Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ella
This time is different from the other times.
The other times were relief, the pressure of weeks releasing all at once, the particular undoing of finally being safe in a body.
This time is not relief. This time is arrival.
This time I know what I am doing and I choose it from a settled place, from the specific version of myself that pulled the carpet this afternoon and stood in the gold light.
He is the same as he always is, his whole attention on the specific person in the room, unhurried, asking what I want and waiting for the answer.
But there is something different underneath it, something that has been building for months and has arrived now with the legal resolution and the locks and the menu on the wall, something that is not urgency but its opposite. The certainty of having time.
I tell him what I want, and because we have time now I take my time telling it, and he takes his time giving it. There are no weeks of pressure behind it tonight, nothing releasing all at once. There is just the two of us and the dark and the unhurried fact of having gotten here.
He undresses me slow, like a man with nowhere else he needs to be, and there is nowhere else he needs to be, and there is nowhere else I need to be either.
He peels away my shirt and bra, his hands warm and deliberate on my skin, then slides my jeans and panties down my legs, kissing every inch he exposes.
He lays me down on the bed and works his way down my body with his mouth, taking the long way, sucking at my nipples until they tighten and ache, licking a slow trail over my stomach and hips.
When he settles between my thighs he does it like a man who has decided to stay a while.
He does. He spreads me open with his hands and licks into my wet folds, slow and deep, his tongue circling my clit before sucking it between his lips.
He stays until I have come once against his mouth, slow and deep and shaking, his hands holding my hips tight while I do, his attention complete, the whole of it turned over to the specific person in the specific room.
My thighs tremble around his head as the orgasm rolls through me, wet and pulsing, and he keeps licking me through it until I am gasping and oversensitive.
I touch his face in the dark and he turns into my hand the way I turned into his at the fence, the way we have been turning toward each other since July, and I think: it was always going to be this. From the first Tuesday, the coffee gone cold, the pie. It was always going to be here.
When he comes into me it is slow and complete, the certainty of having time in every inch of it, his thick cock stretching me open as he sinks deep.
He stays close, his forehead to mine, moving in me with long, unhurried strokes while the pleasure winds back up out of the first one.
"I've got you," he says, and I do the thing I have learned to do with him: I stop managing it, I let it be exactly what it is.
He gets a hand between us and works my clit in time with the way he moves, rubbing firm circles over the swollen nub as his cock thrusts steadily into my pussy.
He takes me up to the edge and holds me there until I cannot stand it, until I tell him please, a word I do not spend easily, and only then does he take me over, driving harder and deeper as my second orgasm crashes through me, my walls clenching tight around his cock.
He follows me, groaning low as he comes, pulsing hot and thick inside me, the two of us going quiet and tight and undone together in the dark above the diner that is mine now, free and clear, my name alone.
After, he holds me. His hand on my back, slow and certain, and I lie there in the dark and I think about nothing in particular for a while, which is the luxury I have been learning.
Then I say: "The short rib tomorrow."
He says: "Thyme or rosemary."
"Rosemary. I have decided."
"Okay."
"You are coming for dinner."
"Yes."
I close my eyes. Outside, the diner is locked with my locks and the menu is on the wall and the boots are on the floor by the door where I stepped out of them, E.S. and R.S. on the heels, side by side.
My father built this place with four other men and a borrowed truck in 1996, the year before my mother left and two years before I came along.
When he died he left it to me, but not the simple way, not free and clear into my hand.
He left it in trust, with Darlene to hold until he could be sure I was ready for it, a careful man trying to protect the thing he loved and getting it exactly backward.
For three years she held it against me instead of for me.
But the trust comes out the way he meant it in the end.
Darlene is out of the trustee's chair, the forged paper is void, and the diner distributes to me the way he wrote it down: my name alone. Clean. Free. Unencumbered.
And there is a man in this bed who found my boot in the dark and knew whose it was because he was paying attention, and who said I've got you in a way I believed, and who eats cherry pie and means it.
I think my father would have said something ordinary that meant everything.
I think he would have said: There she is.
There she is.
I sleep.