking," I murmured, once I could speak again.
"So are you."
"Fair point."
We lay tangled together afterward, rain still soft against the window, the candle burned down to almost nothing, and he traced the line of my jaw with a gentleness that undid me nearly as much as everything before it had.
"I came home thinking the best part of my life was behind me," he said quietly. "Buried with three men in the dirt on a road I never want to see again. You just made me think the best part might still be coming."
I pressed my hand flat over his chest, over the rebuilt, scarred, stubbornly beating heart underneath.
"It is," I said. "We're both still here. That's the whole miracle, Elias. Everything else is just what we build on top of it."
He kissed my forehead, my temple, the corner of my mouth, unhurried now, nothing left to prove.
"I love you," he said, quiet, certain, like he'd been carrying the words for a while and had finally found the safe place to set them down.
"I don't know exactly when it happened. Somewhere between the tomatoes and tonight.
But I love you, Saoirse. I wanted you to know that, out loud, while we're both still here to say it. "
"I love you too." I said it easily, without hesitation, three years of careful guarding falling away in an instant. "I have for longer than I probably should have, professionally speaking."
"We're both terrible at professional boundaries."
"We're excellent at everything that actually matters instead."
He laughed, low and warm against my hair, and pulled me closer, and outside the rain kept falling, steady and soft, watering the garden we'd planted together weeks earlier, feeding the slow, stubborn growth of everything we'd built since.
We lay there a long while, listening to the rain, neither of us in any hurry to move.
"Can I ask you something?" he said eventually, tracing lazy circles against my shoulder.
"Always."
"Does it feel strange to you? That this started in a treatment room. That I met you as your patient before I ever got to meet you as just — a man."
"A little," I admitted. "But I think most good things start somewhere strange, if you look closely enough.
And I didn't fall for the patient version of you, Elias.
I fell for the version underneath that — the one who talked about his grandmother's garden like it was sacred, the one who calmed down a panicking nineteen-year-old like it was nothing, the one who made terrible printer jokes to distract me from crying at my desk.
That's who I fell for. The treatment room was just where I happened to meet him first."
"I like that answer."