CHAPTER 13 #3
It is the deep slow steady fucking of a man who has been told he does not have to be careful and who is taking the permission like a man takes communion.
He pushes his cock fully into me; he pulls almost all the way out; he pushes in again; the bed rocks the smallest fraction.
The four-poster does not creak. The iron posts hold.
He kisses me at the freckle on every fourth stroke.
He says my surname into my hair once with the second hard stroke and then he does not say it again for a while; his speech has shut off. He fucks me.
The second orgasm builds the way the first did not.
The first was the surrender he coaxed out of me with his mouth.
The second is the build I make myself under the weight of him.
I bring my knees up at his hips; he changes the angle the half inch I need; the head of his cock drags across the front wall on every withdrawal.
My left hand is fisted in the sheet above my head.
My right hand is at the back of his neck. The cedar of the fire and the copper of his breath and the cool of the harbor through the glass — I am at the top of it. I am there.
I shout once.
"Vance."
Not Julian. The surname comes out of my mouth and not the first name because the first name is the thing I am keeping somewhere else for some later night I have not yet decided to be ready for; the surname is the name I chose this morning when I decided what I was choosing; the surname is the verdict.
Vance. The second orgasm runs through me long; I tighten around him; he holds inside me through it and does not finish.
He has held himself back the way a man holds a cup of water for a runner.
I am still pulsing around him when I push at his shoulder.
He understands instantly. He rolls. He pulls me up onto him and I am sitting astride him on the white linens with the firelight on my left hip and my right thigh.
I put my hands on his sternum. The undershirt is still on him.
I look down at him. The pale gray is back; the pupil is fractional black on the silver.
I rock my hips once. I find the place I want him.
I ride him at my pace.
I am slower than he was. I take him deep and I keep him there for one beat and then I lift off him and I sit back down and I take him deep again. The rhythm is mine. I watch his pupils widen on each downstroke. I watch the two streaks of silver at his right temple gleam in the firelight.
I run my fingertip down his sternum to where we are joined and back up; I let the fingertip rest at the small dip at the top of his sternum where the pulse — when he has fed — would beat. I am riding him for the slow rebuild of the second orgasm in his body, which I am claiming.
Ten minutes. The fire snaps once. I go faster. His hands are at my hipbones — not gripping, anchoring. His breath has caught. The cool of him is warming, the warmth of him is the warmth I put there with my mouth, the warmth of him is the proof I am the woman who did this.
"Quinn. " It comes out of him low. A request.
I give him three hard downward strokes. He comes inside me; his hips lift the smallest distance off the bed; he says my surname once, low; he holds my hipbones not hard. I sit on him through it. I feel him pulse inside me; I feel him gentle. He breathes.
I collapse forward onto his chest. He folds his arms around me. The cotton of the undershirt is warm now under my cheek; his sternum under it is the warm-marble that has just been given my pulse. We breathe. We do not speak. The fire snaps a second time.
I do not know how long we stay like that. Long enough for the room temperature to come back up the degree it lost. Long enough for the cedar in the wood to smolder down to its last bright hour. He moves his right hand to the small of my back; he holds it there.
I lift my head. I look at him. The pale gray pupils are calm again, the pupil-edge precise.
The hair at his right temple is firelit.
He looks at me back. He does not smile. He says nothing.
He puts his right palm at the side of my jaw and his thumb at the corner — at the freckle — and he holds the palm there for one beat.
"Bath," he says.
"Mm."
He sits up under me, my legs around his waist. He gathers me. He stands with me in his arms. He does not strain. He carries me across the bedroom to the velvet-lined door, through it, into the master bath.
The bath is Carrara marble, soft-lit, the heated floor warm against the soles of his feet — I can feel the warmth through where he is bare and where he is carrying me.
The cast-iron tub from the 1920s squats under the high window.
He sets me on the edge of the tub. He kneels at the foot of it. He runs the water hot.
He tests the temperature with the inside of his wrist — the inside of his right wrist, the wrist that is not the left wrist with the brand on it — and he adjusts.
He reaches for the small glass jar on the marble shelf and tips a measure into the water: olive oil and eucalyptus, the bath salts the cook keeps for him in case he wants them.
He has never wanted them before, I think.
He wants them now. The water turns slightly cloudy; the air goes green with the eucalyptus and gold with the oil.
He turns the tap off. He stands. He pulls the cotton undershirt off over his head in one motion.
It is the first time tonight I have seen his bare chest. The undershirt is on the marble vanity.
He has turned slightly — not deliberately, I think, just the way a man steps out of a shirt — and the inside of his left forearm is angled away from me toward the wall.
I see nothing on the forearm. I do not look.
He has kept the undershirt on for a reason; whatever the reason, it is not my night.
The cedar still in the air through the open door, the eucalyptus rising from the tub, the copper at his breath — the chapter's whole scent in the room with us.