Chapter 3 #3
He kissed her slowly this time — nothing like the door, nothing like the bar. This was different. Deliberate. His hands traced the line of her shoulders, her spine, the curve of her lower back. She made a sound against his mouth that was somewhere between a sigh and an instruction.
He walked her back to the bed and laid her down, following her onto the mattress, his mouth finding her jaw, her throat, the soft skin below her collarbone.
Her fingers threaded into his hair as he kissed across her chest, taking one nipple into his mouth, working it slowly until her back curved off the bed, her grip on his hair tightening into something more urgent.
"Gary—"
He took his time anyway.
His mouth continued downward, tracing her ribs, the flat of her stomach, the jut of her hip.
Sarah shifted beneath him, restless, her breathing going uneven.
By the time he settled between her thighs and put his mouth on her, one hand splayed across her stomach to keep her grounded, she was already wound tight.
He stayed there, patient and precise, reading every catch of her breath, shift of her hips until her thighs clamped around his head and she came apart with a sound she immediately tried to muffle with the back of her hand.
Gary kissed his way back up the length of her body while she was still shaking.
She pulled him up by the shoulders, impatient now, reaching between them to close her hand around him — already hard, had been for a while — and stroked him with a slow deliberateness that made his jaw tighten.
He let her have the moment, watched her face as she did it, the satisfied expression of a woman who liked the effect she was having.
Then she tugged him forward and he pushed inside her in one long, unhurried stroke.
They both went still.
She was warm and tight around him. The stillness lasted long enough for both of them to feel the weight of it — the particular, specific pleasure of two people who fit together unexpectedly well and are both noticing it at the same time.
"Okay," Sarah said quietly, to the ceiling or to him or to nobody in particular.
He started to move.
Slow at first, deep and rolling, his forehead dropping to hers while her hands found his lower back and pulled him into her.
The light from the window lay across them both, catching the lines of her face, the arch of her neck as she tipped her head back.
Gary found a rhythm and held it, watching the way her breath changed with each shift of his hips, reading what she needed, giving it to her — deeper, then slower, then harder when she said his name in a way that left no ambiguity about what she was asking for.
He drove into her harder. Her nails found his back.
"There," she breathed. "Right there—"
He stayed exactly where he was and gave her everything she asked for, steady and relentless, until her hands fisted in the sheets, she came the second time with her whole body, shaking through it, clenching around him in long, rhythmic waves that pulled a rough sound from somewhere in his chest.
He kept moving through it, slower now, drawing it out while she caught her breath.
Then Sarah hooked her leg around him, shifted her weight, rolled him onto his back with a decisiveness that caught him just off-balance enough to work. She settled over him, planted both palms on his chest, sank back down with the unhurried confidence of a woman retaking the situation.
She moved in slow, deep circles at first — grinding rather than bouncing, hips rolling in a rhythm that seemed designed specifically to undo him.
Gary's hands went to her waist, not to direct, just to hold on.
Her head tipped back. Her hair fell loose around her shoulders.
In the light from the window she looked like someone who had spent a long time being unhappy, had, tonight, set it down entirely.
She picked up the pace gradually, the circles becoming something more urgent.
Gary thrust up to meet her — one hand sliding from her waist to where they were joined, thumb finding her clit and pressing in rhythm with her movement, which made her gasp, lose the beat for half a second before she found it again, faster.
"I'm going to—" she started, and didn't finish the sentence, because she didn't need to.
He felt her go — the full-body shudder, the way she clamped down around him, the broken sound she made that she muffled against his shoulder when she collapsed forward.
Gary wrapped both arms around her, drove up into her hard, twice, let go — his own release rolling through him in long, shuddering waves while she shook above him.
They stayed locked together afterward, both breathing hard, neither moving.
Eventually Sarah pushed herself up and looked at him in the dark.
"I needed that," she said, in a tone that wasn't performing anything.
"Good night to be new in town," Gary said.
She laughed softly, low and genuine, dropped her head back to his chest.
Outside, the campus was quiet. Through the wall, from somewhere in the living room, came the long, resonant exhale of a hundred-and-eighty-five-pound mastiff in a deep, entirely unbothered sleep.