22. Jett #2
I snarled and dropped her head and swiped my hand beneath her.
She rutted back against me, no longer caring how she looked.
The instant my fingers found her swollen clit, her body shivered.
Her legs quaked. Her breasts damn near touched the rug as the animal inside of me, the one I'd been keeping in a closet for nine years, came out and stretched its whole length.
"Spank me," she said breathlessly, before I think she even knew she'd said it.
The resounding crack against her ass jumped her walls around me.
"Oh, ho, hooo," I said with a dark chuckle as I reared back. "You're in trouble for that one."
I cracked her again.
"Jett!"
Again.
"It burns!"
Again.
"Oooh, my fuuuck."
With every thrust I spanked her. With every pull-out I rubbed the red spot I'd left.
Everything blurred. I had her at my mercy on a rug at the foot of my bed in a house I'd never let anyone see, and the man I'd been raised by a Tennessee church to be was not the man I was in that moment, and the man I was had a woman fully open to him and was using her exactly as carefully as she wanted me to.
"Oooh, Hartley. Your ass looks beautiful in red. I'll spank you so hard the only thing you'll be comfortable sitting on by the time I'm done with you is my face."
Crack after crack, and all it did was push her over the edge. Her cheek planted into the rug as her orgasm raced through her body. Her eyes rolled. Unearthly sounds left her mouth. I pumped into her, stilling only when her body finally settled.
Then I did something I had not done Saturday night.
I pulled out. I leaned down. I kissed every burning spot on her ass.
And then, with the same slow careful attention I'd used in the shower forty-eight hours earlier, I traced my tongue along the scars her father's belt had left behind when she was eleven.
I felt her go still under me.
I felt her tears before I heard them.
I slid my hand up her back, pinning her shoulders to the rug. I slipped my other hand between her legs. Two fingers slid into the swollen, battered entrance of her. My thumb found her clit.
"I know you've got one more in there for me, beautiful."
She shook her head lazily against the rug. "Jett, I. uh. it, just."
I chuckled and kissed another reddened scar. "Why don't you just lay there and enjoy this one."
"Jesuuus."
"I mean, sure, if that's what you want to call me."
She growled at me in frustration. It made me laugh for real, the first real laugh I'd made all day, and the laugh broke something open in my chest I'd been carrying around without knowing it was there.
"You're never going to rest with me around," I told her.
She lay there with her burning ass in the air and let me kiss every scar on it. I stuffed her full of my fingers. My thumb coaxed her swollen nub back out from under its hood. I kept raking over a spot that burned deep in her gut. Her left leg trembled like a dog's. She wanted more of it.
I pressed my face into her and lapped at her, and all it did was coax her back up the mountain.
"Oh my god. I can't. I can't. I can't. Please. It's too much."
"Mmm," I hummed against her scars. "I think you can."
"Jett, please."
"Just one more for me, Hartley."
She shook her head, even as she bucked back against my hand. "I can't. I can't. I can't."
When my thumb finally pressed against her clit, her tune changed.
"Oh fuck. I can. I can. I can. Jett. I'm so close. Don't stop. Don't stop. Don't. stop."
Her body locked. Had I not wrapped my free arm beneath her stomach to hold her hips upright, she'd have collapsed flat to the rug. My thumb flicked her clit at speed, shaking her body through another orgasm that rocked her to her core. She was done. Completely spent.
When she collapsed, I was there to catch her.
"Come on," I said with a grunt. "Let's get you in bed."
She tried to ask something. I think she wanted to ask about me.
I think she'd figured out somewhere in the last twenty minutes that I hadn't finished, and she wanted to know if I needed her to.
I picked her up off the rug before she could get the question out and set her down on the bed and pulled the duvet half over her and stretched out behind her on the cool sheets.
She made a small sound when the cool of the sheets hit her bath-warm, bath-flushed skin.
I slid one arm under her head.
I slipped my other hand between her legs.
"Give me that leg."
She gave me the leg.
I slid back into her.
