Chapter 5 #2
My hand shoots to the back of her head and grips her hair.
Her scalp is warm under my fingers, her red hair tangled around my knuckles, and the sight of her like this, lips swollen and shining around my cock, her jaw working as she takes me deeper, is so obscenely beautiful that my knees threaten to betray eighteen years of physical discipline.
The groans she's pulling from me come from somewhere guttural and undone, sounds I've never heard myself make.
She hums around me and the vibration rolls through my shaft and up my spine and drags a curse out of my mouth that I don't bother censoring.
Her free hand grips my hip, nails biting crescents into the muscle, and she sets a rhythm that is slow and deep and devastating, her head bobbing, her tongue pressing flat against the underside on every downstroke, the obscene wet sounds of her mouth filling the quiet bedroom.
"Enough." I pull her off by the fistful of hair I'm holding, and the slick pop of her mouth releasing me makes my cock twitch hard. She looks up at me with wet lips and bright eyes and the satisfied expression of a woman who just brought a man to his knees while she was on hers.
"Was there a problem with my technique?"
"Your technique is the problem." I pull her to her feet by her hair and her jaw and kiss her hard enough that she gasps into my mouth. I can taste myself on her tongue, and the raw intimacy of it makes my hands rougher, needier.
I spin her around and press her back against my chest, my mouth on her neck, my hands on her hips, stripping her shorts down her thighs. She kicks them off and I walk her forward to the bed and press her down onto it with one hand between her shoulder blades.
She turns her head on the mattress and looks back at me. The defiance is still there, hot and sharp and entirely unbroken, but her breathing is fast and her cheeks are flushed and her thighs are already parting. "I thought you said you'd been waiting."
"I have."
"Then stop making me wait."
I run my hand down her spine, over the curve of her ass, and between her thighs from behind. She's soaked.
The slick heat coating my fingers when I slide them through her folds pulls a groan from my chest, and the desperate whimper she lets out when I circle her clit, choked back behind her teeth, is the first crack in her composure.
"Don't hold back," I tell her. My voice is rough, commanding. "I want to hear every sound."
"Earn them."
I push two fingers inside her and curl them forward, and her back arches and her hands fist the sheets and the cry that rips from her throat is exactly what I asked for. She's tight and hot and clenching around my fingers, and the wet, obscene sound of my hand working her fills the quiet bedroom.
My thumb finds her clit and presses, and her hips jerk back against my hand.
"More," she gasps. "Boone, more."
I withdraw my fingers, flip her onto her back, and settle between her thighs. Her eyes are wide and dark, the blue swallowed by blown pupils, and she reaches for me, pulling at my hips, trying to drag me where she wants me.
"Tell me," I say.
"You know what I want."
"I want to hear you say it."
Her chin comes up, defiant even now, even flushed and wet and spread beneath me with her thighs wrapped around my waist. "I want you inside me. I've wanted it for months. So stop talking and fuck me."
I line up and push forward in one long, controlled stroke, and the feeling of sinking into her, the tight, wet grip of her body taking me inch by inch, pulls a groan from somewhere deep in my chest.
Her legs lock around my waist, her nails dig into my shoulders, and the breath she lets out when I bottom out is a shuddering, broken thing that she couldn't hold back if she tried.
I don't move. I hold there, buried deep, feeling her pulse around me while I brace my forearms on either side of her head and look down at her.
Her hair is spread across the pillow, her lips are parted, and the expression on her face, stripped of composure, stripped of the clinical brightness, stripped of everything but want, is an image I will carry for the rest of my life.
"Boone." Her voice cracks. "Move."
"Say please."
"I have never said please in my life and I'm not starting now."
"First time for everything." I rock my hips, just barely, the smallest grind of pressure exactly where she needs it, and the moan she lets out is desperate and furious. Her heels dig into my lower back, trying to force a rhythm I'm not giving her.
"I hate you," she breathes.
"No you don't."
I pull back and thrust forward, hard, and her whole body jolts and her cry echoes off the bedroom walls.
I set a pace that is deep and relentless, the rhythm of a man who knows exactly what he wants and has the stamina and the discipline to take it. She meets every stroke, her hips rolling up to match me, her nails scoring lines down my back that sting and sharpen everything.
