4. Ariah #2
He laughs against my lips - that short, surprised sound again - and then he’s standing, lifting me with him, and I’m wrapping my legs around his waist as he carries me down the hall toward our bedroom.
We bump into the wall once. He curses in Italian, something low and filthy that I only half-catch. I bite his lower lip and he groans like I’ve punched him, forehead dropping to mine for half a second before he starts walking again.
“Careful,” I whisper, because the twins are down the hall and the house is too quiet, but my hands are already in his hair and my mouth is already on his throat, tasting salt and cologne and the long day he carried home.
“I’m being careful.” He isn’t. His grip on my thighs is bruising. “I’m being very fucking careful.”
The bedroom door closes with his heel.
He sets me on my feet and we undress each other with the clumsy urgency of people who know exactly what they want and have been denied it too long.
I work his shirt buttons open one by one - he’s faster than I am, impatient - and when I get stuck on the third he makes a frustrated sound and finishes the job himself, peeling the fabric off his shoulders.
The body underneath is still the one I know by heart. Dark hair on his chest. The line of muscle that still exists despite the desk hours. The scar on his ribs from a sailing accident before we met, pale against his olive skin in the low light from the hallway.
I put my mouth on that scar. He shudders hard enough that I feel it in my teeth.
“Ariah…”
“Don’t talk.” I say it softly, almost kindly, dragging my lips higher, over his sternum, to the hollow of his throat. “Just - don’t. Not tonight.”
Because if we talk, I’ll remember everything we’re not saying. If we talk, the distance will come rushing back in - the missed dinners, the cold mornings, the way I’ve started sleeping on my side of the bed like I’m already alone.
Tonight I only want the language our bodies still speak fluently.
He understands. Or at least he obeys.
His hands find the hem of my tank top and lift, and I raise my arms so he can pull it free. The cool air of the bedroom hits my skin. His palms follow, warm and rough at the edges from whatever he’s been gripping all day - pens, steering wheels, the arms of chairs in rooms I never see.
“You’re cold,” he murmurs.
“Then warm me up.”
He walks me backward until my thighs hit the mattress. I sit. He kneels. The sight of Pietro Grimaldi on his knees in our bedroom, still in his pants, looking up at me like I’m something worth kneeling for - it does something dangerous to the soft place under my ribs.
He peels my lounge pants down my legs slowly, pressing his mouth to the inside of my knee, my thigh, higher. His breath is hot through the thin cotton of my underwear. I thread my fingers into his hair just to have something to hold.
“Still so fucking wet for me,” he murmurs, and the crude edge of it - quiet, filthy, meant only for me - sends a jolt straight through my stomach.
He presses two fingers against the damp fabric, rubbing in a slow circle that makes my hips twitch.
“Look at you. Married six years and you still soak through your underwear the second I put my mouth near this cunt.”
“Pietro…”
“Don’t ‘Pietro’ me. Not when you’re like this.” He looks up, eyes dark, mouth curved. “Tell me you want it.”
“I want it.”
“Want what?”
I swallow. The quiet of the house presses in. Somewhere a pipe ticks. “Your mouth. On me. Now.”
“There she is.” He hooks his fingers in the waistband and pulls, and then his mouth is on me - no preamble, no teasing, just the flat of his tongue dragging through my cunt like he’s been thinking about this all day in boardrooms. I clap a hand over my own mouth to muffle the sound I make.
The twins are down the hall. The house is too big and too quiet and suddenly every gasp feels dangerous.
He doesn’t care about dangerous. He spreads me open with his thumbs and sucks on my clit with the focused attention he usually reserves for contracts, and I have to bite the heel of my hand to stay quiet.
He works me in long, deliberate strokes, then shorter ones, then the pointed tip of his tongue circling until my thighs start to shake.
“Fuck - Pietro - I’m…”
“I know.” His voice is muffled, wrecked. “I’ve got you. Come on my tongue. Let me have it.”
I come apart faster than I want to admit - shocking, sharp, my thighs clamping around his head as I shake. He doesn’t stop. He works me through it until I’m whimpering, oversensitive, tugging at his hair.
“Enough - fuck - enough…”
He pulls back, mouth slick, eyes black in the low light. “Not even close.”
He crawls up my body and kisses me so I can taste myself on his tongue - salt and want and something that used to be us every week and somehow became rare enough to feel stolen. I reach between us and get my hand around his cock through his pants. He’s hard, thick, straining against the fabric.
I fumble his belt open, shove his pants and briefs down together, and wrap my fist around him properly.
Hard. Thick. Familiar. The weight of him in my hand still makes my mouth go dry.
I stroke him once, twice, watching his face go tight. A bead of wetness gathers at the tip; I thumb it across the head and he swears softly against my cheek.
“Still so fucking hard for me,” I whisper back, throwing his words at him, and his laugh breaks into a groan.
“Always. Christ, Ariah. Always for you.”
“Even when you’re never here?”
The words slip out before I can catch them. His eyes open. Something complicated moves through them - guilt, hunger, the particular ache of a man who knows he’s failing and still wants.
“Especially then,” he says quietly. “You have no idea how many nights I sat in that office thinking about this. About you. About the way you sound when I’m inside you.”
“Then stop thinking about it,” I tell him, guiding him to where I need him, “and do it.”
He pushes in slow - one long wet slide that steals the air from both of us.
Inch by inch. The stretch of him, the heat, the way my body remembers how to open for him even when my mind has spent months learning how to close.
When he’s seated deep he drops his forehead to mine and just breathes, his arms braced on either side of my head, trembling slightly.
“Move,” I tell him.
“Give me a second. You feel…” He swallows. “You feel like home. Like fucking home.”
The words hurt as much as they soothe.
Home. As if home hasn’t been this cold house and this cold bed and the sound of a car leaving before dawn.
I wrap my legs around him and roll my hips anyway, because wanting him has never been the problem, and he starts to move - deep, grinding thrusts that drag against every place inside me that still remembers him.
The headboard taps the wall. Softly at first. Then harder. I dig my nails into his back and he makes a sound that’s half pleasure, half apology.
“Sorry…” he pants. “The - wall…”
“I don’t care about the wall. Harder.”
“Yeah?”
“Harder. I want to feel it tomorrow.” I want the ache of him when I wake up alone. I want proof this happened. “Don’t be gentle. Not tonight.”