Chapter 27
CARTER
She came to my apartment on Friday night.
Anne had Justin — a real sleepover this time, planned, not an emergency, Finn and Justin and a tent made of couch cushions and Anne texting me a photo of the two of them asleep in it at nine with the caption you’re welcome, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, which is nothing.
And then it was just Jess, at my door, in a coat with snow melting on the shoulders, and the whole Arch burning white behind her through the big windows, and I stood there for a second just looking at her because four days ago I’d thought I’d never get to do this again.
“Are you going to let me in,” she said, “or are we doing this in the hallway?”
The same thing she’d said the night she came to save this. I heard it go through both of us.
“Get in here,” I said, and I pulled her in by the front of her coat, and I kissed her.
It wasn’t careful. I’d meant it to be — I’d had this whole plan, the wine was out, I was going to be gentle and slow and prove something — and then her mouth was on mine and her cold hands came up to my jaw and the plan died on contact.
She made a sound against my lips, low, and I felt it go straight down my spine, and I walked her back against the door and kissed her like I’d been starving for it, because I had.
I got her coat off. It hit the floor. She was in a soft gray sweater and jeans and I got my hands under the hem of the sweater and found the warm skin of her waist and she shivered, arching into me, and I pulled back just enough to look at her.
“I have to tell you something first,” I said.
“Carter—”
“Two seconds.” I pressed my forehead to hers.
My heart was going like I’d just finished a shift.
“The quiet’s coming down. Right now. That thing Sloane talked about — the wall, the part of me that wants to do this from somewhere safe, from behind glass, so it doesn’t count if I lose it.
” I made myself say it. “I can feel it wanting to close up. And I’m not going to let it.
I’m naming it. I want to be all the way here with you, and it scares the hell out of me, and I’m doing it anyway. ”
Something moved through her whole face. She reached up and took my jaw in both hands.
“Then be here,” she said. “All the way. Don’t you dare go behind the glass. Not with me.”
“Not with you,” I agreed, and I picked her up.
She locked her ankles behind my back and I carried her to the bedroom and it was not far but it took a while because I kept stopping to kiss her against things — the wall, the doorframe, the edge of the dresser, her back arching every time, her fingers in my hair. I got her sweater off over her head.
I got the bra after it, and then I had to stop and just look at her, half-undressed on my bed in the low light with her hair loose and her mouth swollen from mine.
People said thirty-seven like it was a number that came with an apology — like a woman was supposed to get quieter about her own body every year past thirty.
But Jess laid out on my bed was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.
The full soft curve of her breasts, the flare of her hips, the stretch marks low on her belly that she’d once started to apologize for and that I would happily spend the rest of my life kissing, because they meant Justin, they meant a whole life she’d built before me, they meant her. She wasn’t some smooth untouched girl.
She was a woman, all of her, every year of her, and I wanted every single one of those years with a want that made my hands shake. “God, you’re beautiful,” I said, and I meant it so much it came out rough.
“You’ve seen me naked before,” she said, but her breath caught when she said it.
“Not like this.” I dragged my mouth down her throat, her collarbone, lower. “Every other time I had one foot out the door. I wasn’t all the way looking.” I closed my mouth over her nipple and she gasped, her hand fisting in the sheets. “I’m looking now.”
I took my time. That was the whole point — I made myself stay, made myself feel every second of it instead of rushing to the part where it was over and I could go back to safe. I kissed my way down her stomach.
I got her jeans off, and the last of it, and then I settled between her thighs and looked up the length of her body at her face, and she was watching me with her lower lip caught in her teeth, and I held her gaze the whole time as I lowered my mouth to her.
She was already wet. She made a broken sound the second my tongue found her clit, and her hips came up off the bed, and I pinned them down with one forearm and worked her slow, deliberate, enjoying every sound she made — the hitch in her breath, the shake in her thighs — and chasing each one down, again and again, until she was writhing under my arm and saying my name in a way I felt in my teeth.
I closed my lips around her clit and sucked, and she swore.