"Harder," she says, because this woman does not know how to stop pushing.
I grip her hip with one hand, tilting it to change the angle, and drive deeper. The shift makes her gasp and clench around me so tight my vision blurs. Her hand flies to the headboard and grips it, bracing herself, and I take what she's offering.
My mouth finds her throat, her jaw, the place behind her ear where her pulse pounds fast against my lips. I can feel her climbing, feel it in the tremor of her thighs and the way her breathing fractures into short, hitching gasps.
"Come for me," I tell her. My hand slides between us and my thumb presses against her clit, circling in time with my thrusts.
"Don't tell me what to do."
"Come for me, Ireland."
She shatters. Her whole body arcs up against mine and her inner walls clamp down and she comes with a cry that starts as my name and ends wordless and primal, her body pulsing in rhythmic waves that I can feel along every inch of me.
I hold the pace through her orgasm, driving her through it, and the tight, wet grip of her body and the months of wanting her that are burning through my bloodstream hit critical mass.
I bury myself deep and come hard enough that my arms shake, my face against her neck, her name on a breath that feels like it tears out of me from somewhere I didn't know existed.
The release rolls through me in waves, and she holds me through it, arms tight around my back, breath hot against my shoulder, both of us shaking.
She's still pulsing around me when I lift my head and look at her. Her eyes are half-closed and glazed and her lips are curved in the particular smile of a woman who got exactly what she wanted.
"Assessment?" she asks. Her voice is wrecked and lazy and still carries the edge that makes her Ireland.
"Comprehensive."
"That's not a grade."
"I don't grade. I monitor outcomes."
"And?"
"Outcomes are exceptional."
She laughs against my chest, and I feel it in my ribs. I roll to the side, pulling her with me, and she settles against me with the comfortable ease of a woman who has been thinking about fitting into this space for months and finds that the fit is exactly right.
My hand traces the freckles on her shoulder in a pattern I will remember when I remember nothing else.
Her fingers find the scars on my knuckles and trace them one by one, reading the history of damage with the gentle precision of a woman who has spent her career putting people back together.
"These are old," she says.
"Most of them."
"This one isn't." Her thumb presses a mark across my second knuckle, white and thin. Recent.
"Hatch cover on the helo. Last rotation."
"And you didn't have it looked at."
"It was a scrape."
"It scarred."
"Everything scars."
She lifts her head and looks at me with an expression that is equal parts tenderness and the specific frustration of a medical professional confronting a patient who doesn't take care of himself.
"When we get back to the center, I'm doing a full assessment of every scar on your hands. Non-negotiable."
"Is that a professional order or a personal request?"
"Yes."
I pull her closer. The morning light has gone from early gold to full sun, and the room is warm, and her body against mine is warm, and the coffee is cold on the counter downstairs, and I cannot remember the last time I wanted to stay in a place this much.
We drowse. We talk. She tells me about the first time she stood on a starting block and knew the water was where she belonged, before the shoulder took that away and gave her a different purpose.
I tell her about the first poem I wrote, in a forward operating base with sand in everything, three lines about the color of blood on concrete that I never showed anyone.
She doesn't ask to see the notebook. She just listens, her fingers still tracing my knuckles, and the patience of her listening is an intimacy I didn't know I was missing.
Sunday passes in the slow, heavy way of a day that both of us know is borrowed.
Rivera will have updates. The rehab center needs attending.
The investigation, the tampered equipment, the pattern that brought us together in the first place, is still running underneath everything, a current that doesn't stop because two people stopped pretending.
We eat. We shower, separately, because the banter required to negotiate a shared shower in her small bathroom is more than either of us can manage without ending up back in bed, and there are limits to how much borrowed time the day can hold.
She puts on clean clothes and looks like the Ireland the world sees.
I put on yesterday's clothes and look like a man who didn't go home.
"You need clothes," she says.
"I need a lot of things. Clothes are on the list."
"What else is on the list?"
"Coffee that isn't cold. A toothbrush that isn't my finger. More of whatever this morning was."
She smiles, and the unguarded version surfaces again, the one that exists before the professional composure. "The toothbrush and clothes can be arranged. The rest is already in progress."