Chapter 7 #2
I laughed again, and he caught the sound against his mouth, kissing me through it, and somewhere in that tangle of laughter and heat and unhurried hands, the last of my nerves dissolved into something that felt, for the first time in my entire adult life, entirely, uncomplicatedly safe.
He was reverent with me. That's the only word I have for it, turning it over since — not performative reverence, not the practiced kind some men perform to seem sensitive, but real, quiet awe, like he understood exactly what it had cost me to let him this far in and refused to treat it like anything less than the gift it was.
He laid me back against the pillows slow, following me down, and I felt the weight of him settle over me like something I'd been bracing against my whole life without knowing what I was bracing for.
His mouth found the curve of my throat first, unhurried, and I felt my own breath catch and stutter under the slow drag of it, my hands finding his shoulders, his back, the warm solid planes of him, memorizing by touch what two months of careful distance had never let me learn.
"Tell me if I get anything wrong," he murmured against my collarbone, and I felt the words as much as heard them, a low vibration against my skin.
"You won't."
"I might. Tell me anyway."
His hands moved over me with the same patient attention he'd given every part of this courtship — tracing the line of my waist, the curve of my hip, mapping me slow like he intended to remember every inch by heart.
Every place he touched, he lingered, reading the catch of my breath, the small involuntary arch of my back, adjusting to what he found there before moving on.
When his mouth followed his hands, unhurried and deliberate, I heard myself make a sound I didn't recognize, low and helpless, and felt him smile against my skin at having earned it.
The room smelled of rain-washed night air and beeswax candles I'd forgotten I'd lit earlier in the evening, still burning low on the dresser, throwing warm gold light across the ceiling that matched, almost exactly, the color of the honey downstairs in the pantry.
I felt that warmth everywhere his skin met mine — the heat of him along my thighs, the press of his chest against mine when he finally settled his body over mine fully, both of us bare and unguarded in the candlelight for the first time.
"You're sure," he said again, low, one more check even now, hips settled against mine, restraint visible in the tight line of his jaw.
"I've never been surer of anything." I pulled him down by the back of the neck, closing the last inch of distance myself, and felt him exhale against my mouth like something in him had been holding its breath for two months too.
He moved into me slow, giving me time, watching my face the whole way with an attentiveness that undid me more than the physical sensation itself — though that undid me plenty, a slow-building fullness that pulled a gasp out of me I didn't try to hide.
His forehead dropped to mine, breath ragged, and for a moment neither of us moved at all, just breathed together, foreheads pressed close, letting the enormity of it settle before either of us dared shift.
"Okay?" he breathed.
"Move," I said, half laugh, half plea, and he did — slow at first, deliberate, one hand braced beside my head and the other finding mine, fingers lacing tight, and I met him for every unhurried thrust, the rhythm building patient and sure the way everything about him had always been patient and sure.
I felt it everywhere — the drag of his skin against mine, the low sounds he made against my ear, half my name and half something wordless, the building heat low in my belly that spread outward until I couldn't have told you where his warmth ended and mine began.
I found, somewhere in the slow unraveling of it, that I could be loud in ways I'd never once allowed myself to be — the walls of this house had only ever held silence, twenty years of a woman who kept even her private moments quiet and controlled, and something about tonight, about him, made that old caution feel suddenly, wonderfully unnecessary.
When I gasped his name he answered with my own, reverent, like it was the only word he had left, and picked up the pace just enough to have me gripping the sheets, my whole body arching into his.
The night moved slow around us and then not slow at all, warm air drifting through the open window, the apiary humming faint and steady in the distance like the whole farm was holding its breath alongside us.
I discovered, with him, what it meant to be wanted exactly as I was — grumpy and soft and both at once, no wall required, no performance necessary, just the whole complicated truth of me, welcomed rather than merely tolerated, held rather than simply touched.
When I finally let go, it was with his name broken on my lips and his own release following close behind, his whole body going taut and then loose against mine, a vulnerability I had never shown another living soul laid bare in the space of a few unguarded minutes — twenty years of careful armor dissolved into something that felt, in the aftermath, less like loss and more like arrival.
Afterward, we lay tangled together in the moonlight, the apiary humming softly beyond the window, his heartbeat steady and warm beneath my ear, and I felt more at peace than I could remember feeling in my entire adult life.
"Tell me something true," I said, quiet, tracing an idle line along his collarbone.
"Always. What do you want to know?"
"Were you ever actually scared? That I wouldn't let you in. That all of this would just — stay a stall at a farmers' market and nothing more."
He was quiet a moment, honest with the question the way he was honest with everything.
"Every week, a little. Not scared enough to quit — I don't think I'm built for quitting on things I actually want.
But scared, sure. You don't chase something for two months without wondering, some nights, if you're reading it wrong.
If the wall's actually just a wall, and not a door somebody forgot they had. "
"I didn't know it was a door either. Not until you kept knocking."
"Well," he said, pressing a kiss to my hair, "I'm glad I kept knocking."
"I spent my whole life certain the only safe thing was to be alone," I said, quiet, into the warm dark.
"And now?" he asked, voice soft, fingers tracing slow, idle patterns along my bare shoulder.
"Now the safest I've ever felt is right here, and it's got a pulse and a terrible sense of humor."