21. Danielle #2
He settles between my thighs like a man arriving at an altar, opens me gently with his thumbs, and draws a long, wet stripe from entrance to clit that makes my back bow.
He hums approval. Then he gets to work - unhurried, precise, tongue flat and then pointed, circling my clit until my hands fist in the sheets.
One finger slides into me, then two, curling in a rhythm that matches the pull of his mouth.
“Oh - God - Niccolo-”
“That’s it.” The words vibrate against me. “Don’t be quiet for the neighbors. There are no neighbors who matter. Let Sicily hear what choosing sounds like.”
I laugh and moan in the same breath. He sucks gently on my clit and crooks his fingers, and climax gathers with a sweetness that has nothing to do with the desperate orgasms of our starved February night.
This one builds like a tide. When it breaks, I come with my eyes open, watching him watch me, thighs shaking around his ears while he works me through every pulse until I’m gasping for mercy.
He kisses my inner thigh, then my hip, then climbs up my body and kisses my mouth so I taste myself on his tongue. I wrap my hand around his cock and stroke, spreading the wetness at the tip, and his forehead drops to mine.
“In me,” I say. “I want you in me while I can still look at you.”
“How do you want me?”
“Like this. Face to face.” I hook a leg over his hip. “I spent too long looking at the ceiling alone. I want your eyes.”
He notches himself against me and pushes in with a single slow thrust that seats him to the hilt. We both go still, breathing, adjusting, feeling the fact of it. No wall. No counter almost. No shadowed estate bed. Just us, joined, choosing.
“Dani.” His voice shakes. “You feel - Christ. You feel like the first true thing I’ve done in years.”
“Then don’t close your eyes.”
He doesn’t. He begins to move - long, deep strokes that drag against every sensitive place his mouth already primed.
I hold his gaze even when it gets hard, even when pleasure makes my vision blur.
His hand finds mine again, fingers laced against the pillow.
The headboard taps the wall in a soft, steady confession.
“Harder,” I whisper. “I won’t break.”
“I know you won’t.” He shifts his angle, hooks my knee higher, and drives deeper until I cry out. “You’re the strongest person I’ve ever held. I’m the one who broke. I’m the one who gets to put himself back together inside you.”
“Less poetry. More hips.”
He laughs, wrecked and delighted, and gives me exactly that - steady, powerful thrusts that slap skin to skin, that make the mattress complain, that pull broken praises out of both of us.
I feel another orgasm coiling, different from the first, deeper, wrapped around the stretch of him.
I tell him so. He slips a hand between us and rubs my clit with his thumb, still watching my face like the answer to every question he’s asked for eight months lives in my expression.
“Come for me,” he says. “Come on your husband’s cock while you choose him. Let me feel it.”
I do - sharp and sweet and open-eyed, clenching around him in waves that make him curse and bury his face briefly in my neck before he forces himself to look at me again.
He lasts only a handful of strokes past my climax, then spills with a groan that sounds like prayer and apology braided together, pulsing deep while I hold him through it, ankles locked at his back, hands in his hair.
We stay tangled together until our breathing slows, neither of us in any hurry to move.
Sometime later, his mouth finds mine again, lazy at first, then hungry, and I feel him hardening against my thigh. I pull him back over me without overthinking it.
The second time begins slower, face to face again, until the rhythm builds and we’re both breathless.
Midway through the second round of thrusting, he pulls out suddenly - leaving me aching and empty - and flips me onto my stomach with a murmured apology that isn’t sorry at all.
He covers me, chest to back, and slides home again from behind while his mouth finds the nape of my neck.
The new angle steals my breath. His hand snakes under my hip to find my clit again.
“Still eyes open?” he teases, because my face is half in the pillow.
I turn my cheek, find his eyes over my shoulder, and hold them. “Still open. Still choosing. Even like this.”
“Fuck, Dani.” He drives deeper, slower, the grind of it devastating. “You’re going to kill me with how brave you are.”
“Good. Die happy.”
He does something with his hips that makes coherent speech impossible.
We move like that until sweat slicks the place where his stomach meets my back, until the only words left are broken yeses and my name and his, until I come again with my fingers laced through his against the mattress and he follows with a shout muffled in my hair, flooding me while Sicily’s night air cools our skin through the open shutters.
We stay joined afterward, sweaty and trembling. He softens inside me but doesn’t rush to leave.
Outside, the sea keeps its old rhythm against the rocks. Inside, my heartbeat matches his for the first time in a long time without fear attached.
After he spills, he doesn’t collapse into silence the way he sometimes did in our worst months.
He stays present - kissing my shoulder, asking if I’m sore, fetching water from the carafe on the nightstand like domesticity itself is part of the sex.
I sit up against the headboard with the sheet pooled at my waist and watch him move naked through moonlight, and the sight of my husband being simply kind in the aftermath undoes me nearly as much as his mouth did.
“What?” he asks, catching my stare.
“Nothing. Everything.” I accept the glass, drink, set it aside. “I forgot sex could feel like a conversation instead of a ceasefire.”
“Then we’ll keep talking.” He slides back into bed and pulls me across his chest. “Every night you let me. Every morning. Until the conversation is the default again and not the miracle.”
He brushes damp hair off my forehead. “Still with me?”
“Still choosing,” I answer. “Still here.”
Later, wrapped around him in the dark, I listen to his heartbeat and try to remember the last time I felt this content. Not happy, exactly - happiness is too simple a word for the complicated mix of emotions swirling through me. But content. At peace.
“I never stopped loving you,” I say into the silence. “Even when I was shrinking myself to fit your world, even when I was disappearing inch by inch. I thought if I could just become small enough, quiet enough, acceptable enough, it would be okay. That the love would be worth it.”
“It shouldn’t have cost you anything.” His voice is rough. “Love shouldn’t require you to become less.”
“I know that now. I didn’t then.” I prop myself up on one elbow, looking at him in the dim light from the window. “That’s why this time has to be different. I can’t shrink myself again. I won’t survive it.”
“You won’t have to.” He traces a finger down my arm. “The woman you’ve become in the past eight months - the one who built a restaurant and stood up to Charlotte and found her voice again - that’s who I want. Not some diminished version that fits into a box my mother designed.”
“And if your mother-”
“My mother will learn to accept it, or she’ll learn to live without a relationship with her son.
Those are her only options.” He pulls me closer.
“I’m not going to let anyone make you feel small again.
Not her, not Charlotte, not anyone in that whole gilded world.
You’re worth more than all of it combined. ”
I settle against his chest, feeling the steady rhythm of his breathing.
“I love you,” I say. “I don’t know if I said that clearly enough before. I love you, Niccolo. I never stopped.”
“I love you too.” He presses a kiss to the top of my head. “I never stopped either. I just forgot how to show it.”
“You’re showing it now.”
“I’ll keep showing it. Every day. For as long as you let me.”
The stars are still visible through the window, scattered across the Sicilian sky. Tomorrow we go back to real life - the restaurant, my family, the long-distance complications of a reconciliation still in progress.
There will be challenges ahead, obstacles we can’t predict. But right now, in this moment, none of that matters.
Right now, there’s just this: two people who almost lost each other, finding their way back.