Chapter 26 #4
Maddy’s jaw dropped. Both hands flew up over her mouth, her eyes wide over the top of them, and she looked, for a second, like she genuinely could not decide whether she was about to laugh or cry.
Aspen was wearing her strap, and over it: Doreen’s ridiculous, enormous DIRTY HOES GARDEN SOCIETY shirt. The woman in overalls and the bandana, the garden hoe slung over her shoulder, the block letters cracked and faded from washing.
Aspen brought her hand out from behind her back and held up the second shirt—the alien, mid-step off its flying saucer, three fingers up in a peace sign, I COME IN PEACE—and Maddy made a sound that was half sob, half delighted disbelief.
She’d gotten them a few months back, during their four days in Pine Valley.
She’d snuck out of the cabin one morning before Maddy was awake, driven fifteen minutes further up the mountain, and knocked on Doreen’s door at seven a.m. to ask a woman she’d met exactly once, eight months earlier, if she could possibly have back the two ridiculous t-shirts she’d lent two stranded strangers for one night.
Doreen had laughed so hard she’d had to sit down.
Then she’d dug them out of a dresser and pressed them into Aspen’s hands and told her she’d been rooting for the two of them since the night they showed up, and to bring that beautiful blonde back up the mountain sometime.
“How…” Maddy trailed off, her eyes wet.
“I have my ways,” Aspen said with a smirk as she crossed to the bed.
Maddy was smiling so hard her cheeks had to be hurting, tears spilling over.
Aspen bunched the shirt up in both hands, the neck hole open and ready, and held it out toward her. “Up.”
Maddy lifted her arms, and Aspen pulled the shirt down over Maddy’s hands and head and let it drape over her, the enormous cotton swallowing her whole.
Maddy looked down at it, smoothed it once over her stomach, and then looked back up at Aspen with so much open, unguarded love on her face that it made Aspen’s chest physically ache.
“I’m pretty sure,” Maddy said, her voice thick, “last time you were ripping this off of me, not putting it on.”
“I know.” Aspen put a knee on the mattress. “But last time you wore this shirt, my entire world changed in the best possible way.” She leaned in close, until her mouth was almost at Maddy’s, and dropped her voice. “And now I really want to fuck you in it.”
She started to climb over her, and Maddy got a hand on her shoulder and a leg around hers and rolled them, pinning Aspen flat on her back, the I COME IN PEACE alien smiling down at her.
“Okay,” Maddy said, breathless, grinning down at her. “But that means I get to be on top. So you can see it properly.”
Aspen would not object to that.
Maddy pushed up, straddling her hips, settling her weight over the strap. She reached down between them and lined it up, and held Aspen’s eyes, and sank down onto it slowly, taking it inch by inch, her mouth falling open and her head tipping back on a long, broken moan.
“Fuck,” Maddy breathed when she’d taken all of it.
Aspen got both hands on Maddy’s hips and held on and made herself stay still, letting Maddy adjust, her own pulse pounding. “You okay?”
“More than okay.” And then Maddy started to move.
She rode Aspen slowly at first, then faster, hands planted on Aspen’s stomach over the worn cotton, hair loose and wild, the gardening shirt riding up Aspen’s ribs.
Every roll of Maddy’s hips drove the base of the strap back against Aspen, and the heat of it climbed through her fast.
She slid one hand up under the front of the alien shirt to palm Maddy’s breast and got the other hand on her hip to meet every stroke, and Maddy moaned and rolled harder, chasing it, gorgeous and uninhibited and hers.
It should not have been sexy—two grown women going at it in faded graphic t-shirts with an alien and a gardening pun. But God, it was. It was possibly the single sexiest thing Aspen had ever seen in her life.
Because, as she watched the most beautiful woman alive riding her with both of them looking objectively, certifiably ridiculous, Aspen knew with every fiber of her being that she was going to marry this woman.
And it had nothing to do with the girl from high school.
Nothing to do with the fantasy Aspen had built and carried for nineteen years, the safe imaginary Maddy she’d wanted from a distance back when wanting the real one was hopeless.
That girl had nothing on this. This was so better than any fantasy.
Better than any version of Maddy she could ever have invented in her mind.
This was her Maddy. The one who fact-checked Christmas movies and drove a hundred miles in the dark just for three stolen hours together and let Aspen fuck her with a strap in a stranger’s ridiculous t-shirts because they meant something to the two of them.
That was the woman Aspen was deeply, madly in love with.
That was the woman she was going to make her wife.
But first, she was going to make her come again.
She tightened her grip on Maddy’s hips, planted her heels, and drove up to meet her.