16. One Time
Chapter sixteen
One Time
NELLIE
Eleven minutes from the town green to my front porch, and Owen Peterson spends every one of them taking me apart with his thumb.
That's all it is. His hand on my thigh where my dress rode up, his thumb drawing slow circles on bare skin.
He's not even looking at me. He's got his elbow propped on the door, watching the fence posts go by, breathing slow and easy while I strangle the steering wheel.
I'm still humming from the bandstand and he knows it.
I run the stop sign at Cedar.
"Nobody at Cedar," I say before he can.
"Didn't say a word." The circles widen. Slower. "Drive faster."
The porch light at 1287 burns yellow in the dark. I kill the engine and the quiet rushes in, crickets and my own pulse, and for one second neither of us moves.
Then I'm out of the car. Around the hood. He meets me at the fender and I don't know which of us reaches first.
His mouth is nothing like the kiss on the green. That one was for the town. This one is for me, deep and starved, his hand fisting in my hair, walking me backward up my own porch steps like he's memorized them.
I fumble the keys. His body cages me against the door from behind, his mouth at my neck, and I feel exactly what this night has done to him pressed against me.
"Four weeks," he says against my ear, low and rough. "That sponge bath. The supply closet. Tonight you stood on my boot in this dress and put your arms around my neck in front of God and everybody." His teeth graze my earlobe. "Open the door, Nellie."
The key finds the lock. We fall through.
His boot catches the doorframe with a bang and I start to laugh and he swallows it, turns me, presses me into the hallway wall with his good leg between mine.
Then he goes still. Pulls back far enough to see my face in the dark.
"Tell me to stop and I stop. Now, later, middle of it. One word."
"If you stop," I say, "I will end you."
"Thank God."
The zipper of my dress gives under his fingers. He drags it off my shoulders slow, watching it fall, and then he reaches past me and turns on the hall lamp.
"Owen—"
"No." His eyes come back to me and the look in them dries my mouth. "I've pictured this in the dark for a month. I'm not doing it in the dark."
He looks. Takes his time about it, both hands settling at my waist, sliding up over every curve like he's claiming ground. I have never once in my life stood still for this. I stand still for it.
"Look at you." Barely a whisper. His thumb traces the lace at my hip. "I stitched my own arm shut once in a firehouse kitchen and it took less out of me than keeping my hands off you has."
His shirt comes off under my hands. The chain glints against his chest and I don't let myself look at it. Not tonight.
I go for his belt and he catches my wrists.
"Bed," he says. "I fall over in this hallway, you'll never let me live it out."
We make the bedroom shedding everything but the boot. He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls me down over him and neither of us can wait.
He drags the head of his cock through the slick heat of me, once, twice, teeth gritted like it costs him, and then I sink down and take him and the stretch of it whites out my vision.
He's big. I knew he'd be big, I bathed the man, but knowing it and taking him are two different educations, and a sound tears out of my throat I've never made in my life.
Thick and deep and pulsing, and my body grips him like it's been keeping this space open for weeks.
"There." His voice breaks in half. Head back, throat working, every muscle in his chest standing out under my palms. "God. You're so tight. So— don't move. Give me a second or this ends embarrassing."
For one breath we hold still. Full. Shaking with it. I clench around him just to be mean and he says my name like a curse.
Then his hands close hard on my hips and he moves me, lifts me and brings me down, sets a pace with nothing polite in it.
Every drop punches the air out of me. I ride him with my thighs burning and my head thrown back, soaked and loud and past caring, and he sits up, wraps an arm around my waist, gets his mouth on my breast and pulls until I sob.
The chain slides hot between our chests.
The headboard knocks the wall in rhythm.
I don't care. I don't care about one single thing outside this bed.
"Harder," I hear myself beg.
He growls it back against my skin and gives it to me.
Fingers digging in deep enough to leave prints I'll find in the mirror tomorrow, driving up to meet me every time I come down, so deep I feel him everywhere, hitting a place inside me that makes sparks climb my spine.
The sounds coming out of him are ruining me.
Low and wrecked and mine. Every one of them mine.
"Feel that?" His hand splays low on my belly, thumb sliding down to my clit, circling slow, a filthy counterpoint to the pace of his hips. "Four weeks I've been half out of my mind."
No fumbling. No apology. He moves me like he knows me and the terrible thing is he does.
"Eyes on me." His hand slides up my spine, into my hair, tips my face down to his. "I waited too long for you to hide now."
I keep my eyes on his. That's my mistake.
Because he watches me the whole way, watches every wall I own come down, and when I clamp down and break apart it's with his name in my mouth and his gaze holding mine like a hand.
He gets three more strokes before it takes him too, hips stuttering up hard, my name grinding out of him through his teeth, and I feel every pulse of it.
After, we lie sideways across the wrecked bed, breathing like we ran here.
"Okay," I manage.
"No." He rolls, braces over me on his forearms, and there's a look on his face I've never seen. Unhurried. Certain. "That was four weeks of wanting you. Now I'm going to take my time."
