27. Ask Me Again in Willowbend
Chapter twenty-seven
Ask Me Again in Willowbend
NELLIE
Owen Peterson is down on one knee on a motel carpet the color of dried mud, soot in his hairline, holding a picture of our baby instead of a ring.
And I can't say yes.
Not here. Not in room 6 of the Lakeview Motor Lodge with the ice machine rattling through the wall like it's got opinions.
"Ask me again in Willowbend," I say.
His face goes still. Careful. A man bracing for the door again.
"Home," I say.
That word lands on him like water on a burn. He hears it. He hears everything inside it, because his eyes go bright and his jaw works once and he says, rough, "Say that again."
"Home, Owen."
I pull him up off that carpet by both hands. He comes up wincing, hardware and all, and then his hands are in my hair and his mouth is on mine and I am done pretending I ever had a rule worth keeping.
The first time, four weeks ago, was a dam breaking.
This is a vow.
He walks me backward to the bed slow, like we've got all the time in the world, because for the first time we do. He peels the flannel off my shoulders and folds it over the chair. Folds it. I laugh through my tears.
"You're folding laundry right now."
"That shirt's been through a lot." His mouth finds my throat. "Show some respect."
I pull his shirt over his head and there's still smoke in the cotton, still soot in the creases of his knuckles, and I press my lips to the scar on his shoulder blade because I know its story now. I know all his stories now.
He shivers under my mouth. This big, unmovable man. Shivers.
"Nellie."
"Right here."
He undresses me like he's unwrapping something breakable, one button at a time, and I let him, and that's the part that undoes me.
Not the heat. The letting. Every inch of skin he uncovers, he kisses first. Collarbone.
Shoulder. The curve of my breast, where he slows down and takes his sweet time, tongue and teeth and that low hum in his chest, until I'm arching off the bed and gripping the quilt.
He gets my jeans off and kneels back on his heels and looks at me. All of me. Lamplight on, nothing hidden.
"You're staring," I whisper.
"Yes, ma'am." His eyes come up to mine, dark and sure. "Get used to it."
When I reach for his belt he catches my wrists, kisses each palm, and presses me back into that ugly motel quilt like it's silk.
"Owen—"
"No." He hooks his fingers in the last of my clothes and draws them down my legs slow, kissing the inside of my knee, the soft of my thigh, higher. "I ran two counties for this. I'm not rushing it."
Then his mouth is on me and I stop having opinions.
Soft. So soft I could cry from it. The warmth of his breath first, then the barest touch of his tongue, and every nerve I own gathers to that one inch of my body like it's the only place I've ever lived.
My hips lift on their own. Chasing.
His forearm settles across me, heavy and warm, pinning me easy to the mattress. Not stopping me. Keeping me. There's a difference, and my body knows it before my brain does, and it melts something low in my spine.
He takes his time like time belongs to him.
Slow. Slower. Each pass of his tongue draws the tension up my thighs, coils it tight behind my hip bones.
I hear myself whimper. He answers it. I feel his mouth curve against me when I say his name, feel the low rumble of his laugh travel straight through me, and I have to grab the sheets because that alone nearly ends me.
"Owen. Please."
"I know, baby." Spoken right against me, his voice a vibration I feel in my teeth. "I've got you."
He does.
His fingers slide into me, slow, curling, and the world narrows to that pressure, that impossible sweet ache, the wet heat of his mouth working me in a rhythm my hips learn without asking.
Everything in me pulls tight. Tighter. He holds me there, right on the edge, until I'm fisting his hair and saying his name like a threat and a prayer in the same breath.
Then his lips close around me and he hums.
I break.
It rolls through me in waves, my back bowing off the bed, my thighs shaking around his ears, his name splitting in half somewhere in my throat.
The ice machine outside can gossip all it wants.
I am past caring. I am past everything except his hands and his mouth and the way he groans against me like my falling apart is doing something to him too.
He doesn't stop.
He gentles. Long, soothing strokes that catch every aftershock and hold it, carry me down soft as a landing. My whole body is loose and ringing. I'm still trying to find my breath when I feel it start again. That slow build. His patience like a promise.
"Owen, I can't."
"You can." A kiss to the inside of my thigh. "Let me love you, Nellie."
So I do. I let him.
The second time is slower. Deeper. Less like breaking and more like dissolving, and when I come apart there are tears sliding into my hair and I couldn't tell you where the pleasure ends and the crying starts.
