Chapter 27 #2
This time there was no fear in it at all.
That was the difference — the first time had been me learning to stay, gripping the edge of it, choosing every second not to run.
This time I already knew I wasn’t going anywhere, and it burned all the careful right out of me.
I flipped her onto her stomach and dragged her hips up and she went, eager, arching her back, looking over her shoulder at me with her eyes gone dark.
“Like this?” I said, dragging myself against her.
“Yes—God, Carter, don’t tease?—”
I pushed into her from behind in one long stroke and she buried a cry in the pillow and I gripped her hips and didn’t hold back, not this time, setting a hard deep rhythm that had her fisting the sheets and pushing back against me to meet it.
I got a fistful of her hair, gentle, a question, and she moaned yes so I held it, guiding her, and reached around with my other hand to work her clit while I drove into her, and the sounds she made stopped being words at all.
My T-shirt was still on her, rucked up her back, my number smeared with sweat, and there was something filthy and possessive about that I felt in my back teeth.
“Mine,” I said, into the back of her neck, not planning to, just the truth coming out. “You’re mine now. Say it.”
“Yours—” she gasped, “—God, I’m yours, don’t stop, right there?—”
I felt her go over the edge, felt her clench around me and sob into the pillow, and I fucked her through it and straight into another one, relentless now, my whole self poured into keeping her there, until she was shaking and boneless and begging, and only then did I let go, spilling into her with a groan torn out of the bottom of me, draped over her back, my mouth on her shoulder, both of us soaked and wrecked and gasping.
We slid down into the sheets in a tangle. She turned in my arms and kissed me, slow and filthy and satisfied.
“Hotter than the first time,” she mumbled.
“You keeping score?”
“Mm. Director. I track metrics.” She was already half asleep. “S’good data.”
I laughed, and pulled her in, and this time when I closed my eyes I did not think about a bag by the door. I thought about a blue toothbrush in my bathroom. I thought: stay. And for once it wasn’t a fear. It was a plan.
I woke up to gray winter light and the smell of coffee I hadn’t made.
She was in the kitchen. My T-shirt, bare legs, standing at my counter scrolling something on her phone with a mug in her hand, and the whole domestic ordinary impossibility of it stopped me in the bedroom doorway.
Jess Calloway, in my kitchen, in my shirt, at eight in the morning, having made coffee in a machine she’d apparently figured out, entirely at home in the apartment she used to flee before midnight.
“There’s coffee,” she said, not looking up. “I made it strong. You looked like you’d need it.”
I came up behind her. I moved her hair off the back of her neck and kissed the spot there, and I felt her go still, felt the shiver run through her, felt her set the phone down on the counter very deliberately.
“Carter.”
“Mm.” I kissed lower. My hands found her hips, the hem of the shirt, the bare skin under it.
“I have to pick up Justin at eleven.”
“It’s eight.” I turned her around and lifted her up onto the dining table in one motion — the big one by the window, the one with the whole white morning and the Arch behind it — and stepped between her knees. “That’s three hours. I can work with three hours.”
She looked at me, and the heat came up in her face, and she reached down and pulled my shirt — her shirt now, apparently — off over her head and dropped it on the floor.
“Then stop talking,” she said.
The table was cold under her and she gasped when her back touched it and then I was kissing down her body in the flat gray daylight, no hiding anything now, all of her laid out in front of the windows where the whole city could theoretically see if the whole city had a telescope, and neither of us cared.
In the flat gray morning light I could see every inch of her, no shadows to hide in, and God, she was gorgeous — flushed and loose-limbed and unbothered, thirty-seven and completely comfortable being looked at, and the confidence of it was hotter than anything a nervous twenty-five-year-old had ever done in her life.
I would take her exactly like this, in the cold light, every morning I had left if she let me.
I pulled her to the edge of the table and put my mouth on her again, morning-slow, and she braced her heels on the edge and her hands came down into my hair and she let her head fall back and just took it, unhurried, still loose from the night, and I could have done that for an hour.
