Epilogue #3
“Not yet.” His mouth finds my nipple instead, sucking hard and biting to leave a sting behind before his mouth covers my entire breast and the sting sparks electricity straight to my clit, and I cry out, and lightning cracks close enough that I feel the boom of it in my own chest a half second later.
“I’m going to take my time with you tonight. Every single inch.”
He does. He works down my body with his mouth, sucking every curve of my ribs, my waist, my hips, my thighs, while thunder rolls long and rumbling outside.
I can’t see one second of it coming, can’t brace for where his hands go next or when his tongue will finally land where I need it most. By the time he settles between my thighs again I’m babbling, incoherent, trembling and undone, nothing left of the world but a man I can only hear and feel.
I feel his chest hair on my breasts and he’s right at my ear. “You should see how pretty you are, swollen and so ready for me. You’re mine, Sage. You’ve always been mine. You were made for me.”
“Dawson, I swear to God, if you don’t fuck me right now, I’m going to lose my mind.”
“There’s the mouth I love.” He finally, finally lines himself up, and pushes into me slow, one merciless inch at a time, and I moan loud enough that it echoes off the storm itself.
“Yes. Fuck, yes, right there.” I strain against the cuffs with the need to touch him.
He builds a rhythm that has me screaming his name into the dark, blind and bound and completely at his mercy, trusting him with every inch of myself in a way I’ve spent a lifetime learning how to do.
Lightning throws the room white behind my closed lids even through the silk, and thunder rolls long and rumbling right on top of every thrust, like the whole valley’s keeping time with us.
He flips me onto my knees at some point, my hands crossed and still bound above me now stretched at an angle that has my back arched and cunt wide open and drives into me from behind hard enough that I feel it in my teeth, one hand fisted around and around in my hair, the other gripping my hip.
“Say my name,” he growls. “Every time.”
“Dawson.” I’m sobbing it now, desperate, chasing my own release with everything I have left. “Dawson, I’m going to come, please, don’t stop.”
“Not stopping. Not for anything.” His thrusts go deeper, his hand sliding around to find my clit and circle it in perfect, punishing time with every stroke. “Come for me, Sage. Let me hear it.”
I do, hard enough that my whole body locks around him, shaking and screaming his name into a room lit gold white then black then gold white again, the storm outside cracking apart right along with me.
He breaks right behind me, yelling my name over the sound of the storm, both of us wrecked together while rain thrashes the window and thunder rolls itself out slow across the whole valley.
He unties my wrists first, careful, checking each one for marks before he ever touches the blindfold, and pulls the silk away last, gentle, like he’s unwrapping something he still can’t quite believe he gets to keep.
“How was that?” he asks, when my eyes finally focus on his face in the dark.
“Life changing.” My voice comes out wrecked. “Do that again sometime.”
“Absolutely happening again.” He gathers me against his chest, both of us satisfied for the moment, the storm finally starting to settle into something steadier, gentler, the good kind of rain that soaks in instead of running off.
“I love you. More than I did yesterday. I didn’t think that was possible. ”
“I love you too. Every single storm.”
We lie there tangled while the thunder rolls itself further away, echoing fainter each time until it’s just rain left, steady against the glass.
His phone buzzes on the nightstand.
I feel him go still before he even reaches for it, the instinct never fully gone no matter how many storms we survive together.
Cora Aldridge.
One photograph, taken from the wrong side of a desk I’ve seen a hundred times through the sheriff’s office window on Main Street. A manila folder, new, county stock, and across the tab in Aldridge’s square block capitals, two names with a slash between them. SULLIVAN / BLACKWATER.
Under it, one line. He opened it tonight. I couldn’t stop him. I’m sorry.
Dawson looks at the screen a long moment. Then he turns it face down, the glow disappearing into the wood, and reaches for my hand instead, lacing our fingers together like the folder never lit up at all.
Somewhere in town, in a lit office over Main Street, a man who’s spent thirty years banking favors with both our families has finally opened a file with both our names on the tab, and whatever’s in it is going to keep. It’s kept this long already.
Tonight there’s just rain finally falling on ground that needed it, a man who chose me in daylight and never once looked back, and a marriage that was never anyone’s to arrange in the first place.
The road on my hip runs into a mountain that isn’t going anywhere. Neither am I.
Whatever’s coming can knock again tomorrow.