Epilogue #3
I kiss my way back up her body while she’s still shaking. Kiss her mouth so she can taste herself. Settle into the cradle of her thighs with my cock nudging against her entrance, and wait.
“Yes,” she says, reading the question in my face. “Yes. In me. Slow.”
I push in slow.
The heat of her. The wet give. The way her body opens for me like it was built for this and nothing else. I sink to the hilt and stay there, braced on my forearms, forehead against hers, just feeling. Her legs wrap around my waist. Her hand finds my face.
“Hi,” she whispers.
“Hi.” I smile against her mouth. “Still processing.”
“Process inside me. Move.”
I move. Long, deep, unhurried strokes that make the headboard tap softly against the wall in a rhythm as old as we are. No slamming. No urgency. Just the wet slide of my cock into my wife, the soft sounds she makes on every thrust, the way her nails skate down my back without digging in.
Halfway through I roll us - careful of her stomach, always careful now - so she’s astride me, my hands on her hips, her palms braced on my chest. She seats herself deeper with a sigh that I feel in my teeth, and then she starts to ride me the way she does when she wants control: slow circles, then longer lifts, the drag of her cunt along my cock so devastating I have to grit my teeth and count backward from twenty in Italian to keep from finishing too soon.
“Don’t you dare,” she says, reading my face. “I’m not done with you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” I sit up so we’re chest to chest, her in my lap, and wrap my arms around her while she grinds down. The new angle makes her gasp. “Take what you need. Use me. I’m yours.”
She uses me. Beautifully. Selfishly. Her forehead against mine, her breath syncing with the roll of her hips, the wet sound of our bodies loud in the quiet room.
I talk to her while she fucks herself on my cock - quiet, filthy, affectionate, the particular dialect of a marriage that’s survived enough to afford softness.
“You feel perfect. This cunt was made for me. Look at how you take me - every inch, so fucking wet, dripping down onto the sheets we’re going to have to explain to no one because it’s our house and our bed and our life.
” I hitch her thigh higher, change the angle, watch her mouth fall open.
“There. That’s the spot. I can feel you clench when I hit it. Do it again for me.”
She clenches. I groan. She smiles, wicked and soft at once.
“I love you,” I tell her, because the filthy and the holy belong in the same breath tonight. “I love you pregnant. I love you in my shirts. I love you mocking me about push-ups. I love fucking you slow in the dark while our son sleeps down the hall and our daughter or son grows under my hand.”
“You don’t know it’s a daughter.”
“I don’t care what it is. I’ll learn every constellation for this one too.” I reach between us and rub her clit with my thumb, soft circles timed to my thrusts. “Come again. One more. Let me feel you fall apart while I’m deep in you. Let me have it.”
“Giovanni - I’m-”
“I know. I’ve got you. Come on, amore. Give it to me.”
She comes with a quiet cry, pulsing around my cock, and the feel of her tipping over pulls me with her - I bury myself deep and spill inside her with a groan I muffle against her neck, holding her through it, my hand splayed over her stomach the whole time.
We shake together. Settle together. Stay joined until our breathing slows and the nightlight-blue under Gio’s door feels like the only other light in the world.
I ease out of her carefully and gather her against my chest, pulling the covers up over both of us. She curls into me the way she always does now - no walls, no careful distance, just Cielo, warm and spent and mine. Her hand finds her stomach. Mine covers it.
Not dramatically. Not with grand gestures or desperate passion. Just gently, carefully, the way you touch something precious that you’re not afraid of losing anymore.
And afterward, with her curled against me in the dark, her hand resting on her stomach where our second child is just beginning, I let myself feel something I never thought I’d feel.
Complete.
The man who spent five years searching is finally home, surrounded on every side by the only thing he ever truly wanted.
A family. A wife who chose him. A son who thinks he makes the best crespelle. And now, impossibly, wonderfully, another child on the way.
I close my eyes and let sleep pull me under, and my last thought before I drift off is this:
I wouldn’t wish those years on anyone - not the loneliness, not the searching, not the grief that nearly broke me. But what waits on the other side is worth more than I ever knew to hope for.
This family. This home. This life I almost lost and somehow, impossibly, got to keep.
Home.
THE END