4. Cal
CAL
Ican’t sit still all night. Something’s lodged in my chest like I swallowed wrong at dinner, and it won’t go down and it won’t come up, and I keep finding my hands doing shit—straightening the remote, checking the deadbolt twice, picking up my empty beer and putting it back down—while Tessa reads on the couch with her feet in my lap like everything’s normal. Everything is normal.
I talked to a grieving woman about funeral flowers in my own garage with the door shut like I was moving product.
That’s the part I keep chewing on. Nothing happened. So why’d I shut the door.
I don’t have an answer, and the not-having-one turns into something else as the night goes on.
Turns into my thumb pressing slow circles into the arch of her foot until her breath changes.
Turns into watching her mouth while she reads.
Turns into needing my hands on her so bad it’s crawling up the backs of my arms like current.
“Bed,” I say, around ten. It comes out lower than I planned.
She looks up over the book. Reads my face in about one second flat. “That kind of bed?”
“Get up.”
“Bossy.” But she’s already smiling, already dog-earing the page, and when she stands I catch her wrist and pull her in and kiss her once, hard, just to hear the little sound she makes.
“Go,” I tell her. “Clothes off. I’m getting a drink of water and when I get in there I want you on the bed.”
“Or what?”
“Or nothing. You’ll be on the bed.” I smack her ass on her way down the hall and she laughs, and the laugh does more to me than the ass did.
In the bedroom I turn the lamp to low. She’s on the bed, bare, propped on her elbows watching me, hair loose, and for a second I just stand there and look, because two years and the sight of her naked in our bed still hits me like a hand on the back of the neck.
I take my belt off slow enough that she hears it. Leather sliding out of the loops, one loop at a time, and her breath does the thing it always does at that sound—hitches once, settles deeper. Her thighs press together on the sheet.
She knows what the belt means, and I know what it means that she’s already holding her wrists out to me before I even ask, palms up, eyes steady on mine. Two years and that still lands somewhere behind my sternum like a dropped engine.
Nobody ever handed me anything like that in my life. Trust with a pulse in it.
“Headboard,” I say.
She lies back and reaches up and I wrap the belt around her wrists—over, through, cinched to the rail. Two fingers under the leather to check the give. Her chest’s already rising and falling faster and I haven’t touched her yet.
“Color?”
“Green, Cal, it’s been green for two years?—”
“Watch your mouth.”
“Make me.”
Any other night I’d laugh. Tonight I need it too much to laugh.
I strip my shirt off, kneel over her, and take one long look at her stretched out and tied to our bed—arms up, back arched a little just from the position, nipples hard in the lamp light, mine, all of it, the whole stupid lucky life—and then I put my mouth on her stomach and go down.
I take my time about it. Kiss the inside of one thigh, then the other. Drag my stubble up the soft skin until she squirms. Breathe on her pussy, close enough she can feel the heat of it, not close enough to be anything.
“Cal.”
“Hm.”
“You absolute—get UP here or get DOWN there, pick one?—”
“You don’t give the orders tied up, baby. Ask me nice.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s not nice.” I press one slow kiss to her clit, barely anything, and pull back, and she makes a sound like I insulted her whole family.
“Please,” she grits out. “There. Nice enough?”
“Getting there.”
First real taste of her and she pulls hard enough on the belt that the headboard knocks the wall.
She’s already soaked—has been since the couch, I’d bet money—and I tell her so, out loud, mouth against her: “You’re dripping, you know that?
All that attitude and you’re this wet before I’ve done a goddamn thing. ”
“Then DO something?—”
I get an arm across her hips and pin her flat and do it the way she likes it.
Slow first, flat and broad, then quicker, working two fingers into her, curling them up where she needs them, and she goes off like I flipped a switch—loud, she’s always been loud, and I have always loved it, every neighbor we’ve ever had be damned.
I read her the way I read anything I’ve got my hands on.
The pitch of her climbing. Thighs starting to tremble against my ears.
Her heels digging into the mattress. That stutter in her breath that means she’s about thirty seconds out—I stop.
Mouth off, fingers out, one kiss pressed to her hip bone like an apology I don’t mean.
“NO—no no no, you son of a—” She yanks the belt. The headboard bangs. “Cal. Cal, I swear to God?—”
“Swear to Him all you want.” I kiss the crease of her thigh, feel the muscle jumping under my mouth. “You come when I say you come. Not before.”
“You’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to me and I hope your bike falls over.”
“There she is,” I say. “That filthy mouth. Keep talking. See where it gets you.”
“It’d better get me your tongue back on my?—”
I put it back before she finishes and swallow the rest of the sentence right out of her.
Build her up again, slower this time, meaner about it.
Two fingers curling steady, my tongue working her clit in the rhythm I could keep in my sleep, and I narrate it this time, pulling off just long enough to talk because it wrecks her when I talk—“Feel that? That’s me deciding.
Every bit of this is me deciding, and you’re gonna lie there and take what I give you and thank me after. ”
She moans at the ceiling, actually moans at just the words, and her pussy clenches around my fingers so hard I feel it in my wrist.
