Chapter 25
MARY CATHERINE
He kissed me like he was angry about it.
Not at me—I understood that immediately, the way you understood things about people you'd let close.
He was angry at something else, something enormous, and I was the only solid thing in his reach and he was holding on.
I felt it in the quality of it—the desperation underneath, the barely contained force of a man who had been through something in the hours since I'd last seen him and had no other language left for it.
I had a speech prepared.
I had been building it since I drove away from this studio, adding to it through the tea and the kitchen and the tickets and the packing, a careful architecture of everything I needed to say about trust and timing and what it meant that my father's business had been raided on the second day of knowing him.
It was a good speech. It covered the relevant ground.
I forgot every word of it.
His mouth was thorough and his hands were in my hair and the anger underneath wasn't the kind that hurt—it was the kind that meant something, the kind that said I needed to get back to you and didn't know any other way to say it.
I kissed him back with everything I had because I had been sitting at my parents' kitchen table for hours with a stone in my pocket and now the stone was gone and there was only this.
We hit the sofa sideways. He caught us before it became a problem, one hand finding the back of it. We broke apart laughing—both of us, at the same moment, at the gracelessness of it.
"You didn't call," I said. “I was mad, but—”
"I know." His forehead dropped to mine. "I got into something. I'll tell you all of it." A pause. "Not right now."
"Not right now," I agreed.
He pulled back enough to look at me. Whatever he found there, it made the tension in his jaw ease slightly. His hand came up to my face and his thumb traced my cheekbone. I turned into it without deciding to, the way a plant turned toward light.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"Better than I was an hour ago."
"Your family?"
"Working on it." I held his gaze. "There are things to deal with.
Later. Tonight—" I paused, thinking of the airport, the flight, Daniel waiting—I would tell him, but not this second, not while his hand was on my face and we were still breathing hard from the kissing.
"Later, I need to take care of some things. But right now, I'm here."
He studied me. The eyes that didn't miss anything.
"Okay," he said. "Right now, you're here."
"Right now, I'm here," I confirmed. "And you look like you've been through something terrible and haven't told anyone about it."
"Yeah." Something moved through his face that was too big and too complicated to name. "That's about right."
I put both hands on his face and looked at him steadily. "Later," I said. "You'll tell me later. Right now—"
He kissed me again and the rest of the sentence went nowhere.
This kiss was different. The desperation still there, but with something else settling into it—an intention, a direction.
His hands moved with the certainty that I had come to understand was just how he did things, with no wasted motion.
I pulled at his shirt because I had been thinking about his chest and I was not going to pretend otherwise.
He helped. Shirt gone, and then mine. I got my hands on him properly for the first time in daylight and took my time about it.
"You're staring," he said.
"I'm appreciating," I said. "There's a difference."
He made a sound that was almost a laugh and pulled me up the length of him. Then, his mouth was at my throat and moving down. I stopped being able to make distinctions about anything.
We found a rhythm this time that was less urgent than the first time. It was slower, the kind of slow that came from having established something—from knowing each other's geography well enough to linger.
He worked his way down my body with his mouth and I let him, my fingers in his hair, the studio quiet around us.
His lips traced the curve of my breasts, tongue circling my nipples until they tightened into aching peaks, then lower, over the soft plane of my stomach, until his breath ghosted hot against the sensitive skin of my inner thighs.
Then, he did something I was not expecting.
He stopped. Looked up at me from somewhere around my stomach with an expression that contained equal parts intent and something close to mischief. It was the first time I'd seen anything like mischief in that face. It was devastating.
"Roll over," he said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Trust me."
"Those are the two most dangerous words you've said to me," I told him. "And you once talked me out of hitchhiking."
A hearty laugh surprised out of him—and then he moved and I moved and we rearranged ourselves and I understood what he was doing. I felt heat flood through me from my scalp to my heels.
We ended up stretched along the narrow sofa, the light filtering through the windows and painting our skin in soft gold.
He lay on his back, and I turned to face the opposite direction, straddling his chest before sliding down so that my thighs framed his head.
My breasts pressed against the hard ridges of his abdomen, my mouth level with the thick, flushed length of his cock, already heavy and straining for me.
At the same time, his strong hands gripped my hips and guided me back until his face was buried between my thighs, his breath teasing my slick folds.
"This," I said, from my end of the arrangement, "is going to require—"
"Yeah," he said. "Stop talking."
So, I stopped talking.
What followed was—there was no word for it that didn't feel inadequate. We took each other apart this way, unhurried, learning and giving and taking in equal measure.
I lowered my mouth onto him, tasting the warm, velvet-smooth skin stretched tight over steel, swirling my tongue around the swollen head before taking him deeper, savoring the salty tang of his arousal and the way he throbbed against my tongue.
At the same moment, his mouth claimed me—lips closing around my clit with devastating gentleness, sucking softly while his tongue delved between my folds, licking long and slow through my wetness.
The position felt deliciously intimate and filthy all at once: our bodies aligned head to toe, every shiver and moan shared in the closest possible way.
His hands kneaded the soft flesh of my ass, spreading me wider so he could devour me more thoroughly, his tongue fucking into me in lazy strokes while I hollowed my cheeks around his cock, bobbing with tender reverence.
