Chapter 8 #3
Belle reached up, put one hand flat against his chest, and walked him backward against the wall with a single, unhurried push — then kissed him with the quiet, direct confidence of a woman who had spent the entire evening deciding and had now decided.
Gary kissed her back, hands finding her waist, and they stood like that for a moment — the warmth of the apartment, Marv's slow breathing from the floor, the faint hum of the neighborhood outside.
Then she pulled back just far enough to look at him.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," Gary said.
She smiled and kissed him again, less quietly this time.
He walked her to the bedroom with his hands still on her waist, and she turned in the dim light of the room and reached for the hem of his shirt, pulling it over his head with the unhurried intent of a woman who had been patient long enough.
Gary returned the favor — finding the buttons of her shirt one at a time, deliberate, watching her face as he did it.
She let him look, chin tilted up slightly, entirely comfortable in a way that had nothing to do with performance.
He bent to kiss her jaw, her throat, the soft skin below her collarbone while his hands moved to her back and found the clasp of her bra.
She exhaled against his hair as he freed her; he drew back just enough to take in the sight of her — the light from the window making everything warm and unhurried — before putting his mouth where his hands had been.
Belle's fingers came up into his hair, tightening slightly when he circled his tongue over one nipple, then the other, her breathing going shallow and uneven. He kept going, unhurried, until her grip tightened enough to constitute a message.
He walked her back to the bed and laid her down, following her onto the mattress, kissing down her stomach while his hands found the waistband of her jeans and worked them open.
She lifted her hips to help him pull them free; he took his time on the way back up — mouth tracing the inside of her knee, the inside of her thigh, until she made a sound that had no ambiguity in it, her hips rolled forward.
He settled between her thighs and put his mouth on her properly, one hand pressed low on her stomach, stayed there — slow at first, reading the small shifts of her breathing, the subtle movement of her hips, then faster as those signals became less subtle.
Belle's fingers found his hair again. Her back curved.
The sound she made when she came was quiet and then not quiet; he stayed with her through all of it until the shaking stopped.
He kissed his way back up her body while she was still catching her breath. She reached for him with both hands — impatient now, the careful composure of the evening fully gone — and pulled him up and into her in one motion, both of them going still at the contact.
"Oh," Belle said quietly, to nobody in particular.
He started to move.
She matched his rhythm immediately, legs wrapping around him, hands running down his back with a specificity that suggested she knew exactly what she was doing and had decided to do it thoroughly.
He kept it slow and deep, watching her face in the low light, the small furrow between her brows when something landed exactly right.
"More," she said, not loud, just sure.
He gave her more — harder, the headboard finding the wall in a rhythm that Marv, from the living room, demonstrably slept through.
Belle's nails found his back. Her breathing climbed.
She said his name once, sharply, then again differently, then she was pulling him in tight and shaking through it, her whole body involved in the process.
Gary followed close behind — a few more strokes and the whole evening caught up with him at once, releasing in a long shudder that he buried against her shoulder.
They lay tangled together afterward in the warm dark of the room, both breathing hard, neither moving for a minute.
Belle stared at the ceiling. "Well," she said.
"Yeah," Gary agreed.
She turned her head to look at him with the expression of a woman who has surprised herself and is deciding what to do about it. Then she laughed softly — the real one, the one that had been appearing all evening in the moments when she forgot to manage it.
"I should go," she said, without moving.
"You don't have to."
She was quiet for a moment. "No," she said finally. "I think I probably do."
She got up and found her clothes in the dark with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had made this decision cleanly and was seeing it through. Gary watched from the bed. At the door she paused and looked back at him.
"First day of class," she said. "How do you think it went?"
Gary considered the question honestly.
"Better than expected," he said.
She smiled — full and unguarded, the version she'd been rationing all evening — and pulled the door closed behind her.
From the living room, the unmistakable sound of Marv rearranging himself confirmed that he had, as Gary suspected, been awake for most of this and had simply decided it wasn't his business.
Gary lay back and looked at the ceiling.
Texas, he thought, was going to be considerably more complicated than he'd planned.
He fell asleep before he could decide if that was a problem.