Chapter 15 #3
He pushes in slowly, his eyes locked on mine, and the sound we both make is something between relief and anguish. The stretch of him filling me after months of emptiness, the heat, the fullness, the raw intimacy of his body inside mine, it overwhelms every sense I have.
"Dios mío." His forehead drops against mine and his arms are shaking with the effort of going slow. "You feel like you were made for me. After everything, you still feel like you were made for me."
I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him deeper. "Then stop being gentle and fuck me like you mean it."
Something snaps behind his eyes. The careful reverence dissolves and the man from the kitchen floor resurfaces, the one who pinned my wrists and talked dirty and fucked me like the world was ending.
He pulls back and drives into me hard enough to make the headboard crack against the wall. I cry out and he does it again, settling into a punishing rhythm that pushes me up the bed with every stroke, his hands gripping my hips, angling me so his cock hits the deepest part of me on every thrust.
"I love you," he says, and the words come out raw and ragged and stripped of any smoothness. He's not reciting but confessing. "I loved you in the farmhouse and I loved you in the safe house and I loved you every night in a city where nobody knew my name."
"I love you." I pull his face down to mine, foreheads touching, sharing breath. "I love you, and I haven't forgiven you, and I may never fully forgive you, and I love you anyway."
"Always," he says. He drives into me and I moan against his mouth.
He hooks my knee over his shoulder and the angle changes and my vision whites out.
He's hitting a spot inside me that sends electric shocks through my entire body, and I'm making sounds I can't control, raw and desperate and keening, sounds that would be embarrassing if I had any capacity left for embarrassment.
"That's it," he murmurs, his thumb finding my clit and working it in relentless circles. "Let me feel you. I want this pussy squeezing my cock when you come. I want to feel every second of it."
The orgasm hits like a wave crashing. I come around him in long shuddering contractions, my body arching off the bed, his name torn from my throat.
He follows me over the edge three strokes later, burying himself to the hilt and pulsing inside me, filling me with warmth while he groans my name, my real name, into the curve of my neck.
Afterward, we lie tangled together under the lavender sheets, and the rain falls softly against the window, and neither of us speaks for a long time because there is nothing to say that our bodies haven't already said.
We doze. We wake up wrapped around each other and make love again, slower this time, with the unhurried attention of people who finally believe there will be a next time.
He traces the lines of my body with his fingers like he's memorizing me by touch, and I let him, and when I come it's quiet and shuddering and so deep it feels like grief in reverse.
He makes us something to eat from what's in my kitchen, because he was the one who cooked, and we eat in bed with plates balanced on our laps, bread and cheese and sliced apples and the last of the coffee reheated in the microwave.
The domesticity of it is so ordinary, so impossibly normal, that I have to look at the tattoo on his forearm to remind myself that this is real and that we earned it.
The afternoon stretches into evening. We talk about small things, safe things, the kind of conversation two people have when the big things have already been said with their hands and their mouths and their bodies.
His construction crew. My immigration cases.
The cat, who has emerged from under the couch to investigate the stranger and is now curled at the foot of the bed, unimpressed.
He reaches across and takes my hand. I let him. And we lie like that, in the quiet houseboat on Lake Union, two people with new names and new lives and a shared history that no one in this city will ever know.
He falls asleep first. I watch his face go slack and open in a way I've never seen, the tension he carries like armor finally dissolving, and I ease out of the bed without waking him. I pull on his flannel, the one with the missing buttons, and pad barefoot through the houseboat to the back deck.
The sun is starting to set over the lake, turning the water copper and gold, and the houseboats along the dock rock gently in the evening wake from a passing sailboat. The air smells like pine and water and the last warmth of October. I sit on the deck chair and pull my knees up and call my mother.
She answers on the second ring. "Mija. I was just closing up the shop. How was your Saturday?"
"It was good, Mamá." I watch the light shift on the water, and through the window behind me I can see Mateo's shape under my lavender sheets, his arm stretched across the space where I was lying. "Listen. I have someone I want you to meet."