Chapter 11 #4
The power of knowing exactly how to make this woman's body respond is a kind of possession that has nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with devotion.
She is mine in the way poems belong to the person who wrote them: not because I captured her, but because I paid enough attention to earn the right to the language.
"Boone." My name in her mouth, rough and urgent, the vowels stretched by wanting.
"I'm here."
"I need you inside me."
I withdraw my fingers and position myself between her thighs, and when I push into her the sound we both make fills the room, raw and mutual and unhidden.
She is tight and hot around me and the sensation of being inside her after the exposure of the last hour hits with a force I am not prepared for.
My forehead drops against hers, my breath coming ragged, and the control I've relied on for every other time is thinner than it has ever been, worn down by the vulnerability of having my poems read and every name seen and the woman underneath me still pulling me closer.
"Stay with me," she says.
"I'm here."
"Stay with me."
The repetition is a demand and a declaration, and I answer it with my body.
The rhythm builds without rushing, deep and deliberate, and her legs wrap around my hips and change the angle, pulling me deeper, and the sound she makes when I hit the place inside her that she's guided me to twice before tells me I've found it again.
My hands are in her hair and my mouth is on her collarbone and each thrust carries the weight of everything I've written in the notebook, every name and every poem about her hands, pressing between us like a shared language that doesn't require translation.
Her body tightens around me, the orgasm building in the tremor of her thighs and the shallowing of her breath and her hips no longer matching my rhythm but chasing their own.
Her fingers grip the iron headboard above her, and the image of her hands on the dark iron, her knuckles white, her wrist flexing with the strength she has never lost, is a poem I will write tomorrow and carry in my pocket for the rest of my life.
The pace increases because her body demands it.
I give her what she needs, harder, deeper, my hips driving into hers, and the threshold approaches in the tightening of her body around my cock, in her breathing gone fast and broken.
She releases the headboard, moving her hands down until the nails bite into my shoulders.
"Look at me," I tell her, and my voice comes out lower than I intend, rougher, stripped of everything except the need to watch her face when she lets go.
Her eyes find mine, green and unguarded and holding nothing back.
I adjust the angle, press deeper, hold, and the sound she makes is broken and mine.
Her body clamps around me, the orgasm taking her in waves I feel in every nerve, her back arching off the mattress.
The sight of Ireland with her hair spread across my pillow and her body pulsing around my cock while she holds my gaze is the single most devastating thing I have ever witnessed, and I have witnessed enough devastation to know the weight of the word.
Two strokes later the finish takes me, hard and total, burying myself in her with my face pressed into her hair and her name in my mouth, not a word but a sound, the sound of a man who has set down every wall he was carrying and found that the woman on the other side of them was strong enough to hold the weight.
The aftermath is quiet. Her fingers find my hair, and the gentleness of the gesture after the intensity is the contrast that defines her.
She is fierce and warm, the banter and the tenderness woven into the same person, all of it hers, all of it mine.
She traces the scar on my shoulder, the one from shrapnel that a field surgeon removed in a forward operating base years ago. Assessment and affection delivered through the same fingertips.
"You're going to write about this," she says.
"Probably."
"The poem about my hands on the headboard."
"How did you know?"
"Because you looked at my hands on the headboard the way you look at the ocean before you open the notebook.
" She turns her head and meets my eyes, and the expression on her face is the same one she wore when she set the notebook on the table.
Recognition and gravity and the tenderness of a person who has seen all of it and chosen to stay.
"Write whatever you want, Aldridge. The notebook is yours.
But the woman in the poems is yours too, and she's not going anywhere. "
The ocean moves below the deck outside. The notebook sits on the kitchen table between the bourbon glasses and the flowers.
The current volume is on the deck rail where I left it, open to the unfinished lines from the other night.
Two notebooks, two volumes of the same practice, and Ireland has read the older one and will read the rest when she's ready, because the line in the sand is gone and the privacy that remains is offered, not defended.
Tonight the notebook is open and Ireland is breathing against my shoulder and the poems have a reader and the reader has a sharp tongue and freckled hands and a scar that matches mine in a different register.
Tomorrow Falk walks into the rehab center. So does Ireland. The notebook can wait. The safety cannot.