Every time one of us made a sound, the other absorbed it and gave it back different, better. The wet sounds of mouths and tongues filled the room, mingling with our ragged breathing.
Pleasure coiled tight and low in my belly, building in slow, luxurious waves.
He sucked my clit harder, two fingers sliding deep inside me, curling just right, and I shattered first—my orgasm crashing over me in deep, pulsing waves that made my thighs tremble around his head.
I moaned around his cock, the vibration pulling a guttural groan from him that vibrated straight through my core.
He didn't stop, licking me through every aftershock until I was gasping, oversensitive and aching for more.
I felt him laugh, too, against me, which sent me somewhere entirely new. The joy and raw pleasure of it undid me again, a second, gentler orgasm rolling through me as I kept sucking him, stroking the base of his shaft with my hand while my tongue worshipped every inch.
By the time we came back up for air, we were both undone, flushed and breathless and tangled on the narrow sofa.
He pulled me up against him the way he had before—like that was just where I went, the natural resting place—and I settled into the warmth of him and listened to his heart beat slow for a moment.
But the hunger between us hadn't faded. His hands roamed my back, then lower, gripping my hips as he shifted us again.
With tender strength, he guided me onto my back beneath him on the sofa, my legs parting to cradle his hips.
He looked down at me, eyes dark with need and something softer, deeper.
"I need to be inside you," he murmured, voice rough.
I nodded, pulling him down for a kiss as he positioned himself.
The broad head of his cock nudged my entrance, slick from my orgasms and his mouth, then he pushed in slowly, inch by thick inch, stretching me open in the most exquisite way.
We both groaned at the perfect fit. He filled me completely, bottoming out with a roll of his hips that made my back arch off the cushions.
He moved with that same focused certainty—deep, unhurried strokes that built heat between us like a slow-burning fire.
The sofa creaked softly beneath us, our bodies moving together in perfect sync.
He angled his hips to hit that sensitive spot inside me with every thrust, one hand cupping my breast, thumb brushing my nipple, the other braced beside my head.
Pleasure mounted again, sharper this time, coiling tighter with each powerful glide of his cock.
"Come for me again," he whispered against my lips, and I did—clenching around him in rhythmic pulses, my third orgasm pulling a broken cry from my throat.
The feel of me coming around him shattered his control.
His thrusts grew deeper, more insistent, until he followed me over the edge with a low groan, spilling hot inside me as we clung to each other.
"Okay," I said eventually, boneless and glowing in the aftermath.
"Yeah," he said.
"That was—"
"Yeah."
I laughed. "Very articulate."
"I'm doing my best." His hand was moving slowly on my bare skin. "You broke me. I've got limited resources."
He slid out of me, gently, as we repositioned, then I turned my face against his chest and smiled at it. The studio held us in its quiet—the turpentine and the old wood and the canvases against the walls, everything I'd made in five years of private work witness to this. I found I didn't mind.
His heartbeat had gone slow and steady under my ear.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
He was quiet for a moment. "I've never—" He stopped. Started again. "I've been through a lot of places and a lot of situations and I have never once wanted to stop the situation and just—stay in it. Stay in it and let it be what it is." His hand stilled against my back. "I want to stay in this."
I lifted my head and looked at him. Natural light across his face. The jaw, the eyes, all of it.
"I want that, too," I said. "And I also need you to understand that I'm a person who has things. A life. Things I'm responsible for and people I love and—" I paused. "I'm not going to dissolve. I'm not going to become just this, just us, and nothing else. I'm not built that way."
"I know," he said. No hesitation.
"You can't say nobody else and also try to make me smaller," I said. "Those two things can't live together."
He looked at me steadily. "I know that, too.
" A beat. "I said nobody else because I meant it.
Not because I wanted you smaller. Because I didn't want to lose you to—" He stopped.
The jaw worked. "To something stupid. Something preventable.
Someone not paying attention to you the way you—" Another stop.
"The way I what?"
"The way you deserve," he said. Like it cost him something.
I held that for a moment.
"Nobody's ever said that to me," I said quietly.
"Then everyone's been doing it wrong."
I looked at him—at this man I had known for two days who had somehow become the axis of a life I was still building the shape of—and felt something settle in my chest that I didn't have a precise word for.
Not quite love, not yet, not in the form I understood love to take.
But the precursor to it. The ground it grew in.
The feeling of recognizing someone as necessary before you'd fully worked out why.
"I'm developing feelings for you," I said. Blunt. It was the only honest way to say it.
Something moved across his face—relief, and something fiercer underneath it.
"Yeah," he said. "Same."
"That's terrifying," I said.
"Completely," he agreed.
"We just met.”
"I know."
"I was supposed to be on a plane to Dublin today."
"I know that, too."
"None of this makes any logical sense."
"Mary Catherine." He said my name the way he always said it—all four syllables, deliberate, full weight.
"I know. I know all of that. And I'm telling you—" His hand came back up to my face.
"I don't care. I am not a man who does this.
I am not a man who feels this. And I am sitting here feeling it, anyway. "
I looked at him for a long time.