I don't want to know. He stays with me through all of it, murmuring things into my skin, my name, that he's here, that he's got me, until the shaking stops.
Then he starts up my body. Unhurried. A man with nowhere else on earth to be.
His lips at my hipbone. The flat of my stomach, soft as a prayer, and he lingers there, and neither of us says why. Between my breasts. Over my heart, which is hammering loud enough to give me away.
He looks up at me then, chin resting on my sternum, eyes dark and wrecked and certain.
"Hi," he says.
I laugh. Wet, shaky, ruined. "Hi yourself."
"Hi yourself."
I get his belt this time. He lets me. I push everything off his hips and he's heavy and hot in my hand, and I watch his whole face come undone at the firs. Forehead dropping to mine. A sound punching out of him that I want tattooed somewhere.
I push at his shoulder until he rolls, and I slide down and take him in my mouth, and Owen Peterson, who runs into burning buildings, makes a sound like a dying man and grabs the headboard.
"Nellie. Darlin'. God." His hand cradles the back of my head, not guiding, holding. Like I'm precious. "You're gonna finish this fight before it starts."
I take my time anyway. Learn the weight of him, the taste, the exact rhythm that makes his thighs go rigid and his breathing turn ragged.
When his hips start to move helplessly, when he groans my name like a warning, I let him go and crawl up his body slow, letting him feel every inch of me on the way.
"Then come here," I whisper against his mouth.
He rolls us. Settles into the cradle of my hips, braced on his forearms, and lines himself up, and stops. Looks at me. Really looks.
"Last chance to run, Greer."
Two days ago I did. Forty miles was as far as I got.
"Not going anywhere," I whisper, and wrap my legs around him and pull.
When he sinks into me, we both go still.
All the way still. Stretched, and full, and held, and home, and neither of us breathing.
He's shaking with the effort of not moving.
I feel him pulse inside me and clench around him on purpose, and he swears into my hair, and I laugh, and the laugh turns into a moan when he draws back and rolls home the first time. Deep. Unhurried. Devastating.
His thumb wipes my cheek and comes away wet. Neither of us says a word about it.
"I'm here," he says.
"I know."
"I'm staying."
"I know, Owen."
He moves. Slow and deep, no hurry in him anywhere, grinding against me at the bottom of every stroke until sparks scatter up my spine.
It's nothing like the hallway four weeks ago.
That was want. This is worship. He murmurs against my mouth while he rocks into me.
Pieces of sentences. Beautiful. Missed you.
Never again. I answer with my heels at the small of his back and my nails mapping every muscle I get to keep.
The headboard knocks the wall. We laugh into each other's mouths and don't slow down.
He shifts higher, changes the angle, and the new drag of him pulls a sound out of me I've never made in my life. He does it again. Again. Reading me like a monitor, adjusting to every gasp, relentless and patient at once.
"Look at me," he says, when I get close, when the coil in me winds tight and I start to turn my face into the pillow the way I always have with everyone, hiding the last of me. "Nellie. Look at me."
I look at him.
I let him see the whole way down.
I break with his name on my lips and my nails in his shoulders, clenching around him in waves, and it pulls him right over the edge behind me.
He buries himself deep and comes with a groan against my throat, hips jerking, saying my name like it's the only word he's got left, and then we're a tangle of shaking limbs and damp skin and his heart hammering against mine like it's trying to get in.
He doesn't roll away. He gathers me. Tucks my head under his chin, drags the blanket over us, presses his lips to my hair and keeps them there while our pulses come down together.
"Marry me," he mumbles into my hair.
"You already asked."
"Practicing. For Willowbend."
I laugh, and I feel him smile against my scalp, and something in my chest unlocks that's been bolted shut since I was seven years old and packing my own suitcase.
He slides down the bed and puts his mouth against the flat of my stomach.
"Hey, little one." His voice cracks clean in half. "I'm your dad."
I press my hand into his hair. He turns his cheek against my skin and stays there, one arm wrapped over my hips, holding both of us at once.
"I got here early."
We wake once in the deep of the night and reach for each other half asleep, slow and wordless, more comfort than fire, and fall back under still joined at every possible seam.
I fall asleep with both feet in the bed and his arm heavy across me, and for the first night in my whole life, I don't dream about leaving.
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