27. Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Honey
I take his hand in the kitchen doorway and pull.
He comes. Of course he comes. He’s been coming toward me since he drove twenty-three miles out of his way with two cups of coffee and no real reason to be here, and we both know it.
But I pull anyway, because it turns out that after everything—after the bar and the creek and the sycamore and a month of not answering my phone—what I want most is to be the one who reaches first.
He ducks the landing beam on the stairs without looking. I feel it land somewhere warm and certain—the ease of him in my house, his body already knowing where the low places are.
We’re laughing when we reach the top. I’m not sure how it started—a word he said on the stairs, or the way my grandmother’s third step still creaks the way it always has, or just the relief of this, of being on the other side of a month and a parking lot and a song coming through an open door.
The laughter doesn’t stop at the bedroom doorway.
It settles into something else there—not heavy, just real.
The room with the amber lamp and the hairline crack in the ceiling and the curtains moving in whatever comes off the ridge at this hour.
He looks at me.
I look back.
“Hi,” I say, which is absurd given everything, and his face does the thing—the real version, the one that changes it completely—and he says “hi” back, and then I cross the distance because I’m done waiting for things to come to me.
I put my hands on his chest and feel him go still under them—not the startled kind, the deliberate kind, the kind that means he’s receiving something and intends to receive all of it.
I reach up and start on his shirt buttons, and he watches me do it with an expression that is not the patient, careful look from the first time.
This is something else. This is a male who knows exactly what’s coming and is choosing not to rush a single second of it.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” I say, working the third button. “For the past month. While I was sanding kits and not answering my phone.”
“What were you thinking?” His voice has dropped.
“That I knew exactly what I wanted and couldn’t make myself reach for it.” I look up at him. “I’m reaching now.”
He brings one hand up and tucks a piece of my hair back, slow and deliberate.
“And that, Honey, is what I’ve been thinking about,” he says.
Not that I needed him to say it. I wasn’t reaching for permission.
But there’s a difference between knowing you’re wanted and hearing it named out loud by someone who doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean—and that difference lands somewhere in my chest and stays.
I finish the buttons.
I have thought about his chest since before I had any right to.
He shrugs the shirt off, and I let myself look—the broad green expanse of him in the amber light, the muscles moving under his skin, the taper of his ears I’ve been carefully not staring at for months.
I let myself look at all of it now. I put my palms flat against him and feel his heartbeat and the specific fact of him standing in my grandmother’s room like he has always been going to stand here.
And beneath my palms, low and steady, the vibration I remember from the first time—not quite a sound, more like weather moving through him. I stay here a moment longer than I need to.
His hands find the hem of my shirt.
“Yes,” I say, before he asks.
He lifts it over my head in one smooth motion and reaches behind me, and this time I don’t hold still for the looking—I reach for him while he’s looking, my hands at his belt. I feel his breath change.
“Honey.”
“I know what I’m doing,” I say.
“I know you do.” He catches my hands, not stopping me, just stilling them. “I just want to—” He stops. Looks at me. “I want to look at you for a minute. If that’s all right.”
I let him.
He studies me the way he did the first time—completely, without apology, taking his time—and this time I hold his gaze.
I don’t manage it. There is no searching for something neutral to do with my eyes.
I stand in the amber lamplight and let him see me and allow myself to feel what it is to be seen by someone who has been paying attention for months.
“Goddess,” he whispers. Just that.
I step forward and finish with his belt. We take care of the rest together—his pants, mine—and then there’s nothing left between us at all.
I sit him on the edge of the bed and stand in front of him and for a moment we are eye to eye, which almost never happens, and I feel it like a key turning—the rightness of it, the way looking straight into his face without tilting my head back changes something in the geometry of us.
I put my knee on the bed beside his hip.
His hands come to my waist, steadying, and he looks up at me—the slight remaining angle between us, me above him now, his face tipped up. “Is this—” he starts.
“Yes,” I say. “This is exactly what I want.”
