32. Kieran #2
I put both my hands flat on her ribcage. I draw them up, slowly, over her breasts, around the underside, and back down to the curve. I cup her where the baby has been turning all night.
She breathes out.
I unzip the cotton skirt at her hip and let it drop. I crouch behind her and slide the soft tights and underwear down her legs. She steps out of them. I kiss the back of her thigh once, and stand.
She is naked in front of the mirror.
She does not, for a long second, move.
Then she turns into me.
She is at my chest with both her hands flat on the front of my dress shirt. She lifts her face and kisses me slowly, deep, the way she has not kissed me since the morning the Globe column ran.
She works the buttons of my shirt. She pushes it off my shoulders. She pulls the undershirt off after it. She undoes my belt, the button of the suit pants, the zipper. She pushes the suit pants and the boxer-briefs off together.
I am hard for her before she has stopped pulling.
She wraps her hand around me. Her palm is warm, and her fingers know the way around me now — eight months of finding me in the dark of every bed in two cities. She moves her hand slowly.
I let her.
I let her for what is probably a full minute, with my hand on the back of her neck and my mouth at her temple and my breath going short against her hair.
She lifts her face.
She says: "Sit."
I sit on the edge of the bed. She steps between my knees, puts both her hands on my shoulders, and lowers herself slowly to her knees in front of me.
She wraps her hand around me, then her mouth.
She takes me in slow. I have not, since the morning at the Bellamy, had this from her — the long unhurried way she does it when she is the one in control, with her hand at the base and her mouth taking me to the back of her throat in one long stroke.
For eight months she has only had time and energy for the version where I am taking care of her.
Tonight she is taking care of me.
I let her, for what is probably two minutes, with my hand in her hair and my breath coming hard and my back going stiff against the edge of the bed.
When I am close, I lift her gently off me.
"Greer."
"What?"
"On the bed. I want to come inside you."
She stands. She kisses me on the mouth and says, “Lie down, Kieran,” and pushes me back onto the duvet.
I lie down. She climbs onto me carefully with one knee on either side of my hips, both her hands flat on my chest. She lowers herself onto me slowly.
The fit, eight months in, is the thing I will never get used to.
She is warm and wet and tight around me, and at twenty-eight weeks she is taking me at her pace, and her pace, tonight, is slow.
She moves.
I keep my hands on her hips. Then on her thighs. Then I move one hand to the front of her where the curve is between us, and I keep the other on her hip.
She rides me slow.
She is over me with her hair fallen forward, her breasts heavy in the lamplight, the curve of her between us, her hands flat on my chest. She does not, in any of it, look away from me.
She rides me for what is probably five minutes. When she comes the first time, she comes against me with her mouth half-open and her head back, and I feel her go tight around me from inside.
I do not come with her.
I want to be inside her for longer than that.
She breathes out and sinks onto my chest, the curve against my stomach, her hair against my jaw, her hand at the front of my shoulder.
"Kieran."
"Yes."
"You didn’t come."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because I want to be inside you for the rest of the night."
She laughs against my chest, the first laugh I have heard from her in a week. She pushes herself up off me and looks down at me on the pillow.
She says, "What do you want?"
"Roll onto your back."
She rolls onto her back. I push myself up onto my knees beside her, lift one of her legs gently, slide between her knees with my hand under her thigh.
"Like this," I say.
I push into her slowly, with her thigh against my hip and my hand on the underside of her knee and the curve between us. At twenty-eight weeks I cannot get on top of her, but on her side with one leg lifted, I can be deep inside her and still hold the rest of her where I need to hold her.
I move slowly.
She watches me.
I tell her, into the small space between her face and mine: "I have wanted this for two weeks."
"I know."
"Every night I have lain awake with you next to me and wanted this and not asked for it because you were too tired."
"I know."
"Tell me what you want."
"More."
"Slow?"
"Slow. And more."
I give her more. I move slow and deep, with my hand on her thigh and her hand around the back of my neck. She breathes out — long, slow, the held breath of two months leaving her chest at once.
She comes the second time around me on her side, with my hand under her thigh and her mouth open against my shoulder.
I hold her through it.
When she is finished, I ease her thigh down, slide my arm under her ribs, and roll her onto her side facing away from me. I slide up behind her, slide back into her from behind, and put my hand back on the front of her.
"This is how we finish," I say, into the back of her neck.
"Yes."
"Together this time."
I move slow. She moves with me — small, careful, her hand on top of mine on the curve and her hips going back to meet me.
Tonight she is moving with me deliberately, her body taking me the way it has been taking me for eight months but with the deliberate slow strength of a woman who has, in the last twenty minutes, come twice already and is reaching for the third.
I tell her, into the back of her hair, "I love you."
"I love you."
"I am going to love you for the rest of my life."
"I know."
"And I am going to do this with you for the rest of my life."
"I know."
She comes the third time with a soft broken sound against the pillow and her hand tight around mine on the curve.
I come a beat after her, with my forehead against the back of her shoulder and her name in my mouth.
I stay inside her.
I do not, for a long minute, move.
When I roll us, I keep my arm under her and my hand on the front of her. The baby kicks, once, then again. She breathes out — the deepest breath I have felt from her in eight months.
She says, into the dark: "Kieran."
"Yes?"
"I love you."
She is asleep on me within ninety seconds, the way she sleeps when she has been waiting to sleep for too long.
I do not close my eyes for another half hour.
I lie in the bed with the woman I love asleep on me, the baby still turning under my palm, the lamp still on at the side of the bed, the door of my daughter's room closed at the top of the stairs.
The man on the contract that arrived from the franchise's outside counsel at nine this morning is asleep with his family for the first time in eight months.
The press conference is six weeks past. The licensing-board inquiry closed quietly on the sixteenth.
I have, between the bed and the floor above me, given the only thing the day was going to ask of me already.
I let myself stop bracing.