3. Fran #3
“Fuck.” He drops his forehead to mine. He’s shaking.
I’m shaking. He’s so deep I can feel him in my throat, stretching me, filling me so completely it’s just this side of too much, and I love it, I love it, I hook my ankles at the small of his back and take the rest of him.
“You feel - Fran, you feel like - I can’t-”
“You can.” I kiss him, taste myself on his mouth, filthy and perfect. “You are. Move. I want you to fuck me like you’ve been thinking about it. Don’t be careful. I didn’t come down here for careful.”
He moves.
The socially awkward man disappears. What’s left is this, hips snapping, hands gripping my ass hard enough to bruise, the wet filthy sound of him driving into me on his own workbench.
Sawdust on my thighs. My dress bunched around my waist. His mouth at my throat again, open, telling me things between thrusts like the filter’s been ripped clean out of him.
“You. This. Your cunt around me - fuck, you’re tight, you’re taking it so well, look at you, spread out on my bench like you belong here-”
“Logan-”
“I’ve wanted to ruin you for months. Wanted my mouth on you. Wanted you dripping on my floor. Wanted-” He hits a spot that makes me cry out and he files it away, craftsman, does it again, harder. “There, that’s it. Come on, give it to me. I want to feel you come on my cock.”
I am saying his name like a problem I can’t solve.
I’m saying yes and harder and don’t stop and things that would get me thrown out of church.
He fucks me like he builds, thorough, relentless, adjusting the angle when my breath catches, one hand dropping between us to rub my clit with that same callused thumb, and I come a second time with my teeth in his shoulder and my nails in his back, clenching around him so hard he swears like he’s been shot.
He doesn’t stop. He fucks me through it, slower now, deep, filthy grind, mouth on my collarbone, and when I go limp and laughing and oversensitive he gathers me up easily, one arm hooking under my knees, and carries me, still inside me, Jesus Christ, the three steps to the old couch shoved against the wall that I am now certain exists for exactly this purpose.
We hit the cushions in a tangle. He gets his jeans the rest of the way off.
I get the dress over my head and then we’re naked, finally, skin to skin, and I have a second to look at all of him, the ink, the muscle, the dark hair on his chest, the wet shine of my come on his cock, before he hooks my knee up and slides back into me with a groan that sounds like relief.
This round is slower, meaner somehow. He has leverage now, and he uses it.
One hand braced by my head, the other gripping my thigh, he fucks me into the couch like he’s got something to prove and also like he’s worshipping, and I am loud, I don’t care, the workshop can hear it, the wood can hear it.
I drag my nails down his back. I tell him he’s huge, that I can feel him everywhere, that if he stops I’ll kill him.
He tells me I’m perfect, that my pussy’s gripping him like it doesn’t want to let go, that he’s been jerking off thinking about this and it was never this good, never, Fran, fuck, Fran-
I come a third time with my face in his throat and his name in my mouth. He follows me over with a broken sound, hips stuttering, spilling into me in hot pulses I can feel, and then he collapses half on top of me, huge and shaking and mine, for this hour, for this dark.
We breathe.
Sawdust on my thighs. His come leaking out of me onto the couch. His heartbeat slamming against my chest. In the corner of the shop, past his shoulder, I glimpse a large piece standing covered with a drop cloth, turned to face the wall. Something he’s working on. Something he doesn’t want seen.
I don’t ask.
Afterward, after the workbench and the couch and the mess of us, I lie with my head on his chest and listen to his heartbeat slow. His fingers trail up and down my spine, idle, wondering. I am boneless. I am wrecked. I have sawdust in places sawdust has no business being.
“That was…” I trail off, not sure how to finish. Filthy and perfect and a terrible idea, and the best thing that’s happened to me in years.
“Yeah.” His voice is a rumble under my ear. “It was.”
I trace my fingers over the ink on his forearm, a geometric pattern that turns out to be wood grain, stylized and abstract. “How long have you wanted to do that?”
“Since the courthouse.” He says it easily, like it’s nothing, and my heart stutters.
“You were wearing that blue dress, and you looked like you wanted to murder everyone in the room, and I thought-” He stops, laughs quietly.
“I thought, she’s not going to make this easy, and that’s probably the most attractive thing about her. ”
“You thought I was attractive because I looked angry?”
“I thought you were attractive because you looked real.” His hand strokes down my back, slow and warm, then lower, shameless, cupping my ass like he’s allowed now.
He is. “Everyone else was performing. You were just… there. Pissed off and honest about it.” A pause. Dry. “Also the dress. I’m not a saint.”
“You’re not a saint at all. Saints don’t eat pussy on a workbench.”
He makes a sound that’s half groan, half laugh, and I feel him twitch against my hip, interested, insane. “Don’t say it like that. I’ll get hard again and I think you might actually kill me.”
“What a way to go.”
I lift my head to look at him. In the low light of the workshop, with his hair messed up and his mouth still reddened and his eyes soft with something that might be satisfaction or might be something deeper, he looks younger.
More open. More like the man I’ve been glimpsing in pieces and less like the stranger I married.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I say, and I’m not sure if I’m warning him or reminding myself. “The deal is still the deal. Two years, and then-”
“I know.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. His fingers linger at my jaw. “I’m not asking for anything to change.”
“Good.” I settle back against his chest. “Because I don’t do complicated.”
“This is already complicated.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” I close my eyes, letting myself enjoy the warmth of him, the solid weight of his body under mine, the ache between my legs that’s going to make tomorrow interesting.
“We’re married. We’re allowed to do this.
It doesn’t have to mean anything more than two people who are attracted to each other acting on it. ”
He’s quiet for a long moment. Then: “Is that what you want? For it not to mean anything?”
The honest answer is no. The honest answer is that I’m already in over my head, that every night we spend talking in the kitchen and every morning I wake up alone has been slowly, inexorably pulling me toward something I can’t control.
The honest answer is that I’m terrified of how much I want this to mean something, because wanting things is dangerous, and wanting things from Logan Davis feels like the most dangerous thing of all.
“I don’t know what I want,” I say instead. “But I know what I can handle. And I can handle this.”
His hand stills on my back. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.” He resumes his slow stroking. “We’ll do it your way.”
I fall asleep there, on the workshop couch, with sawdust in my hair and his come drying on my thighs and his heartbeat under my ear and words rising in my throat that I refuse to let out.
I think I’m falling in love with you, I want to say.
I think I’ve been falling since the courthouse, and I don’t know how to stop.
I don’t say it. Because I already know what happens in the morning.
***
I wake to cold light and an empty bed.
For a moment I’m disoriented, the bedroom, the unfamiliar angle of the ceiling, the deep sweet ache between my legs.
Then it all comes flooding back: the workshop, his mouth, the workbench, the way he said because you’re you like it was the simplest truth in the world.
He must have carried me up. I don’t remember.
I’m still in yesterday’s dress, wrinkled, inside-out at one strap, smelling like sex and maple.
His side of the bed is made. Hospital corners. Like he was never in it.
On the nightstand, a note.
I pick it up with hands that aren’t quite steady.
Early meeting. Had to go. - L
That’s it. Blocky handwriting. No last night was amazing. No we should talk. No I can still taste you. Just early meeting and had to go, like I’m a reminder on a calendar he’s already forgotten about.
I fold the note carefully, tuck it into my pocket, and walk to the shower to get the sawdust out of my hair.
The night man doesn’t survive the sunrise. I’m learning that now.
I just wish the lesson didn’t hurt so much.