Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ella
The apartment is dark and small and warm, the radiator ticking, the highway a low sound through the one window that shows it at the right angle.
He's been up here enough times now that it's stopped being a question and started being a place we go.
I spent three years making sure nothing got to be ordinary with me.
Now there's a man who hangs his cut on the hook by the door like he knows it has a place there, because it does.
I don't wait for him tonight. That's the new thing, the not-waiting, the reaching first. I get my hands in the front of his shirt and walk him backward toward the bed and he lets me, watching me do it with the small thing at the corner of his mouth that I've decided is his version of delighted.
"You're in a hurry," he says.
"I've decided," I say, which is the truest sentence I own, and he knows it, and something in him goes warm.
I take his shirt off him. I've had my hands on this man enough times now to know the geography of him, the heat, the hard flat plane of his stomach, the way his breath changes when I put my mouth to the center of his chest. I get his belt open.
I get the rest of it open. When I wrap my hand around his cock he makes the low sound I've started living for, the sound of a careful man losing a little of the careful, and I stroke him slow and watch it happen.
His shaft thickens in my grip, heavy and hot, the skin velvet over steel as I pump him root to tip, thumb circling the slick head until his hips twitch.
"Lie back," I tell him. He does. There's a particular pleasure in a man that size doing what I say, not because he has to, because he wants to give it to me, the whole of his attention turned over like a thing handed across the counter.
I take my time getting undressed because he likes to watch and I've learned to like being watched, which is its own three-year distance closed.
Then I climb over him. I take him in my own hand and I sink down onto him slow, taking him in by degrees, watching his jaw set with the effort of holding still and letting me run it.
The thick stretch of his cock parting my slick folds pulls a raw sound out of me.
Inch by inch he fills me, so deep I feel him in my belly, the blunt head pressing against the end of me until my thighs shake and I am seated fully on him, pussy stretched wide and throbbing around every rigid inch.
His hands come to my hips, not pushing, just holding, there if I want them.
"Tell me what you want," I say, giving him back his own sentence, and his eyes do something at that.
"This," he says. "Exactly this. Take what you want."
So I do. I find the rhythm that's mine, the angle that lights me up, and I ride him slow and then less slow, my wet pussy sliding up and down his thick cock, grinding my clit against his pelvis on every downstroke.
His hands stay warm on my hips, his attention complete.
When I want his mouth I lean down and take it; when I want his hand he gives it, his thumb finding my swollen clit and rubbing firm circles in time with the way I'm fucking myself on him.
It builds the way everything with him builds, certain, unhurried, until certain turns to urgent, and I come hard with both hands flat on his chest and his name in my mouth, my inner walls clamping and pulsing around his cock as pleasure rips through me.
He lets me come down, breathing through it with me.
Then he sits up with me still impaled on him, wraps an arm around my back, and turns us, lays me down without coming out of me, the strength of it easy and matter-of-fact.
Now it's him setting the pace, driving deep and slow and then building, his heavy balls slapping against me with every thrust, his forehead at my temple, his breath gone ragged.
"I've got you," he says, the way he always says it, and I believe it the way I always believe it.
He fucks me harder, cock stroking every sensitive spot inside me, stretching me open again and again until I am dripping down his shaft and onto the sheets.
He works us both up once more and this time we go over close together, his rhythm breaking into short, powerful thrusts, mine matching him, the two of us holding on tight as he spills hot and deep inside me in the dark of the apartment my father left me.
After, he doesn't let go. We lie tangled and breathing and I put my hand flat over his heart and he covers it with his.
"Monday," I say, into the dark. Because Monday is when it comes, if it comes, Keller, or the AG, or nothing at all.
"Monday," he agrees. His hand moves slow on my back. "Not tonight."
Not tonight. Tonight there's this, his weight and his warmth and the highway sound and the boots by the door where I stepped out of them.
I close my eyes, and I sleep without deciding to, the way I've been learning to, and the last thing I'm aware of is his hand still moving slow at the small of my back, keeping its watch even as he goes under too.