28. Pietro #3
I don’t follow her yet. I fuck her through it, slowing just enough to keep her shaking, then I pull out - she makes a sound of protest that does filthy things to my pride - and I take a second just to look at her.
Spread on the bunk. Dress hiked. Thighs trembling.
My come isn’t in her yet but she’s already a mess, and the knowledge that I did that, that she let me, that she *planned* this, sits warm and possessive in my chest.
“Pietro,” she warns. “If you are having a poetic moment right now I will…”
“I’m having a filthy moment. Closely related.
” I roll us carefully so she’s on top, straddling me in the narrow bunk, dress still around her waist, hair wild from the wind and from this.
The boat dips; she steadies herself with a hand on my chest. “Your turn to work. Ride me. Show me what that planning was for.”
“You’re impossible.”
“You’re wetter than the bay. Get on with it.”
She sinks back down onto me with a broken moan and starts to move - rolling her hips in a rhythm that makes the bunk complain and my hands find her waist like they belong there.
I thrust up to meet her. She braces on my chest. The sight of her above me, sun-flushed and filthy and free, is going to live in my head until I die.
“That’s it - fuck - just like that…”
“I know,” she pants. “I fucking know. I’ve had all day to think about this.”
“Show-off.”
“You fucking love this.”
“I do. God, I do.” I sit up enough to get my mouth on her breast through the sundress, then shove the fabric aside and suck her nipple hard enough to make her clench around me. “Come again. One more. I want to feel it before I lose my mind.”
She does - smaller, sharper, laughing through it - and the squeeze of her cunt around my cock is the last coherent thing I register before I follow her over with a sound that is not dignified in the slightest, spilling deep inside her while the boat rocks us through it like the sea itself is in on the joke.
We collapse in a sweaty, laughing heap. Her dress is still bunched around her waist. My shorts are nowhere to be found. There’s come on her thighs and a ridiculous smile on her face and I think, absurdly, that I have never been happier in my entire life.
I press lazy kisses along her collarbone. She traces the scar on my ribs with one fingertip. Outside, the light is starting to go gold. My heartbeat is still hammering. Hers matches it, syncopated against my chest.
“That,” she says eventually, voice ruined in the best way, “was not subtle.”
“You planned the no-underwear. You don’t get to lecture me about subtlety.”
“Fair.” She laughs, soft. “Piper is going to know the second she sees us.”
“Piper already knew. That wink could have powered a small city.”
“True.”
I card my fingers through her wind-tangled hair and feel something settle in me that has been restless for years - a bone-deep certainty that this, right here, is the life I almost threw away and somehow got back.
The boat. The bay. The woman in my arms who chose me with her eyes open and then chose me again with nothing under her dress.
“We should probably find your shorts,” she murmurs eventually.
“In a minute.”
“The marina…”
“Can wait.” I tuck her against my chest. “Everything can wait.”
We don’t talk much, after.
We lie tangled together in the cabin’s narrow bed, her head on my chest, my hand tracing idle patterns on her shoulder. The boat rocks gently beneath us, and through the small window I can see the sky beginning to deepen toward evening, the blue giving way to gold.
“I love you,” I say, because I can. Because I want to say it as often as possible, to make up for all the years I didn’t.
“I know.” She presses a kiss to my chest. “I love you too.”
“Even when I was terrible?”
“Even then. Though I loved you less when you were terrible.”
“Fair.”
She laughs softly, and the sound vibrates against my skin. “This is nice. This whole day. The boat, the kids, this.” She gestures vaguely at our current state of undress. “All of it.”
“We should do it more often.”
“The boat?”
“All of it.”
She props herself up on one elbow, looking down at me. “You mean that?”
“I mean everything I say to you now.” I reach up and tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “No more saying things I don’t mean. No more hiding behind work or letting other people speak for me. Just… this. Us. Honest.”
“Honest,” she repeats, testing the word. “I like that.”
“Good. Because I have something I want to ask you, and I need to be honest about it.”
Her expression shifts - curiosity, maybe, or the faint wariness of someone who’s learned to brace for unexpected turns. “What is it?”
“Not now.” I smile at her confusion. “Soon. But not now. Now I just want to lie here with you and watch the sun go down.”
“You’re being mysterious.”
“Am I?”
“You are. It’s unlike you.”
“Maybe I’m becoming a man of mystery in my old age.”
“You’re thirty-six.”
“Ancient. Decrepit. Full of secrets.”
She laughs and settles back against my chest, and we lie there as the light changes around us, as the boat rocks us gently, as the evening unfolds in shades of gold and rose.
I watch her later, when she goes up on deck to look at the sunset. She stands at the rail with her back to me, silhouetted against the sky, and I feel something crystallize in my chest - a certainty I’ve been building toward for months without quite realizing it.
I know exactly what I’m going to do.