Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
WORTH THE RISK
LOUISA
I’m pinned against the recording booth as my arms wrap around his neck and my hands knot in his hair.
While a million thoughts flood my head, the one that makes me laugh into his mouth, that has his eyes on mine in a way asking to be let in on the joke, “Thank god this thing is sturdy.” As he has my back pressed against the prefab wall.
He smiles into my kiss as his tongue curls against mine.
His full lips pulling, begging, for every taste he can get.
His kiss tastes like sour candy as he reaches under my thighs and hoists me into his arms. Stepping us away from one of the greatest gifts I’ve been given.
(The other might be what’s currently happening.) He carries me to my bedroom, kicking open the door that's been left ajar for months. (In more ways than one.)
Even in his arms I can feel how hard he is, how large, and I’m desperate for him.
I was honest to the air, I didn’t know this kind of wanting existed.
Our mouths are warring against each other for each pull of the other’s kiss. Trying to satisfy a craving that will be my undoing. As he breathes in my ear, I think this might just undo him, also.
He sets me on the bed, and takes a step back. An annoying, steadying step back.
“Say it again,” he commands.
I sit up on my elbows, on a bed I haven’t slept in since the man in front of me became my husband.
“Say what?” I ask, coyly. Knowing there are so many things I could say.
“Say it, so I can hear you.” His voice is gravel at best, with every word, more and more desire slips out.
“I—” His lips are begging to be pulled into a smile as he kicks off his shoes.
“Want you.” He unbuckles his belt and the button on his pants to step out of them.
“To fuck.” He pulls his shirt over his head, I think I hear a button hit the hardwood, but nothing could pull his attention from me.
“Me.”
And with the last word he steps to me, reaching under my skirt to pull off my underwear.
Not before grazing what’s waiting for him between my legs.
His chest is heaving and my legs twitch, betraying me completely, as his fingertips brush gently against me.
He grips them from the middle, the wetness now held in the palm of his hand as he pulls them down my legs, and tosses them to the side.
“Is this how wet you get for me?” he says, and he’s expecting an answer. He wants to hear me, he’s made that clear.
“Yes,” I say, slipping out of my skirt and ripping the bra from my body, and that makes him smile in a way I couldn’t have imagined if it had been written into a script.
I’m naked and exposed to him. Crawling back farther on the bed, giving him space to join me.
But he’s taking a moment to take it in, to see all of me, in a way he hasn’t before.
“You mean to tell me,” he says, stepping out of his boxer briefs, and suddenly I’m sitting even more upright for a better view. “You’ve been living under my roof, with a pussy like that, and you haven't said anything?”
As he says the words my whole body responds. “Maybe I did and you weren’t listening,” I say as he prowls on top of me.
“Louisa.” His voice ripples over my skin, my name carried with it. “I have always been listening.” I reach between us, and wrap my hand tight around him, pulsing it up and down the length of him, and I see him fighting his focus as his breath hitches.
“You’re sure?” he says, guiding himself to my entrance as his lips press kisses down the column of my neck.
Asking me, one more time, because this is out of the bounds of everything we agreed.
We are momentarily suspended, naked and nearly pressed together.
As quickly as this escalated, he’s giving us the breath to decide, knowing that we could have months left of cohabitating.
And how different that will be after we make this choice.
I wrap my legs around his back, locking them, locking him, as his tip is pressed against my entrance.
“I’m positive,” I say. As he wraps his arm under my neck, bracing my shoulders against his forearm, and slowly, painfully fucking slowly, slides himself into me.
He takes his time to let me stretch to him, to adjust to the size, the sheer thickness.
And as he does, my back bows off the mattresses and presses against his chest. Tangling my arms around his neck pulling him into a deep kiss, causing me to tighten around him, and he releases a sound so uncontrolled, I can’t believe it's actually from him. And then, he moves.
The pace and electricity that existed the second I stepped out of that booth picks up again. His tongue dives into my mouth as he thrusts deeper and deeper into me, each time, hitting a point so buried within me, I cry out in sheer pleasure as he does.
“That’s it,” he coaxes into my ear, his breath warm against my neck.
“You spent months torturing me with the sound of your moans.” He slams deeper into me as my nails dig into his broad shoulders.
“I want to hear you now, for real.” He pulls out slowly, waiting for me to reply.
Grabbing my chin to face him where my head had lolled back in ecstasy. “For me.”
He fucks me relentlessly, as he does. Like with everything between us since the beginning, it builds quickly and uncontrollably. Whimpers turn to cries, to moans of ‘oh god.’ (Not that I’m religious anywhere but the bedroom, and even then, before now, I was questioning my faith.)
As I come hungrily, for him, he does, voraciously, in me.
With orgasms pulsing through both of us, our skin is sweaty and stuck together, commingled more intimately than ever imaginable. (No matter how much I imagined it.) He peels himself off me, and lays down so our shoulders remain pressed together, as we sink into my mismatched bedding.
“The husband homework was a good idea.” Of all the things he thought I might say post-sex, I can tell it takes him by surprise.
His head turns to mine in response, awaiting the rest of the thought.
“What kind of birth control do you and your spouse use?” I say with a voice to mimic the severity of the form. His laugh rumbles in response.
“An IUD,” he says, deep and low, as the sated grin spreads across his face.
I feel like every page I’ve ever narrated, every slow burn that finally combusted, every character who spent hundreds of pages pretending they weren't going to end up exactly like this, I feel it in the places that don't have names, the the ones the authors try to describe that I could only imagine existed in pages, and which I have been performing from a careful distance for longer than I knew. Simply because I didn’t know.
I feel it, actually feel it. The real version. (Which is the worst-case scenario in a fake marriage.)
The one that doesn't arrive with directions on a script, that doesn't build to a chapter break and resolve itself neatly on the other side.
The one that just sits in your chest like something has rearranged the location of your heart, and you won't know until you reach for it and find it somewhere else.
“It was worth the risk,” I say. He kisses my temple, and pulls my body close.
“I hope so.”