"Owen, your leg—"
"My leg's got hardware. The rest of me is fine."
I'm not writing home about what he does on the way up. I couldn't. There aren't words for it I could say in daylight.
But it goes like this.
His mouth starts at my ankle and climbs.
The inside of my knee. The soft skin of my inner thigh, where he stops and sucks a mark into me, slow, deliberate, branding, and when I gasp he does it again an inch higher.
By the time his breath ghosts over my pussy I'm already trembling, already wet enough that I can feel it on my thighs.
He doesn't put his mouth where I need it. He kisses my hip instead. The other hip. The curve of my belly.
"Owen." It comes out ragged.
"Mm." His stubble drags across my thigh, rough velvet, and my whole body arches off the bed. "You washed every inch of me and called it clinical." His hands slide under me, big and sure, tilting my hips up to his mouth like an offering. "Lay there. My turn."
Then his tongue is on me and I stop being a person.
He takes me apart slow. Long, flat licks first, lazy, like he's got all night and intends to spend it.
Then his tongue finds my clit and everything in me pulls tight.
He circles it. Soft. Softer. Learning exactly what makes my thighs shake and then doing it until they do, until I'm dripping down his chin and he groans against me like I'm the one doing something to him.
When I grab for his hair and try to hurry him, he pins my wrists soft to the sheets without lifting his head.
"No, ma'am."
"Owen. Please."
"Say it again." The words vibrate straight through my clit and I nearly come from that alone. "Four weeks I've been dying to hear you say please."
"Please. Please, plea—"
He gives me his whole mouth then, tongue working my clit hard and steady, two fingers sliding into me and curling, and I break so hard I lose the ceiling.
My heel hooks over his shoulder. His name comes out of me in pieces.
He doesn't stop, works me through every last shudder with his tongue going gentle, and when I finally go boneless against the sheets, he presses one more kiss to the inside of my thigh like he's signing his work.
My fingers find the scar on his shoulder blade when he moves back up my body. The shiny patch I noticed weeks ago and never asked about.
"Rookie year," he says against my throat. "Flashover drill. I zigged."
"You were supposed to zag."
"Story of my life." Then he's inside me again, slow this time, deep, and every story I've ever known leaves my head.
This time there's no hurry in him at all. Long and deliberate, his forehead dropped to mine, my name low in his chest every time like it's the whole sentence. Not baby. Not honey. Nellie, Nellie, like a man saying grace.
"I've got you." His hand laces through mine against the pillow. "I've had you since the stitches. You know that."
I do know it. That's what breaks me. I come apart the second time with tears sliding into my hair, and I will deny them until the day I die, and he kisses every one of them like he's counting, and when he finally lets go it's with my name and his whole body shaking.
After. The real after.
Three a.m. by the nightstand clock. My ear on his chest, his heartbeat slow under it, his fingers moving through my hair like he's got nowhere to be for the rest of his life. The ceiling fan turns. The crickets have quit.
Two runners, lying perfectly still.
"This was one time," I whisper.
His fingers don't stop. "Sure."
Neither of us moves. Not a muscle. His arm stays heavy across my back, my leg stays thrown over his, and the lie stays on the pillow between us, and we let it lie there.
I fall asleep to his heartbeat. I don't remember deciding to.
***
I wake up reaching for him.
That's the first thing. Before I'm conscious, my hand is moving across the sheet expecting warm skin. That alone should scare me to death.
The sheets are cold.
I sit up. His boot is gone from the floor. The bedroom door stands open and the house holds that gray stillness that means dawn, and there's a smell of coffee nobody made.
The kitchen is empty. The pot is cold. He got a mug down and never filled it.
Then I see him through the window over the sink.
He's on the back porch in the gray light, sitting on the top step with his back to me, my flannel throw off the couch wrapped around his bare shoulders. Too small for him. Any other morning, that picture would make me laugh.
I'm reaching for the door when I see his hands.
The chain. The one he wears under everything, the one that lay against my cheek all night. It's off his neck and wrapped through his fist, and there's a ring on it. A plain gold band. A woman's.
His fist is pressed hard against his mouth.
His shoulders are shaking.
Owen Peterson, who carried a grown man out of a fire with a torn-open arm. Who took a ten-foot fall onto flagstone without one sound. Sitting on my porch steps at dawn with his wife's ring pressed to his lips, coming apart where he thinks nobody can see.
My hand is on the doorknob. Every instinct I own says go to him.
I don't.
Because I know what I'm looking at. He didn't sneak out of my bed to leave me. He snuck out to apologize to her.
I back away one silent step at a time. Down the hall. Into the bathroom. I run the water loud so he'll hear it and have time to put himself back together, because that's the kindest thing I know how to do. Then I grip the sink and look at the woman in the mirror with his beard burn on her neck.
One time. It has to be one time.
Because I will not compete with a ghost.
And worse, so much worse, the thing I can never say out loud: I understand her. I'd haunt him