19. Beau
Beau
Iwake up and she’s still here.
That’s the first thing my brain does — not the time, not the shoulder, not practice.
Just: she’s still here. Sloane Beckett is in my bed in the grey morning light, on her side, facing away from me, and I lie still for a second and look at the line of her bare back and the platinum blonde hair across my pillow and I think: that happened. That was real. She’s still here.
I don’t move, because moving might end it. I’ve learned that about good things — you hold still and let them last.
My shoulder reminds me it exists when I shift, a deep ache where twenty-two drove it into the glass, where I told her last night I didn’t care about it and meant it.
I still don’t care about it. There’s a girl in my bed who let me see her not managing, once, for a whole night, and the shoulder can file a complaint with someone who’s listening.
She stirs. Comes awake the way she does everything, all at once and aware, and I feel the second she remembers where she is — a small stillness, a recalibration — and then she rolls onto her back and looks at me, and her hair’s a mess and her eyes are soft with sleep and she is, without a single thing done to her face, the best thing I’ve ever woken up to.
“Morning,” I say.
“You’re staring again.”
“Still no no-staring clause.”
“I’m going to draft one.” But there’s no heat in it, and the corner of her mouth goes, and I lean over and kiss her, slow, morning-soft, and she lets me, her hand coming up to my jaw, and for a second it’s easy. It’s so easy.
Then she pulls back half an inch, and something crosses her face I don’t catch in time, and she says, “I need a shower.”
“Yeah.” I drag my thumb along her hip. “You do.”
“That was an insult.”
“It was an invitation.”
She pretends to think about it, which is how I know I've already won.
She lets me pull her up out of the warm wreck of the sheets, and we go down the hall to the bathroom, her hand in mine, neither of us bothering with clothes we're about to not need.
It's the one nice thing about this house — the bathroom my room shares, redone before we moved in, a walk-in shower big enough for two with no door to fight with, just a half-wall of glass gone foggy at the edges and a wide tiled floor that slopes to a drain in the center.
Room to move. Room for a guy my size and then some.
I reach in and crank the handle and we wait the few seconds it takes the old pipes to think about it, her leaning against the counter watching me, me watching her watch me, until the water finally turns over and goes hot.
The water runs hot and the bathroom fills with steam and I get her under the spray and against the tile and there's nothing careful about it now, none of last night's slow first-time reverence — this is morning and she's wet and warm and laughing when I crowd her against the wall, the real laugh, and I swallow it out of her mouth
“The guys—” she starts.
“Have practice. They’re dead to the world. We’ve got time.” I get my mouth on her throat, down, over the slick skin of her collarbone. “Stop tracking the house.”
“I always track the—”
“I know you do.” I drop to my knees on the wet tile, shoulder be damned, and look up at her through the steam. “Stop. Just for ten minutes. Let me.”
And she looks down at me with her hair plastered to her shoulders and the water running between us and whatever argument she had dies in her throat, and she nods. I hook her leg over my shoulder and put my mouth on her pussy and she stops tracking the house.
She tastes like the shower and underneath it like her, and I take my time even though there isn’t much of it, learning the same things I learned last night and finding they still work.
I start slow — broad, flat strokes of my tongue, no hurry, until her hips start to chase it — and then I give her what she’s chasing, my tongue on her clit, working it the way she likes, while I slide two fingers into her and curl them up.
The sound she makes goes straight through me.
Her hand fists in my wet hair and her thigh tightens over my shoulder and I hold her open with my thumb and stay right there, exactly there, because there is nothing in my life I’m better at than reading what a body wants a half-second before it knows, and her body is telling me everything in the only language I’ve ever been completely fluent in.
I feel her start to go — the tremble building in her thigh, the way her breath stops — and I don’t change a thing, don’t get greedy, just keep the rhythm until it breaks over her.
She comes with my name bitten off in her mouth and her thigh shaking against my ear and her hand pulling my hair hard enough to sting, and I stay with her through all of it, gentling, until she’s pushing weakly at my head, too much, too much.
I come up her body grinning. “Still got it.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“You came in about ninety seconds, Beckett, I’m allowed to be a little insufferable.”
