4. Az #2
“Ruin it,” he says immediately. Then, catching himself: “Unless you want slow. I can do slow. I want to do slow. I want to learn what married sex feels like before my brain melts out my ears.”
“Slow,” I agree. “Reverent. Filthy. Stack those adjectives. And if you say my name like a vow while you’re inside me, I won’t complain. I’ll reward you.”
He stands, pulls me up with him, and undoes the safety pins Priya used on my strap with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb.
One pin pings off the dresser. We both snort.
The dress puddles at my feet in a sad little satin puddle.
I’m in a strapless bra that doesn’t quite fit and underwear I bought yesterday because the idea of marrying him in anything else felt cosmically wrong.
“Jesus, Az.” His hands hover at my hips like he’s waiting for customs to stamp his passport. “May I?”
“You may. Husband privileges. Use them before they expire.”
He peels the rest away and lays me back across the terrible floral bedspread like I’m something the motel doesn’t deserve and never will.
The neon stripes my stomach pink and blue in alternating sins.
He kisses the bruise forming on my forehead first, apology written in lips, then my mouth, claim, then the hollow of my throat where my pulse is committing perjury.
“Wife,” he whispers there. The word vibrates into my collarbone and lower. “My wife. Fuck. Say it back so I know I’m not hallucinating the paperwork.”
“Husband.” I arch when his mouth finds my breast, tongue circling, teeth grazing just shy of too much. “My ridiculous, concussion-prone husband. Don’t stop. Don’t you dare get gentle now that the judge already stamped us.”
He doesn’t stop. He worships his way down my body with a patience that makes me restless, kissing the soft below my navel, the insides of my thighs, the crease where hip becomes something needier.
When he finally puts his mouth on me properly I fist the bedspread and laugh because it feels too good to be solemn about and this room is too ugly to deserve reverence.
“You’re laughing again,” he murmurs against me, the words buzzing my clit.
“You’re going down on me in a motel that advertises hourly rates next to free HBO. You have to admit the sign is doing a lot of work.”
“Then let me make the punchline filthy.” His tongue is devastatingly focused, broad strokes, then a pointed flick that makes my heels dig into his back.
Two fingers curl inside me and crook like he already mapped the spot years ago.
“Come on my tongue, wife. I want to taste how married feels. I want it dripping down my chin when I kiss you after.”
“Eli, fuck, your mouth is a menace-”
“Your cunt is a cathedral. I’m lighting candles.” He sucks harder. “Give it to me. I earned this front-row seat.”
I shatter with his name bitten into a pillow that smells faintly of industrial detergent, thighs clamped around his ears, neon blurring into one indecent color. He crawls up my body looking wrecked and proud, mouth wet, borrowed suit jacket somehow still half-on like the world’s stupidest cape.
“Off,” I order, yanking at buttons hard enough that one pops and skitters under the TV stand. “All of it. I want skin. I want ink. I want to ride my husband under this criminal lighting until the neighbors file a noise complaint.”
He strips like the suit personally offended him and his mother.
When he’s naked he is almost absurd, broad and tattooed and hard, kneeling on ugly carpet for a second just to look at me spread out in pink-blue neon.
I crook a finger. He comes like I reeled him in on a line.
I push him onto his back, he goes willingly, grinning, and straddle his thighs, the neon turning my skin candy-colored and ridiculous.
“This okay?” I ask, because he taught me asking works both ways and I like the way permission makes his eyes go soft.
“Az. If you don’t put me inside you in the next ten seconds I am going to expire on this floral disaster and Hank will have to explain death-by-anticipation at the funeral. Roz will cry. It will be a whole thing.”
I wrap my hand around him first, stroke once, twice, watch his abs jump. “Look at you. Married five hours and already begging.”
“I’ve been begging since the hallway at the courthouse. I have continuity.”
I sink down onto him slow, inch by inch, watching his face fracture open like something holy and obscene at once.
He’s thick and deep like this, and the angle hits a place that makes my vision spark white at the edges.
His hands find my hips, steadying, then slide up to cradle my stomach, not possessive, just present, like he’s holding the center of gravity that keeps him on earth.
“Look at you,” he breathes. “Riding me in neon. My wife. My fucking wife. You feel like the reason I learned how to pray and the reason I learned how to swear.”
“Don’t get religious when my cunt is stuffed full of your cock.”
“Too late. I’m converting. Dual citizenship in filthy and devout.” He thrusts up to meet me, and the wet sound of it is shameless in the quiet room. “Talk to me. Tell me what you need. I want instructions. I want a syllabus.”
“Harder. Hands on my stomach, yes, keep them there like you’re blessing the middle of me. Call me wife when you come. And don’t you dare apologize for the doorframe again while I’m fucking you, or I will make you recite the vows backward.”
He laughs, broken and bright, and gives me harder.
The bedframe complains in a rhythm that would get us kicked out of a nicer place.
Somewhere through the thin wall a neighbor’s TV plays a game show; applause bursts every time I moan.
I brace my palms on his chest, ink warm under my hands, and roll my hips until we’re both sweating and swearing and saying each other’s names like they’re the only vocabulary left in California.
“Wife, Az, I’m close. Can I-”
“Then fill me up, husband. Make it count. I want to feel you lose it while you’re looking at me.”
He comes with a groan dragged up from the floorboards, hands spanning my belly, the word wife punched into the neon-stained air like a second set of vows.
The pulse of him tips me over again, smaller, sharper, laughing through it, and I collapse forward onto his chest, burying the sound in the hollow of his throat because my forehead still throbs faintly and somehow that makes the whole night funnier.
We breathe. The champagne continues its quiet protest from the bucket. His fingers draw lazy circles on my back, then the letters of my name, then what might be a heart if his calligraphy were better.
“You’re why any of this matters,” he says eventually, voice wrecked-soft into my hair. “The music. The borrowed suit. The stupid motel with the hourly rates. You’re the foundation. Everything else is just decoration I bought to impress a girl who hates roses.”