His hands spread firm across my hips, and I move forward over him. At the first press of contact, we both go still. I watch his face while it happens. I have been on the receiving end of his attention since the first visit. From up here, I can give it back.
“You,” he says, low. “You have no idea.”
“Tell me.”
“How many times I’ve—” He stops. Starts differently.
“Since the first time you handed me something across a workbench. Since before I understood what was happening to me.” His thumb traces a slow circle at my hip, on the scar, as if it belongs to him.
“I kept thinking about this. About you here. Like this.”
I lean down and kiss him and feel the careful angle he holds for me—the slight turn of his head so his tusks don’t scrape—and I bring my hand up and trace one with my thumb, slow, feeling the smooth curve of it, and feel him go completely still beneath me.
“Honey,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “I’ve got you.”
He looks at me and what’s on his face is not the performer’s ease, and not the patient, careful look from before. Just him. All the way through.
When I sit back up, his hands find my breasts and his thumbs find my nipples and I let my head fall back.
“Look at me,” he says.
I bring my head back up and meet his eyes. He does it again, deliberate, watching my face, and the sensation moves through me so sharply I have to breathe through it. There is nothing accidental about it. He learned me the first time. Hasn’t forgotten a single thing.
“You already know,” I say. Not a complaint. Just the truth of it.
“Yes.” His thumbs move again. “I know.”
I reach between us, wanting to watch his face when I touch him, so I do. His entire body goes still. The sound he makes is low and unguarded, more honest than anything I’ve heard from him with a room full of people watching. His hands go still on me. His eyes close for just a moment.
I understand now what he must have felt the first time. The erotic intimacy of watching someone receive you.
“Honey.” My name in his mouth in that register does things I will not recover from quickly.
I rise up over him. He guides me, and the first press of him makes my breath catch—the stretch of it, the fullness, the slow overwhelming slide of being filled by someone built like he is. I hold his gaze and lower myself, taking my time, watching his face while I do.
I’m halfway down and my thighs are already trembling.
He’s thick and hard and my body is deciding whether to resist or surrender and choosing surrender, inch by inch, and I can feel every bit of it—the stretch that walks the edge of too much, the slick heat where we’re joined, the way my nipples graze his chest when I lean forward to breathe through it and his sharp intake of breath tells me he felt that too.
Beneath my palms his chest hums—that deep, involuntary vibration, not quite sound, that I felt the first time and have thought about since. He’s not doing it deliberately. That’s the part that undoes me—the involuntary truth of it, his body responding to me without his permission.
I’m wetter than I’ve ever been in my life, and it still takes time. That’s okay. I want every second of the getting there.
His hands are at my hips, steadying, not directing. Letting me set every aspect of it.
“Okay?” he asks when I’m halfway there.
“More than okay.” I keep going. “Don’t stop looking at me.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says.
I believe him. That’s the thing. I believe him completely, without the part of my brain that usually audits statements like that for accuracy and finds them wanting.
He says it, and it lands without resistance.
I sit with what that means for a moment, the weight of it, the specific feeling of trusting something all the way down.
The word for this has been sitting at the back of my mind for weeks. I’ve been leaving it there because once I say it, even just to myself, it becomes something that can be taken away.
I look at his face.
Real, then. Real.
When I’m fully seated, I stay still for a moment, adjusting, breathing, his hands warm and firm at my hips and his gaze on my face, and the fullness of him something I want to hold before it becomes motion.
I open my knees slightly, changing the angle, and feel the shift of it, and watch his jaw tighten. I do it again, deliberately.
“Goddess,” he says. “Honey. You—”
“I know,” I say, and start to move.
I find the rhythm without thinking about it, my body knowing before my brain catches up.
This is him beneath me, his hands learning the new geometry of me from this angle, his voice low and continuous, saying things that land in my heart and stay there.
His chest hums under my palms. It moves through me from the contact points outward, the vibration finding every nerve ending it can locate.