This time I let her get closer. Right up to the ledge, right up to where her whole body’s one held breath and she’s chanting don’t stop, fuck, don’t stop, don’t you dare—And I stop.
Flat hand pressed on her stomach, feeling it clench and jump under my palm while she calls me things a nice girl shouldn’t know.
“You—absolute—BASTARD?—”
“Uh-huh.”
“I was RIGHT there?—”
“I know exactly where you were. I put you there.” I bite the inside of her thigh, soft, and she jolts. “You’ll get there when I’m done with you. Say okay.”
Silence. Ragged breathing. The belt creaks.
“Say it, Tessa.”
“…Okay.” Barely above a whisper, and furious, and so turned on the word shakes.
“Good girl.”
The third time she goes quiet near the edge, too smart for me now, trying to sneak it past me—breath held, hips dead still, playing possum.
But I’ve had two years of studying her and her thighs always tell on her, that fine tremble right at the top, and I pull back the second I feel it and she actually screams into her own shoulder, half laugh, half genuine fury, whole body bucking against my arm.
“Sneaky,” I say.
“WHY.” She’s panting at the ceiling, hair stuck to her face, wrists twisting in the leather. “Why—you’re hard as a rock, I can SEE your cock from here, you’ve been grinding it into the mattress for twenty minutes, this is hurting you more than me, you lunatic?—”
She’s not wrong. I’m aching in my jeans, have been since the belt came off, a dull insistent throb I haven’t done one thing about and I’m not going to.
And here’s the part I don’t say out loud, the part I barely let myself hold on to sideways: it’s better this way.
This—her tied to our bed, wrecked and swearing and safe, me in charge of every breath she gets—this I can hold.
This has edges. Everything that finishes has an after, and in the after you’re just lying there, open, nothing to steer. Something in me tonight can’t do open.
So I stay right here in the middle where nothing ends, and I keep us both hanging, and it feels steadier. Like keeping a bike on the throttle because you don’t trust the brakes.
“Who said anything about me,” is what I say out loud. “Tonight I’m just the mechanic. You’re the job.”
“The job would like to be FINISHED?—”
“The job doesn’t get a vote.” I slide two fingers back into her, slow, and her whole spine bows. “Christ, listen to you. Soaked. You want to come so bad you’d say anything right now, wouldn’t you.”
“Yes—”
“Say it.”
“I want to come, Cal?—”
“Louder. The neighbors miss you.”
“I want to COME, you sadistic son of a bitch, PLEASE?—”
The fourth time I build her slow and don’t stop talking the whole way up—telling her exactly what I’m doing while I do it, fingers curled into that spot, thumb circling her clit, my mouth at her ear now, feel that, right there, that’s mine, this whole sweet pussy is mine and it comes when I say—and she’s past bratty now, past furious, down to just please, please, Cal, please, no fight left in it, and even I’ve got limits.
“Okay, baby.” I get the heel of my hand grinding down right where she needs it, fingers buried deep. “You earned it. Take it. Ride my hand—let me watch.”
She plants her feet and does exactly that.
Hips rolling up against my hand, greedy, no rhythm but need, wrists straining the belt white-knuckled above her head, and when she comes it’s enormous—back bowing clean off the bed, her pussy clamping down around my fingers in waves I can count, my name torn in half on the way out of her, going and going, aftershock after aftershock while I work her through it and watch every second of it like it’s the last one I get.
Then she’s flat and boneless, laughing weakly at the ceiling, one leg still twitching.
“You,” she says, and runs out of sentence.
“Yeah.”
“You’re a menace and I love you.”
I untie the belt slow, unwind the leather, and rub feeling back into her wrists, one at a time, working my thumbs into the heels of her hands. Kiss the red lines the leather left, one wrist, then the other.
Still hard. Still not doing anything about it. She reaches for my waistband, clumsy, half-melted, and I catch her hand and kiss the palm instead.
“Tonight was yours.”
“That’s stupid. Get up here and let me?—”
“Tessa.” I stretch out and pull her into my chest, her back to my front, and wrap her up. “Sleep.”
“You’re really not?—”
“I’m good.” A lie the size of the throbbing in my jeans, but she’s too wrung out to fight it.
Her breathing goes slow and even against my arm, her heartbeat coming down out of the redline, and the room settles, and the swallowed-wrong thing in my chest is still there. Waited out the whole show. Patient bastard.
And in the dark, with her warm and loose and trusting against me, it climbs up my throat all on its own.
“Hey. So. Something happened today?—”
“Mm?” Half-asleep. Warm. Completely mine.
The words are loaded and sitting right there—Whitney texted, her dad died, I’ve been helping with the funeral stuff—fifteen words, one breath, and then I’m an honest man.
I look at her face in the lamp light, soft and open, wrists still pink from my belt because she trusts me with everything she’s got.
And I lose my nerve so fast it’s like a trapdoor.
“Nothing,” I say. “Tell you tomorrow. Sleep.”