16. Maren
Maren
He kisses me down the hallway like he’s got all night, which, it turns out, is the whole problem with men who’ve waited a long time for something.
They don’t hurry. They savor. I’ve spent my entire adult life rushing, efficient even in want, getting to the end of things so I can get to the next thing, and Rhett Mercer backs me into my own bedroom one slow step at a time like the rushing was never an option he was offering.
“Slow down,” he says against my mouth, which is rich, because I’m the one trying to drag him, fisting his shirt, already half out of my own.
“I’ve been thinking about this since a press room in September.
” His hands find the hem of my shirt and lift it off, unhurried, and then he just looks, his eyes going over me in the dark like he’s reading tape, like I’m the only thing in the building worth studying, and the look does more than the hands.
“I’m not going to rush the one thing I actually wanted. ”
I should have a comeback. I’m famous for comebacks. I’ve got nothing, because he’s pulling me in by the hips and putting his mouth at my throat, at the spot under my jaw, and the words just leave.
We get the rest of it off between the door and the bed, his shirt, my sweats, the clumsy laughing part where his belt fights him and I say something about a man his age and reading glasses and he bites my shoulder in retaliation and I stop laughing.
He’s all hard lines gone soft at the edges, a body that gave the game everything and kept what mattered, the bad knee, the surgeon’s map of scars I’ve only ever seen listed in a file, and now they’re under my hands and they’re warm and they’re his and the file feels very far away, which is the first mercy I’ve had in days.
I put my mouth on the worst of the scars, the long one over the knee, and he goes still like nobody’s ever done that, like in thirty years of being adored nobody thought to be tender about the parts that hurt, and I think, I will be tender about every part that hurts, I will make a whole career of it, and then I stop thinking in sentences for a while.
He lays me down and takes the tour he promised.
Mouth at my collarbone, my breast, his tongue at my nipple until I arch off the bed, and lower, the gray-stubbled jaw dragging down my stomach, his hands spreading my thighs like he’s got every right, and he settles between them and looks up the length of me with those steady gray eyes and says, “Tell me to stop and I stop. Otherwise I’m going to take my time here too. ”
“Don’t you dare stop. Don’t you —”
His mouth closes over my clit and the sentence dies.
He licks into me slow and certain, no fumbling, no hoping, a man who knows exactly what he’s doing and is in absolutely no rush to be done doing it, and it’s filthy and patient and devastating, and I’ve got one hand in his silver hair and the other fisted in the sheets and I’m already, embarrassingly fast, climbing.
“Rhett —”
“I know.” Against me, the words buzzing through. “Let go. I’ve got you. You don’t have to manage this one.”
And that’s what does it. Not the tongue, though God, the tongue.
It’s you don’t have to manage this one. The one person who saw that I run everything, carry everything, fix everything, telling me to put it down, that he’s got it, that for once I don’t have to be the one holding the room together, and I come apart on his mouth with his hands gripping my thighs to keep me there, loud in a way I’d be mortified about if I had a single thought left, the orgasm rolling through me long and hard while he works me through every second of it, unhurried even now, even here.
I’m still shaking when he kisses his way back up, and he’s smiling, the rusty one, the one that tilts the floor, except now it tilts the whole bed.
“There she is,” he says, like he said in a film room a lifetime ago.
“Shut up and —” I get a hand around him, finally, the thick hard length of his cock, and his breath goes ragged and the smug drops off his face, and there’s my comeback, late but landed. “There he is.”
“Maren.” A warning and a plea, my favorite version of my name.
“Condom. Drawer. Left.” I’m already reaching. “And then I need you to stop touring.”
He laughs, low and wrecked, and gets it, rolls it on, and then he’s over me, braced on his forearms, fifty-three years of him caging twenty-eight years of me, and he goes still for a second at the last second, the head of him right there, and he looks at me with something that isn’t heat at all.
“Eyes open,” he says, soft. “You said eyes open. Keep them on me.”