“That was circumstantial—”
I kiss the rest of the sentence out of her, push her back against the tile, and her hand finds my cock between us and wraps around it, slow, deliberate, and it’s my turn for the words to stop.
She strokes me with the water sluicing between us, her thumb dragging over the head, watching my face the whole time like she’s the one reading bodies now, and she’s good at it.
She’s good at everything she decides to be good at, and my forehead drops to hers.
“Sloane.” It comes out wrecked.
“Turnabout is fair play,” she says, against my mouth, and there’s the dry thing back even now, even wet and undone, and I have never wanted anyone the way I want this woman who can make me lose my mind and land a line about it in the same breath.
I get a hand under her thigh and lift and she wraps around me — and then I stop, because there's no foil packet in here, nothing within reach, and I'm not going to be the guy who doesn't ask.
“I don't have anything in here,” I say, against her jaw. “I'm clean — I get tested, every few weeks, the season makes you. And there's been no one since before the summer.” I pull back far enough to find her eyes through the steam, because this is a thing you say to a face. “Your call.”
“I'm on the pill.” She says it steady, holding my look. “And I believe you.” A beat, and then the dry thing, even now, even wrecked: “Don't make me regret it.”
“Wouldn't dream of it.”
And I line up and push into her against the wall, slow, all the way, the water hot on my back, and we both stop talking entirely — and it's different like this, nothing between us, and I feel her register it the same second I do, the catch in her breath that isn't only the stretch.
She's tight and slick around me and I have to stop, buried in her, forehead to the tile beside her head, just breathing, before I trust myself to move.
I shift my stance and look between us, watching the way my cock disappears inside her small body, only to come out slick with her arousal. Jesus.
“Look at you,” I manage. “Look at you taking me. Fuck.”
“Beau—”
“I know. I've got you.” I move then, slow at first, drawing almost all the way out and pushing back in just to feel her breath catch, then faster, harder, the tile at her back and the water and her legs locked around me and her nails dug into my good shoulder, and I say things I don't plan, filthy things, true things, that's it and you feel so fucking good and this perfect fucking cunt and you're going to come for me again, I can feel it.
I get a hand between us and find her clit and work it in time with my hips, and she does, clenching around me so hard I lose my own rhythm, a cry she doesn't try to swallow this time, and I follow her over a few strokes later with my face in her wet neck and her name in my mouth like it's the only word I've got left.
We stay there a minute, wrecked, the water going from hot to warm to a warning of cold, holding each other up.
“We’re going to be late,” she says, into my shoulder.
“Worth it.”
“You have practice.”
“Extremely worth it.”
She huffs a laugh, and I feel it against my skin, and for one more second everything is exactly right.
Here’s the thing I notice in the shower and don’t think about until later, because I’m not built to think about things until later:
She goes quiet on the way out of it.
Not cold. Just — quiet. I’m reaching for towels and riding the dumbest happiest high of my life and she’s gotten still in a way that’s different from the still she was a minute ago.
When I hand her a towel, she takes it and wraps herself up fast, tight, like she’s covering something that isn’t her body, and there’s a beat where she’s looking at the middle distance and her face has gone somewhere I can’t follow.
“Hey.” I tip her chin up. “You good?”
“I’m good.” And she smiles, and it’s a real smile, mostly, but it arrives a half-second late, and her sentences are getting more grammatically perfect, which is a thing I’ve noticed she does, though I haven’t worked out yet what it means.
“I just need clothes. Mine are — my sweater’s downstairs on your couch and it’s a whole situation. ”
“I’ve got you.” I dig a clean hoodie out of the drawer, the grey Whitmore Hockey one, soft from a hundred washes, and hand it over. “Here. It’s warm.”
She pulls it on and it swallows her whole — comes down to mid-thigh, sleeves past her hands, the hem hiding everything — and she stands there in my sweatshirt with her wet hair and her bare legs and I have to physically stop myself from saying the thing in my chest, the thing I’ve been not-saying for weeks, because she’d run, and because it’s six in the morning, and because some things you hold.
She looks down at herself, swimming in it. “I look ridiculous.”
“You look—” like mine, my brain says, unhelpfully, a beat too late. “Warm. You look warm.”