22. Jett
JETT
She wrote for three hours.
She didn't look up once. Didn't touch the second toast I made her at nine.
Didn't touch the coffee I poured at ten.
Didn't notice me hovering by the counter like a busboy waiting on a plate.
She sat at the island in my t-shirt with her hair up and her feet hooked over the rung of the stool and she typed the way I hadn't seen anybody type in years.
The way a writer types when the inside of her head has finally synced up with the outside of her hands.
I did not interrupt.
I went out on the deck. Read on my phone.
Took a call from my agent I'd been ducking for three weeks and got him off the line in nine minutes by promising him a thing I wasn't actually going to do and that he'd forget by Thursday.
I came back in at eleven. She was still typing.
I made myself a sandwich. Made her one and put it on a plate next to her elbow. Went back to the deck.
What the agent wanted, under the nine minutes, was for me to say something.
The defending champs were sliding, the city had noticed, and the beat guys had started using the word everybody uses, which is slump, and somewhere in the building a decision was getting made about whether one of the team's stars needed to stand at a podium and account for a three-week goal drought.
I was playing the worst hockey I'd played in years and I could not have explained to one living soul why I didn't care about it the way I was built to.
I had never in my life been this happy and this useless at my own job in the same week.
The two things were not unrelated. I knew exactly how related they were.
I ducked the call anyway, because the only person I wanted to account to was three feet away in my shirt, typing the truest thing either of us had ever made, and she hadn't once asked me to account for anything.
At one in the afternoon she came out and stood next to me at the rail. She was holding the half-eaten sandwich. She'd eaten it in front of the laptop and forgotten how it had gotten there.
"How's it going," I said.
"It is going."
"Yeah?"
"I have nine thousand words. I'm going to delete most of them. The ones I keep are going to be the right ones. I needed to write the wrong ones first to find the right ones."
"Okay."
"I'm going to go back at it for another two hours. Then I'm going to be done for the day. Then I'd like a real meal and a real glass of wine and a real shower and to not think about words for the rest of the night."
"I can make a real meal happen."
"I figured."
She turned and went back inside. I watched her go.
I stayed on the deck another fifteen minutes, the afternoon coming down warm on the valley, and thought about the woman inside writing for three hours about, possibly, me.
Possibly her father. Possibly something I didn't yet have language for.
I'd kept her life uninterrupted for three hours and was about to do it for two more.
It was a thing I'd wanted to be doing my whole life without knowing I'd wanted it.
I made her a real meal.
I made her a real glass of wine.
I drew her a real bath at six, because she'd said shower but I had a tub I didn't use and a woman in my house who'd earned a bath.
She ate at seven. Drank her wine at seven-twenty.
Took the bath at eight, with the door open, with me sitting on the bedroom floor with my back against the bathroom doorframe on the other side of the wall, both of us not saying anything for forty minutes, the water turning her gold through the partly-open door, the steam coming out into the bedroom.
When she came out she was in nothing but a towel, and the air around her smelled like the bath oil I'd put in without asking and which she hadn't commented on, and she stood in the middle of my bedroom with her hair wet against her shoulders and her face flushed from the heat, and she looked at me.
I looked back.
She let the towel drop.
She didn't say anything when she did it.
She let me look.
I looked.
She was a woman I'd been in bed with twice.
I'd seen her by candlelight and by lamplight and by morning light and by the dim yellow of the bedside lamp on its lowest setting.
I had not, before this moment, seen her in the soft warm light of the bedroom in the early evening, body still flushed pink from a bath, hair still wet, eyes on me, telling me to come and get her.
I got up off the floor. I crossed the room. I picked her up.
She wrapped her legs around me automatically, the way she had at the front door ten days ago in a kiss that lasted half of half a heartbeat, except this time her legs were around my hips and her bath-warm body was bare against me and her arms came up around my neck, and she said, into the side of my throat:
"Take me to bed."
"Yeah."
I took her to bed.
I had a rug at the foot of the bed.
I'd bought it the year I moved in, on the recommendation of a designer Hollis Briar's wife had sent over to deal with the house I hadn't known how to furnish, and the designer had said every bedroom needs a rug at the foot of the bed, sir, and I'd said sure, and she'd picked it out herself.