I let her body swallow me down slow this time, the way a body swallows something it already knows the pattern of, and the languid push of me into her pulled small low whimpers from her throat.
I kissed along her pulse point. I took a slow breath at the back of her hair.
The movements were slow. Lazy. Reverent in a way I didn't have a word for and wasn't going to look for in that moment.
"Oh, Jett," she whispered. Her tears came back.
"I've got you."
I fucked her slow from behind. My hands soft.
My lips on the curve of her neck. My teeth on the muscle where her shoulder met her neck.
I left a mark there I hoped she'd see in the morning.
I didn't have a reason for hoping that. I just hoped it.
I wanted her to wear the mark of me the way men of my generation hadn't been taught to want women to wear marks of them, and which I wanted anyway.
"I know you've got one more for me, sweet girl," I muttered against her ear as my arm wrapped around her and my fingers found her clit again. "So why don't we go slow this time. Really savor it."
"Oh yes."
The soft pace was relentless. I timed my circling fingers to my slow thrusts and she fell into another universe.
She gave herself up to me. She didn't fight.
She didn't try to hold herself up. She lay against me and let me move her body with mine, and the growl that came out of me at the gift of that surrender was a sound I had not made in my life.
"That's it. Give yourself to me." My voice broke on it. I did not care that it broke. "Let me have all of you. Let me show you how you should feel. How a woman like you should feel every single night for the rest of your life."
Our bodies collided. We fell over the edge together.
I shivered into her. My teeth sank into the muscle of her shoulder and I let myself bite, hard enough that she'd feel it, light enough that I wouldn't break skin, the way her body had taught me to bite over two encounters of trial and error, and I spilled into her as her body milked the rest of me out.
She bucked back through my orgasm. She fucked me through it the way I'd fucked her through hers earlier. She gave me the same gift I'd given her.
When she'd milked me dry, our bodies stilled.
"Such a good girl for me, Hartley," I muttered, smoothing her sweaty hair off her face.
Her lower lip quivered.
"That's all I ever wanted to be, you know," she whispered.
I went very still inside her.
"I know," I said.
"You know."
"Hartley. I've known since that first afternoon three weeks ago.
Possibly since the gym nine years ago. The thing you wanted to be at seventeen was the thing somebody never told you already were.
I have spent every minute I've been in this house with you trying to figure out how to tell you.
I don't yet know how. But I'll figure it out.
I'll figure it out by morning if I have to. "
She cried again, very quietly, with my body still inside her and my arm still under her head and the duvet half across her cooling skin and the room dim and warm around us.
I held her.
I held her until the crying stopped.
I held her until her breath slowed and her body went heavy against my arm and she went under into the sleep of a woman who'd been awake her whole life without knowing it, and was now, possibly, going to be allowed to be a person who slept.
I slipped out of her carefully.
I pulled the duvet up over both of us.
I lay there with my hand flat against her sternum, feeling her breath rise and fall, and I thought about a Tuesday night in November in a glass house in the desert and a woman who'd told me a thing in the dark at the end of an act, and I thought about the math of it, the same arithmetic I'd done at one in the morning on Sunday holding her hand under the duvet on the other side of the same bed, and the math was still clean.
She slept.
I did not.
I lay there a long time. I thought about all of it. I thought about a girl in a green dress in 2015 and a woman on a shag rug at the foot of my bed in 2024 and how the woman had told me, at the end of the act, the thing the girl had not known how to ask for at the start of her life.
That's all I ever wanted to be.
A good girl for someone.
Not for the man whose belt had left the scars on her back when she was eleven. Not for the boy I'd been at seventeen who she couldn't have heard correctly even if I'd known how to speak.
For somebody.
For somebody who was just going to keep telling her she already was.
I closed my eyes.
I fell asleep with my hand against her chest.
In the morning I was going to figure out how to tell her she already was.
I was going to spend the rest of my life figuring out how to keep telling her.
The morning was coming.
I was, possibly, going to be a man who could do it.
I slept.