I slid one finger into her, then two, curling them, my mouth never leaving her, and she reached down and gripped my hair hard enough to sting and I didn’t stop, I stayed, I kept my mouth on her and my fingers moving until she came apart against my tongue with my name breaking in half in her mouth.
I stayed with her through all of it, every pulse, until she went boneless and tugged at my shoulders.
“Come here,” she said, wrecked. “Now. I need you.”
I came up over her, and she got her hands between us and went after my belt — fast, impatient, nothing careful about it — and I lifted up so she could shove my jeans and shorts down over my hips and free me.
Then she wrapped her hand around my cock and I stopped breathing.
She stroked me slow. The whole length of me, root to tip, taking her time about it, her palm dragging warm and firm and unhurried, and when she reached the head she caught the wetness already beaded there and smeared it down over me with her thumb, and I had to drop my forehead to her shoulder and just hold on. “Jess?—”
“I want my turn,” she said against my ear, and then she was pushing at my shoulder, rolling me onto my back, and moving down my chest with her mouth, unhurried, and I knew exactly where she was going and could not have stopped her if the building had been on fire.
She took me in her mouth.
I said something that wasn’t a word. She went slow at first — one hand wrapped at the base, her tongue dragging up the underside, her lips closing hot and tight over the head — and then she took me deeper and sucked, and my hips came up off the mattress before I could think about stopping them.
I got a fist in the sheets. I got the other hand in her hair, not pulling, just holding on, and she hummed around me like she was enjoying every second of it, and that sound nearly finished me on the spot.
“Jess.” It came out ruined. “Jess — stop. I’m gonna come, and I don’t want to. Not like this. Not tonight.”
She let me go with a slow drag of her mouth and looked up at me, lips wet, absolutely wrecking me.
“Then get up here,” she said.
I did. She pulled me down over her and reached between us and guided the head of my cock through her wet, notching me right where she wanted me, and I pushed into her slow — inch by inch, both of us groaning at the stretch of it — until I was buried in her to the hilt.
And then she went still and cupped my face and made me look at her.
“Here,” she said. “Right here. With me.”
“With you,” I said, and I started to move.
It was slow at first and then it wasn’t.
She hooked her legs high around my back and I got a hand under her hip and changed the angle and she cried out, her nails dragging down my back, and I kept my eyes on hers as long as I could stand it, this woman who had walked into my burning life and refused to leave, who was falling apart underneath me and holding my gaze while she did it.
I felt her tightening again, felt it building in her, and I got a hand between us and worked her with my thumb until she shattered a second time, clenching around me so hard I saw white, and I followed her over with her name in my mouth and my whole body shaking and — for the first time in my life, all the way there, hands full, nothing held back, no glass, no exit, no foot out any door.
I collapsed onto her and she wrapped both arms around my back and held on, and neither of us said anything at all, just breathed.
“You stayed,” she said finally, into my hair.
“I stayed.”
I felt her smile against my temple. “Good.”
Later — much later, after we’d both dozed and the snow had stopped and the apartment had gone quiet and blue with the middle of the night — I got up and got us water, and when I came back she was sitting up against my headboard wearing my Blaze T-shirt, the one from the back of a chair, and something about the sight of her in it, my number across her chest, her hair a mess and her mouth still soft — it did something to me.
It flipped a switch I didn’t know I had.
“That’s mine,” I said.
“It’s mine now.” She stretched, deliberately, the shirt riding up. “I’m keeping it. And I left my toothbrush in your bathroom, by the way. The blue one. It lives here now.”
And that — that stupid, enormous thing, a toothbrush, the thing she had never once left in six weeks of coming and going — hit me square in the chest.
“Yeah?” I said, and my voice wasn’t quite right.
“Yeah.” She looked at me, and she knew exactly what she was doing, she’d known since she packed it. “I’m done leaving your apartment like a hotel room. Get used to it.”
I set the water down. I crossed the room. I pulled the sheet off her in one motion and she laughed, low and surprised, and then I was on her again and the laugh turned into something else.