She didn’t let me. She hauled me up by the shoulders. “Inside me. Now. We did slow last night.”
I shoved my sweatpants down and pulled her hips to the edge and drove into her right there on the table, and she wrapped her legs around me and grabbed the far edge above her head for leverage and met every thrust, the table rocking, the coffee mug tipping and rolling and neither of us reaching for it. Morning light all over both of us.
Nothing hidden. Her breasts moving with every stroke, her mouth open, my name and God and yes and right there falling out of her, and I watched all of it, wide open, all the way present, a man who three weeks ago couldn’t hold anything now holding this — her, this, the whole impossible full-handed life of it — and choosing it, choosing it, choosing it with every stroke.
“I’ve got you,” I said, and I meant all of it. “I’ve got you, I’m not going anywhere, I’ve got you?—”
She came with my name and both hands fisted against the table and I went right after her, buried deep, folding down over her with my face in her throat, and we stayed there tangled on the dining room table in the cold morning light, breathing, wrecked, laughing a little, while the spilled coffee dripped slowly off the edge onto the floor.
“We’re cleaning that up,” she said, into my hair.
“Later.”
“Later,” she agreed.
And I held her on the table in my apartment with her toothbrush in my bathroom and her son’s sleepover ending in three hours and the whole rest of my life stretched out in front of me for the first time as something I got to keep instead of something I was bracing to lose, and I thought — clear, calm, no alarm underneath it, the good kind of quiet for once —
This. This is what my hands are for.
Thanksgiving was five days later.
I hadn’t planned it — neither of us had, everything that November had happened too fast and too hard for planning — but on the Wednesday night Jess called me while I was icing my knee and said, in the careful voice she used when she was about to let herself want something, “So. Tomorrow. My parents aren’t coming down until Christmas, and Anne’s doing her family thing, and I was going to just do a small one for me and Justin, and I wondered if —” and I said “yes” before she finished the sentence, and heard her exhale on the other end like she’d been holding it.
So I spent my first Thanksgiving in that temporary Clayton apartment, at a table that had come out of storage two days before, with a turkey Jess had brined and a stuffing I was not allowed to touch and a boy who had assigned himself the job of Official Olive Distributor and took it with the gravity of a man defusing a bomb.
I had eaten a lot of Thanksgivings in a lot of houses. That’s the thing about growing up the way I did — you’re never not invited, there’s always a placemat, families are generous on the holidays, everybody wants to do a good thing for the foster kid.
I’d sat at a dozen of those tables and been grateful and been careful and been, always, a guest. Somebody passing through. Somebody who said thank you for having me and meant it and left.
This was the first one where nobody was having me.
I was just there. At the table. Not a guest.
Justin put an olive on each of my fingers without asking, because that was apparently a tradition now, ours, invented on the spot, and Jess looked at me across a table she’d pulled out of storage for a life she was building in a city she’d moved to, and I understood that I was not passing through this one.
I got to stay for the leftovers. I got to stay for all of it.
“What are you thankful for?” Justin demanded, because his teacher had told him you had to ask, and he was nothing if not a rule-follower.
Jess said her family. Justin said Gerald, and Barry, and after some thought, olives.
They both looked at me.
The old me had a dozen easy answers ready — charming, deflecting, guest answers, the kind you give at somebody else’s table. I felt the reflex come up. I felt the quiet want to come down over it, smooth and safe.
I named it instead.
“I’m thankful I didn’t lose this,” I said. My voice wasn’t quite steady, and I let it not be, at a Thanksgiving table, in front of a six-year-old with olives on his fingers. “I almost did. And I didn’t. And I’m going to spend a long time being thankful for that.”
Jess reached over and took my hand — olives and all — and Justin said “that’s a good one” with enormous approval, and outside the first real cold of the year came down over St. Louis, and inside, for the first time in my entire life, I was not a guest anywhere.
I was home.