18. Sloane #2
That’s the part I’ll think about later, alone — the silence in my own head.
The reel that never stops, the surface-line-beneath-the-line-beneath-the-beneath, the constant managing commentary I’ve run since I was nine years old — it goes quiet.
He kisses down my body, slow, reverent, his stubble scraping the soft skin below my navel, and the only thing in my head is the want, clean and total, no analysis under it.
He kisses lower, and lower, and then his mouth is on my pussy and I arch off the bed with a sound I’ve never made for anyone.
He groans against me like the sound did something to him and settles in, unhurried, like he’s got all night and intends to use every minute of it, one hand flat and warm on my stomach holding me to the bed while he works me with his tongue, slow and deliberate, learning what makes me shake and then doing it again.
He drags the flat of his tongue up the length of me and circles my clit and I lose a fistful of his hair.
He’s good — of course he’s good, he’s good at everything with his body, the whole infuriating point of him — but it’s not the skill that undoes me.
It’s the attention. The way he reads me the same way I read rooms, catching every hitch of breath and tightening of muscle and adjusting, learning me in real time, the way you’d learn an opponent’s timing except there’s nothing to beat here, there’s just me, coming apart under the most focused attention anyone has ever paid me.
He slides two fingers into me while his mouth stays on my clit, curls them, finds the place that makes the room go white, and that’s it, that’s all I have.
When I come it’s with his name in my mouth and my thighs locked around his head and a sound I don’t recognize and don’t try to, because rule eight — do not, under any circumstances, forget that this is fake — is somewhere far below us on a couch under a melting bag of ice, and I have forgotten it completely, and I do not care.
He comes back up my body grinning, wrecked, pleased with himself in a way I’d mock if I had any composure left to mock with.
I pull him down and kiss myself off his mouth and reach between us and wrap my hand around his cock, and his grin breaks, his forehead dropping to mine, a long unsteady breath against my lips.
He’s hard and heavy in my hand and I stroke him slow, watching what it does to his face, and the sight of this enormous, controlled person coming undone because of my hand is the most powerful I have ever felt.
“Sloane—”
“I want you,” I say, and it’s the truest sentence I’ve said in years, and it comes out in a complete, controlled, certain shape even now, because some part of me will be precise on my deathbed. “I want all of it. I want all of you. Now.”
He reaches for the drawer and there’s a fumble and a foil packet and a low curse when his bad shoulder protests, and I laugh — the real one, into the dark, the one that gets all the way out — and he laughs too, foreheads together, and that’s the thing about it I won’t be ready for later: that it’s fun, that there’s laughter in it, that the most undone I’ve ever been is also the most at ease.
And then he’s pushing his cock into me, slow, careful, watching my face the whole time, and the laughter goes out of both of us and turns into something with no words in it at all.
He works in by degrees, letting me take him, letting me stretch around him because he’s bigger than anyone else I’ve ever been with.
Long, thick, and hard. And when he’s all the way in he stills, jaw tight with the effort of going slow, breathing like it costs him.
“Fuck,” he says, ragged, against my throat. “You feel — fuck, Sloane.”
I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper and watch his control fray at the edges.
“You’re going to be the end of me,” he says.
“Probably,” I say, and mean it in more ways than the one he’s talking about.
He moves, and I move with him, and we find it fast — the rhythm, the thing our bodies apparently already knew, deep and certain and building — and his good hand laces through mine and pins it to the pillow beside my head, and I let him, and the surrender of it is its own kind of climbing.
He fucks me slow and then not slow, deep, the headboard a quiet rhythm against the wall, and he whispers things into my skin that I’ll pretend later I don’t remember — true things, filthy things, I’ve wanted you so long and look at you taking me and this perfect fucking cunt and Sloane, Sloane, my name like he’s been saving it.
His good hand slides between us and finds my clit and works it in time with his hips, and I come apart a second time, clenching around him, and he follows right after with a groan torn out of him, his whole controlled body finally losing the control he wears like a uniform, spilling into me with my name once more against my throat.
After, the room is dark and warm and I’m wrecked in the best way, my head on his good shoulder, his hand tracing absent shapes on my bare back, and for a while neither of us says anything and the not-saying is, again, the most comfortable thing in the world.
“So,” he says eventually, and I can hear the grin. “That was definitely tier three.”
“That was so far past tier three the document doesn’t have a number for it.”
“We left the document on the couch.”
“We left the document in a different building, Beau. The document is at the bookshop. We are nowhere near the document.”
He laughs, low, and pulls me closer, and presses a kiss to the top of my head, easy, unthinking, the kind of kiss you give someone you’ve done this with a hundred times instead of once, and I let myself have it.
I let myself lie in the warm dark in the wreckage of every rule I wrote and have, for once, no commentary running underneath.
It lasts about an hour.
I wake before he does, the way I always wake first, and the room is grey with almost-morning and Beau is asleep on his stomach with his bad arm thrown over me and his face gone young and unguarded in a way it never is awake, and I lie very still and feel the thing arrive that I knew, somewhere, was always going to arrive.
The cold thread of it. The retreat.
Because here is what I did last night: I needed someone.
On purpose. With my eyes open. I reached for the thing I wanted instead of cataloging why I shouldn’t, and it was the best night of my life, and that is precisely the problem, because now I know what it feels like, and a person can survive never having had a thing far more easily than she can survive having had it and knowing it can be taken.
You really think a guy like that keeps a girl like you past Christmas.
I reach, in the grey light, out of pure habit, for the rule. For rule eight. For do not, under any circumstances, forget that this is fake — the sentence I wrote in pen specifically so this exact morning could never happen.
I forgot it last night. Completely. For hours.
The one rule that was only ever mine, the one I underlined harder than the others, and it didn’t just bend, it’s gone, it died somewhere on the stairs and I can’t find the pieces, and lying here in the best morning of my life with this beautiful sleeping boy’s arm heavy and warm across my back, I understand with the clarity I only ever get about disasters that I have done the one thing I swore I would never do.
I’ve started to need him.
And needing people, in my experience, in the entire evidence of my life, ends exactly one way.
Beau stirs, half-wakes, tightens his arm around me without opening his eyes, murmurs something that might be my name into the pillow, and settles back into sleep, trusting and unguarded and certain I’ll be there when he wakes.
I just lie there, in the warm and the wreckage, already — God help me, already — beginning to plan the exit I stopped cataloging weeks ago, the way I’ve planned every exit my whole life, because the only thing more frightening than being left is the part where you let yourself believe you won’t be.