A thick deep-pile shag the color of cream.
I'd used it exactly never until the night I laid Dani Hartley down on it.
I did not lay her down right away.
I held her against the side of the bed for a long minute first, with her legs still around me and her wet hair against my shoulder and her body the temperature of bathwater against me.
I held her like that the way I'd wanted to hold her at one in the morning on Friday with the photograph on the counter, and at three in the morning yesterday with the nightmare just out of her, and hadn't, because in either of those moments she'd needed something other than holding.
She needed holding now.
She needed holding, and then she needed the rest of what I'd been carrying for her since the security guards walked her father out of my arena yesterday afternoon.
I laid her down on the rug.
She came down soft. Hair fanning out. Body still loose from the bath.
The towel still on the floor somewhere across the room.
I came down over her on the rug and kissed her, slow, the way I hadn't kissed her on Saturday because Saturday had been about taking, and this was not about taking. This was about something else.
She kissed me back.
She kissed me back the way you kiss somebody when you've decided.
The instant I slid back into her, her back arched.
I felt her stop caring how she looked. Felt her stop caring how she sounded.
I hooked her legs over my shoulders, opened her up underneath me, pinned her to the rug, and the slow languid kiss became a thing with more teeth in it, and the not-taking became a slow precise taking I'd been calibrating all weekend without meaning to.
Every drag of me out of her and back into her was deliberate.
I wanted her to feel each one land. I wanted her to feel chosen, one slow inch at a time, by a man who had nowhere else in the world he'd rather be than buried in her on a rug he'd never had a use for until her.
"Holy fuck, Jett," she moaned. "Just like that. So deep. So deep. My God."
Her words spurred me on. I felt her body jolt with the effort of my hips. The sound of wet skin against wet skin filled the space between us, and her pleasure climbed the walls of the room, and as I drove into her I heard myself growl with the effort.
"Fucking. Hell. Hartley."
She whimpered at the next thrust, the one that came with my name out of her, and she wove her legs around me, clinging the way she hadn't clung Saturday night, and her hand tugged my hair and her face came up against the crook of my neck.
"That's it. Cling to me."
She threw her arms around my neck. Raked her nails down my back. I kept a pace that left her breathless, panting, eyes rolling back, her body fitting itself against mine the way a thing finds the thing it's been looking for its whole life.
I'd have died right there. I'd have happily died on top of her on a shag rug at eight forty-five in the evening on a Tuesday in November, and I would not have minded.
"Oh my god," she cried out as another orgasm caught her by surprise.
"Oooh, fuck," I hissed as I buried myself deep. "That's it. Massage that cock. Make me mold to you."
She raked her nails up my back. She did not want this to end. I felt it. I felt the wanting in her like a current running up into my own body.
"Please. Just one more."
I growled as my cock slid out of her. "Only if you insist, Hartley."
I grabbed her ankles. I flipped her over.
The small squeal that came out of her was a sound I was going to remember for the rest of my life.
I pulled her hips up. I dove back into her body.
I did not give her a second to breathe, because she hadn't asked for one, and because the version of her that lived underneath the version that had been polite for two and a half weeks in my conference room was a version that did not want a second.
She gripped the rug beneath us as her body absorbed me. Her hands clawed into the cream pile. I pressed her ass back against me. She met me thrust for thrust. The sounds I pulled from her sent goosebumps up the backs of my arms.
"That's it, take this dick," I grunted, gripping her hips. "Look at you. Such a whimpering mess. Opening up this body for me. Spreading those folds. Streaking my cock. Hartley, you should see how you look right now."
"Jett, please."
I gripped her hair and pulled her forehead up off the rug. "Please what."
"Please let me come again. Oh fuck. I'm so close. Just. just a bit harder."
I kept my hand in her hair. "Like this?"
I pulled all the way out to the tip and slammed back in, and that was all it took.
"Jett!"
"That's it," I growled, pounding her through it, "let the neighbors know my name."
"Jett. Oh god. Right there. Right there. Right there."