And he pushes in, slowly, one long claiming stroke that splits me open and fills me up, and I keep my eyes on his because he asked and because I can’t not, and the stretch of him is almost too much and exactly enough, and we both make a sound, his low in his chest, mine high in my throat, and for a second neither of us moves, just breathes, just holds the impossible fact of it.
Then he starts to move, and it’s not slow anymore.
It’s deep and it’s hard and it’s two months of not-doing-this finally undammed, the headboard finding the wall, his hand sliding under my hips to change the angle until I see actual light.
He tells me how good I feel, how long he’s wanted this, how I undid him in a press room before he knew my name, that’s it, take it, you feel that, that’s mine, filthy and reverent at once, and I give it all back, every word, because banter survives the clothes coming off, it always has with us, it’s the whole language we’ve got.
“Harder,” I tell him, and he gives me harder, his control fraying, the careful man coming apart by degrees. “Don’t be careful. I’m not made of —”
“I know exactly what you’re made of.” His forehead drops to mine, his rhythm going ragged. “Sharpest, bravest, most exhausting woman I’ve ever, fuck, Maren —”
I get a hand between us, on my clit, and he watches me do it, watches me chase it, and that’s what tips him, the sight of me taking my own pleasure underneath him, and he loses the last of the rhythm and pours himself into me with my name in his mouth like a man going down, and I follow him over a second later, clenching around him, the second orgasm tearing through me sharper than the first, both of us shaking, both of us done.
He doesn’t collapse on me. Even now, even wrecked, he braces up so he doesn’t crush me, this enormous careful man, and that small considerate thing in the middle of the filth is going to be a problem for my whole heart.
***
After, we’re a tangle on top of the wrecked sheets, his arm under my neck, my leg thrown over his, the cooling sweat and the slowing breath and the streetlight coming through the blinds in stripes.
It’s not the tidy thing where everyone falls asleep glowing.
It’s better and worse. He traces the stripe of light down my arm, and I lie there with my head on his scarred shoulder and I feel, for the first time in I genuinely cannot remember how long, chosen.
Not needed. Not useful. Not the reliable one.
Chosen, on purpose, with the eyes open he asked me to keep.
And under it, immediately, like it always is now, the file. The folder. The memo with his name on it and my fingerprints on the handle, sitting one drive away while I lie naked and undone against the man it’s built to destroy.
I almost tell him. Again. The fourth time, or the fifth, I’ve stopped counting the times I’ve nearly broken.
His shoulder is warm and his arm is around me and he just told me I don’t have to manage things, and the truth claws up my throat, the reports, Rhett, the reports are a weapon and I’m the one who made it, and I get as far as opening my mouth.
“What,” he says. Not a question. He felt me tense.
He feels everything. “You keep doing that. Getting to the edge of something and stepping back. You did it in your kitchen. You’re doing it now.
” His voice is gentle and it’s relentless, both.
“Whatever it is. I just had you say my name like that, Maren. You can tell me anything.”
And that’s exactly why I can’t. Because he’s lying here believing he finally got the one person who stays close on a bad night, and the thing behind my teeth would teach him that the person staying close is the same one who’s been sharpening the knife, and I will not give him that tonight.
I won’t be the one who turns chosen into betrayed while the sweat’s still drying.
Not tonight. I’ll fix it first. I’ll find the door out before I ever show him the trap.
That’s the deal I make with myself, naked in the stripes of light, and it’s a coward’s deal and a lover’s deal and I make it anyway.
“It’s not a tonight thing,” I say, which is true, and a lie, and the worst of both at once. “Tonight I just want this. Can I have just this? One night where it’s only this.”
He’s quiet a moment. Then he pulls me in tighter and presses his mouth to my hair, and he gives me the most dangerous gift he’s got, which is his trust.
“You can have just this,” he says. “We’ve got time for the rest.”
We don’t. That’s the thing he doesn’t know and I do.
We don’t have time for the rest, the clock’s already running, it’s been running since a privileged folder in a quiet office.
But he believes we do, and I let him, and I fall asleep on the chest of a man I’m protecting and deceiving in the same breath, more cared-for and more dishonest than I have ever been in my life, and both of those things are love, which is the part nobody warns you about either.