4. Ariah #3
Something dark and pleased flickers across his face. He hooks one of my knees over his shoulder and drives into me, and the new angle punches a broken sound out of my throat. Deeper. Meaner. The kind of fucking that leaves fingerprints on your memory.
His hand covers my mouth - gentle, not silencing me so much as holding the sound between us - and I lick his palm, filthy and deliberate, tasting salt and skin. His rhythm stutters.
“Fucking hell, Ariah…”
“Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”
“Wouldn’t. Couldn’t.” He fucks me in earnest now, the careful man from the kitchen gone, replaced by someone hungrier. “This body. This fucking body. I’ve been dying without it.”
“Then take it,” I gasp against his palm. “Take what’s yours.”
He does. The orgasm builds low and mean, a pressure that gathers behind my navel and spreads.
His free hand finds my clit - rubbing in tight, filthy circles timed to his thrusts - and I tip over with a muffled cry, shaking apart under him while he keeps moving through it, relentless, dragging the pleasure out until it borders on too much.
He doesn’t stop. He pulls out while I’m still trembling, and the sudden emptiness makes me whimper. Then he’s flipping me onto my stomach with hands that know exactly how to move me, dragging my hips up, pressing my cheek into the pillow.
“Okay?” he asks, and the check-in - quiet, necessary - is the most married thing about this whole night.
“Okay. In me. Now.”
He pushes back into me from behind with a groan that sounds like prayer and blasphemy mixed. The angle is devastating. I fist the sheets. His hand slides under me to find my clit again, already swollen and oversensitive, and his mouth finds the nape of my neck, open and hot.
“This cunt,” he mutters against my skin, quiet and wrecked. “This perfect fucking cunt. Mine. Still mine.”
“Yours,” I gasp, and I hate how true it still feels. Hate that six years of slow erasure haven’t managed to unwrite this one fact. “God - Pietro - right there…”
“Here?” He adjusts, hits a place that makes my vision spark white at the edges. “Yeah. There. Feel that. Feel how deep I am.”
“I feel it - fuck - I feel everything…”
He fucks me like that until I’m shaking again, until the pillow is damp under my cheek and my thighs are trembling with the effort of holding myself up. His rhythm goes ragged. His fingers on my clit go desperate.
“Come with me,” he orders, soft and broken. “I need - Ariah - come with me…”
“I’m - I’m close…”
“Then let go. I’ve got you. Always fucking got you.”
He comes with a low, broken sound, burying himself deep, pulsing inside me in hot floods while his fingers keep working my clit until I follow him over again - softer this time, almost weeping with it, my face pressed into the pillow and his name a wrecked whisper against the cotton.
We collapse. The sheets are a wreck. My thighs are sticky with him. His heartbeat thunders against my back before he rolls us carefully onto our sides, still half-joined, his arm locked around my waist like he’s afraid I’ll slip away even now.
I can feel him softening inside me. I can feel the wet mess of us between my legs. I can feel the night pressing in at the windows, and somewhere under the pleasure a small cold voice is already counting the hours until morning.
He presses a kiss to my shoulder. Then another. His breathing slows against my neck.
I don’t move. I don’t want to break whatever this is before it finishes breaking itself.
Afterward, with his arm locked around my waist and his heartbeat slowing against my back, I tell myself this is enough. This is still us. We’re still in here somewhere, underneath the years and the silence and the slow erosion of everything we built.
“I love you,” I whisper, but he’s already asleep.
* * *
I wake to a cold bed and pale gray light filtering through the curtains.
His side of the mattress is empty, the sheets already cool to the touch. The pillow still holds the indent of his head, proof that he was here, that last night was real and not some elaborate dream I constructed out of loneliness and wishful thinking.
But he’s gone.
I lie there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, listening to the silence of the house. Then I hear it - the distant sound of a car engine turning over, the crunch of tires on the drive, the front door already closed and locked behind him.
Gone before the sun. Gone before I woke. Gone without a goodbye or a note or any acknowledgment that last night happened at all.
I press my hand flat against the cold sheets where he should be, and I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything. He has early meetings. The launch is consuming everything. He promised he’d be there for the anniversary, and Pietro keeps his promises.
Doesn’t he?
The cold is worse today, my throat raw and my head stuffed with cotton. I should rest. I should take care of myself the way he told me to, the way I never seem to have time for.
Instead, I get up and start planning the anniversary dinner, because it’s the only thing I can control in a life that feels increasingly like it belongs to someone else.