23. Cassandra #2
He peels my underwear down with a patience that borders on obscene, lifting each foot carefully, setting the cotton aside like it matters. When I’m bare he sits back on his heels and just looks - flushed chest, round belly, glistening sex - and the awe on his famous face makes my throat tight.
“Beautiful,” he says simply. “All of you. Especially the parts that are changing for her. Especially the wet part that’s changing for me.”
“Then put your mouth where the beauty is wettest before I lose my patience.”
He laughs, surprised and delighted, and obeys.
He licks into me with long, savoring strokes, hands steadying my hips so I don’t tip backward under the new balance of my body.
Pregnancy has made everything swollen and hypersensitive; each pass of his tongue draws a helpless sound from my throat that the open window carries toward the sea.
He takes his time. No rush toward a finish line. Just the slow, deliberate devotion of a man who has finally learned that hurry was the original sin of our marriage.
“Antonio - right there - keep that exact pressure…”
“Here?” He circles my clit with the pointed tip of his tongue, then flattens it, experimenting.
“Yes. God. Don’t you dare move away from that spot.”
He doesn’t.
He settles in like a man clocking overtime and works me with a patience that feels like penance and gift both. One hand slides up to cradle my belly while the other spreads me open for better access, fingers holding me apart so he can see everything his mouth is doing.
When I come it’s a rolling, full-body wave that starts low and floods upward, my fingers locked in his hair, a broken moan spilling toward the open window and the silver water beyond.
He rises, mouth shiny, eyes soft as rubbed sea glass. He pushes his trousers and underwear down and steps out of them.
I tug him toward the bed - narrow rental mattress, white sheets that smell of cheap detergent and salt - and push him onto his back. I straddle his thighs carefully and wrap my hand around his cock, stroking him slowly while I watch every microexpression cross his face.
“Still okay?” he asks, even now, even with his cock twitching in my fist.
“If you ask me that one more time I’m throwing you in the ocean like I promised on the sand.”
“Fair warning received.” His smile is crooked and boyish. “Then tell me how you want me arranged.”
“Inside. Slow. Facing me so I can watch you fall apart without hiding.”
I guide him to my entrance and sink down carefully, mindful of the new balance of my body and the way the belly changes the angle.
The stretch is familiar and new at once - tighter from pregnancy swelling, deeper somehow because of how I have to lean.
He groans like he’s been stabbed with pleasure, hands flying to my hips, then checking themselves, then settling lightly as if afraid of gripping too hard and leaving bruises on something sacred.
“You can hold me,” I tell him. “I’m pregnant, not made of porcelain.”
“You’re precious.” His voice cracks on the word. “There’s a difference, and I’m finally learning it.”
I start to move - unhurried rolls of my hips, the kind that let every ridge of him drag against every swollen nerve ending.
Sea breeze cools the sweat gathering at my spine.
Moonlight paints a pale stripe across his chest and the hollow of his throat.
I plant my palms there and ride him while he stares up at me like I’m a cathedral he finally earned the right to enter without performing for an audience.
“Talk to me,” I whisper. “I want filthy and honest, not movie-star poetry.”
“You’re so fucking wet.” He swallows hard. “You’re soaking my stomach every time you bottom out. When you take me to the root I feel you flutter, and I have to count hotel room numbers backwards so I don’t finish like a teenager on his first try.”
“Count later. Praise me now. Be specific.”
“Your cunt is gripping me like it wrote me a letter of complaint for being gone. Your tits are fuller and heavier and I want to put my mouth on them until you come again just from that suction. Your belly keeps brushing my abs and every time it does I remember she’s in there listening to us be happy. ”
I lean forward carefully, bracing on the headboard so my belly has room, and offer him exactly what he asked for. He sucks one nipple, then the other, gentle because they’re sensitive, filthy because his tongue invents new blasphemies against my skin between soft curses.
The dual sensation - cock deep and steady, mouth wet and devoted - builds another climax low in my pelvis like a second tide.
“I’m close,” I warn, forehead dropping toward his.
“Take it. Use my cock like a tool. I want to feel you break open around me and know I helped.”
I do. I grind down hard and shatter with a cry I don’t bother to muffle, pulsing around him in long, rhythmic waves that make him swear through clenched teeth.
He holds perfectly still through it, jaw locked, letting me use him as an instrument, whispering praise into my cleavage until I go limp and trembling against his chest.
Between climaxes he rolls us carefully onto our sides, facing each other, and slides back into me with a sigh that sounds like relief.
This angle lets him kiss me while he moves - slow, shallow rocks that keep him deep without jostling my belly. I hitch my top thigh over his hip. His hand finds the small of my back and holds me flush.
We stay like that for a long stretch of minutes, barely fucking, mostly existing inside the same heat, trading soft filthy praise between kisses.
“I used to think sex had to prove something,” he murmurs against my lips. “That if I fucked you hard enough you’d forgive the hours I missed.”
“And now?”
“Now I know the proving happens before we get naked. This part is just the celebration.”
“Then celebrate harder,” I whisper, and he smiles and does, picking up the pace just enough to make my toes curl against his calf. Another smaller orgasm ripples through me - unexpected, sweet, almost shy - and he kisses the surprised sound out of my mouth like it’s treasure.
“Your turn,” I murmur when speech returns. “Flip me. Careful of the belly. Fuck me from behind so you can go as deep as you need.”
He helps me onto my hands and knees with ridiculous care, tucks a folded pillow under my hips for support, and slides into me again from the back with a rough sound that travels up both our spines.
One hand braces beside mine on the mattress.
The other spans my belly, protective and possessive at once.
His thrusts are deep and measured, not frantic - each one a full sentence in a conversation we are finally having with our bodies without panic editing the draft.
“How does it feel?” he pants, having learned not to ask if I’m okay.
“It feels like coming home after a year of airports.” I push back to meet every stroke. “Harder. I can take harder. She can take the motion.”
He gives me harder. The slap of skin mixes with the distant guitar and the hush of waves against the cove.
His fingers find my clit from the front, rubbing in time with his thrusts, and I laugh breathlessly into the pillow at how thoroughly he’s studied me since counseling taught him to pay attention.
“What’s funny down there?”
“You. Us. That we almost burned this down and somehow rebuilt a hotter version with better blueprints.”
“Don’t make me emotional while I’m balls-deep in my wife, Cass. I’ll cry and it’ll ruin my rhythm.”
“Then make me come again instead of crying.”
He does - relentless circles, deeper thrusts, mouth open and wet against my shoulder blade until I shake apart again, sobbing his name into cotton.
Only then does he let himself go, burying to the root, flooding me with a broken Italian curse and my name braided together like rope. We stay joined while his cock twitches through the aftershocks, his palm still spanning our daughter between his heat and my skin.
When he finally pulls out, slick and careful, he cleans us both with a warm damp cloth from the tiny bathroom, then crawls back into bed and gathers me against his chest with the same reverence he showed my belly on the tile.
The windows stay open. The sea keeps talking in its old language. My body feels used in the best possible way - chosen, deliberate, unafraid of morning.