Chapter 6 #3
He took my hand and we walked the two blocks to his hotel through the warm July night, the city still buzzing around us, and I thought about how different this felt from every other time I'd made a careful, considered decision in my life.
This didn't feel careful. It felt joyfully reckless — and I couldn't remember the last time I'd let myself be either.
His room had a small sitting area — a couch, a low table, a lamp casting warm light across the room.
He opened the minibar and poured two glasses of wine without asking, handed me one, and we settled onto the couch together the way we'd gotten good at on my porch swing — his arm around me, my legs tucked up, the city quiet outside the window.
We talked for a while. About nothing in particular. About everything that didn't need to be said urgently.
And then I put my glass down, turned toward him, and kissed him.
Not the gentle kind. The kind I'd been thinking about for weeks — deep and deliberate, my hand coming up to his jaw, letting him feel exactly what I meant by it.
He responded immediately, his arm tightening around me, his other hand sliding into my hair, and we just stayed there, kissing like we had all the time in the world and intended to use it.
His hands moved to my back, slow and warm, tracing up my spine, and then around to the front — cupping my breasts through my shirt, thumbs moving in slow circles — and I exhaled against his mouth in a way that wasn't entirely dignified.
He reached under my shirt and then his thumbs were on my breasts, deliberate and unhurried.
I started to slide off the couch and we both laughed, realizing how absurd this was.
"The couch," he said after a moment, shifting and making a face. "Not ideal."
I laughed — really laughed — and he grinned and stood up and held out his hand.
"I know somewhere more comfortable," he said.
He led me to the bedroom and kissed me again at the foot of the bed — long and thorough — and then lowered me back against the pillows.
He pulled my shirt over my head and tossed my bra after it, and then his mouth was again on my breast, then my erect nipples — teasing, deliberate — and I stopped thinking about anything outside this room entirely.
I pulled his shirt over his head and ran my hands down his chest, then lower.
I could feel his hardness through his jeans.
I reached down to feel his bulge, then popped the button on his jeans and pushed them down along with his underwear and wrapped my hand around him, not only hard, but I rubbed his head with his pre-cum, and heard him exhale sharply.
He kissed his way down my stomach, pulled my jeans and underwear off in one motion, and then his mouth was between my thighs — warm and certain, his tongue finding exactly the right rhythm with the unhurried focus of a man who intended to take his time about this.
He read every sound I made, adjusted, pushed me right to the edge and held me there until I was breathless and his name was the only word I had left.
I came apart completely, hands fisted in the sheets, and he stayed with me through every second of it.
He kissed his way back up my body and reached over to the nightstand, and I heard a drawer slide open and the crinkle of a wrapper — the quiet efficiency of a man taking care of it without being asked, the tear of foil loud in the dark.
Then I pulled him up to me and stopped breathing entirely when he finally, finally pushed inside me.
We both went still for a second — just breathing, adjusting, feeling the full weight of this moment that had been building since a hotel locker room in June.
He started to move, slow at first, finding a rhythm, and I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him closer and thought: yes. This. Finally.
It was everything I'd imagined and then some — unhurried and thorough and exactly right, the two of us finding each other in the dark like we'd been doing it for years.
He knew when to go slow and when to push harder and when to pull back just to the edge and hold there until I was breathless and saying his name like a question he already knew the answer to.
When I finally came apart completely — hands gripping his shoulders, his name on my lips, the whole summer night outside the window — he followed me under with his face pressed to my neck and my name on his breath like something he'd been holding for a long time.
We lay there afterward, tangled and quiet, his hand moving slowly through my hair.
I stared at the ceiling and thought about how strange it was to feel this settled about something I hadn't planned.
I stayed the night.
I hadn't planned that either. But I was starting to think that the best things that had ever happened to me were the ones I hadn't planned for, and this — this warm, quiet hotel room in July, this man who called every night and remembered how I took my coffee and held my son through fireworks without being asked — this was shaping up to be one of the best things in a long time.
The distance was still there. Three hundred miles, a hockey season starting in September, two lives that didn't overlap in any obvious way.
But tonight, I couldn't make myself think about the logistics.
Tonight was enough. Tonight was more than enough.