19. Solenne #2
“Neither can I.” He reaches for the thermos. “Here.”
The hot chocolate is exactly what I need. I drink half of it before I realize how tightly I’m holding the cup.
“Thank you,” I say. “For this.”
“For that terrible idea?”
“For bringing me here. For the hot chocolate. For remembering that I’d need something warm.”
He sets down his cup and turns to face me. In the moonlight, with his hair wet and his face unguarded, he looks like someone I’m meeting for the first time. Someone I might fall in love with if I didn’t already know him.
“You’ve got chocolate on your lip,” he says.
“You’re welcome to do something about it.”
He smiles, then searches my face. I touch his cheek before he can turn the moment into another question.
I set my cup down beside his. I draw the dry blanket around both of us. His shoulder settles against mine.
“I’m asking you now,” I say.
He goes still.
“I’m choosing you.” I keep my hand against his face. “I want this, Valentin. I want you.”
For a moment he doesn’t move. Then he reaches for me, pulling me close, and his mouth finds mine.
The kiss is nothing like the one in the parking structure. That was desperate, angry, born of too much pain held too long. This is something else. This is coming home.
I wrap my arms around his neck and let myself fall into it. His hands move to my waist, my back, pulling me closer still. The blankets tangle around us as we shift, and I can feel his heartbeat against my chest, fast and uneven.
“Solenne,” he says against my mouth.
“Don’t stop.”
He doesn’t.
The kiss deepens until I taste salt and chocolate and the year we almost lost. His mouth is open, hungry, careful only in how he holds my face like something precious he’s finally allowed to ruin properly.
I make a sound against him and he answers with a low curse in Italian, then English, then just my name like a prayer he means to keep.
“Solenne. Fuck. Come here.”
He stands, drawing me up with him. The dry blanket falls, towels slip. Cool night air hits damp skin and I shiver; he pulls me flush, cock hard against my stomach through nothing but cold and want.
We stumble toward the waterline without breaking the kiss for long, feet finding wet sand and smooth rock.
Knee-deep, the sea bites. I gasp. He laughs once against my throat, dark and fond.
“Still freezing,” I manage.
“I’ll warm you.” His hands slide under my thighs and lift. “Legs around me. That’s it. Good girl.”
I lock my ankles at his back.
The water holds some of my weight; he holds the rest, one arm banded under my ass, the other in my wet hair tipping my mouth to his.
We make out like the cove is private and the moon is a witness we don’t mind. Tongues, teeth, the slow grind of him against my bare cunt until I’m whining into his mouth.
“Valentin…”
“I know.” He rolls his hips, the thick head of his cock sliding through my folds in the cold water, not entering yet. “Listen to you, already begging. So wet for me I can feel it even here.”
“Stop teasing.”
“No.” Soft dominance, absolute. “I waited to have you back again. I’m going to feel every second of this.” He kisses me filthy, then softer, then filthy again. “Tell me what you want.”
“You. Inside. Please.”
“Ask properly.”
“Fuck me,” I breathe, forehead to his. “I choose you. I want your cock. Now.”
“Cazzo.” He notches himself and pushes in slow, inch by thick inch, while the sea laps our hips. The stretch pulls a broken sound out of me. He swallows it with his mouth and keeps going until he’s buried deep, holding still so I can shake around him.
“Good. So fucking good. Taking me like you were made for it.” His voice scrapes. “My wife. Sei mia. Say it.”
“I’m yours.” It comes out wrecked and true. “Sei… mia. Don’t stop.”
He fucks me standing in the shallows, controlled thrusts that still punch soft cries out of me. Water splashes. My nails dig into his shoulders. He praises me between curses: beautiful, perfect, so tight, look how you open for me.
When my thigh starts to tremble he growls and walks us backward out of the water without pulling free, each step driving him deeper until we’re clear of the surf.
He drops to his knees on the spread dry blanket and lays me down beneath him, still inside, still kissing like he can’t stand an inch of air between us.
Rocks hard under the fabric; I don’t care.
He braces on one forearm and starts to move in earnest, long deep strokes that drag against that place that makes me arch and whine.
“There, fuck! There…”
“I feel you clenching.” He hitches my knee higher, opens me wider, snaps his hips. “Come on my cock, Solenne. Give it to me. Be loud. No one here but us.”
“Valentin… ah…”
“That’s it. My brilliant girl. Taking every inch like a gift.” He thumbs my clit in tight circles timed to his thrusts. “Come. Now.”
The orgasm hits hard and clean, pleasure rolling through cold-stung skin until I’m shaking and gasping his name. He fucks me through it without mercy or apology, praising every flutter, then pulls out only long enough to flip me onto my hands and knees on the blanket.
“One more,” he says, palm warm on the small of my back. “Want to watch you take me like this. Ass up. That’s my girl.”
He sinks back into me from behind in one smooth thrust. I shove back to meet him, filthy with it, healed and hungry at once. His hand fists lightly in my damp hair; the other grips my hip hard enough to bruise tomorrow.
“Listen to that cunt,” he groans. “Wet for me. Mine. Fuck, Solenne…”
“Harder,” I beg, and he gives it, dominant rhythm slapping skin, the cove swallowing the sounds we make. When he reaches around to rub my clit again I’m gone almost immediately, second climax tearing through me while I swear and push back onto him.
“Coming! I’m…”
“I know. I’ve got you. Come.” He follows with a broken curse of my name, burying himself deep as he spills into me in hot pulses, forehead pressed between my shoulder blades, arm locked around my waist like he’ll never let the year take me again.
We stay like that until our breathing slows.
Waves keep their patient rhythm. He presses a kiss to my spine, gentler than the fucking, and eases us down onto our sides under the second blanket, still half tangled, still joined until he softens and slips free.
“Okay?” he whispers.
“More than okay.” My voice is ruined in the best way. “Come here.”
We clean up with the damp towels as best we can, laughing once at the impracticality of sex on Sicilian rocks in March. Then we pull on dry clothes with clumsy hands. My sweater ends up inside out. I notice the seam at my wrist and decide it can stay that way.
By the time we settle beneath the blankets again, we have pulled on our dry clothes. His arm rests around my shoulders, and I lean into him while the waves wash against the rocks.
“I forgot,” I say.
“Forgot what?”
“What this felt like. Being with you when it’s easy.” I turn my head to look at him. “The last year, there was always something in the way. Even when we were getting along, there was this space between us. Like we were both waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“I felt it too.”
“But just now, there wasn’t any space. It was just us.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his thumb tracing circles on my shoulder. “I never stopped loving you. Even when I was doing everything wrong. Even when I couldn’t show it.”
“I know.”
“I kept thinking you knew,” he says. “As if that excused asking you to wait for everything else.”
“I did know. That was part of why it hurt.”
His arm tightens around me for a moment, then relaxes. He lets me finish.
“I don’t wonder whether you’re listening anymore. I used to rehearse things before I said them, trying to find a version you wouldn’t dismiss. I stopped doing that. I don’t even know when.”
I push myself up on one elbow so I can look at him properly. His face in the moonlight is serious, open, waiting.