Chapter 27 Isak #3
I touched the marks low on her belly and hips, the silvered lines, the ones a lesser and stupider man might've thought she'd want unmentioned, and I did not have it in me to leave them unmentioned because not worshipping them properly would've been a lie about how I felt looking at them, and I'd retired from lying about how I felt at a very recent press conference.
"These too," I said. "Especially these. I want it on the record."
"You don't have to—"
"I'm not doing 'have to.' Have-to retired with the lying.
This is want-to. These are a map of every version of you there's ever been and I got the current one, I got the one sitting in my lap deciding what she wants, and I'd like to thank all the previous management.
" I traced one, slow, and felt her go still in the way that isn't armor, the new way, the way that's just feeling something and letting it land.
"Every part of you is the point. Not the part I'm putting up with to get to a better part.
There's no better part. It's all the part. "
She didn't say anything to that. For once Clover Freeman, who always gets the last word, didn't have one ready, and I watched the genuineness of this moment between us break across her face. But she couldn’t contain it. I’d seen this beautiful authentic essence of her true self, the one she tried to hide from the world break out of her, sideways and at the worst times and the perfect times.
She ducked her head down against my neck so I wouldn't see it, except I already had, and we both knew it.
Sweet, beautiful, gorgeous Clover let me see it.
She didn't take it back. She didn't reassemble.
She just stayed pressed against me with this unnamed part of her showing, undefended, and that — her letting the soft underside show and not reaching for the spreadsheet — that undid me more than any of the rest of it.
"Okay," she said, finally, muffled against my skin. "Okay. Keep going. Don't stop. And don't you dare go quiet on me, I need you loud, I need to hear you the whole time, that's my actual request, file it with maintenance—"
"Five stars," I said. "Very responsive." And I gave her loud, because it was the one thing I'd never had to fake.
I kissed her lips, which I would never get enough of. “Yes?”
“Yes.”
I dragged my teeth across her jaw and down the to soft spot at the base of her throat. “Yes?”
“God, yes.”
Then I sacrificed one hand, forcing it to release her juicy ass, and in my best move ever, unclipped the clasp of her pretty, but far too demure bra. She let it slide off her arms and I literally had to lick my lips to keep from drooling on her.
I blew a soft breath across her tits and watched her pretty brown nipples harden for me. “Ye—
“Yes, Isak, please.” She arched her back and straightened her back so that nipple was right in front of my mouth.
I gave it a long, slow lick and listened to her groan. It wasn’t a moan, but a sound meant to say she wanted, needed more. I licked it again just to tease her a little, but then drew her nipple fully into my mouth and sucked.
Now I got the moan I was looking for. “Mmm. Isak, just like that.”
I knew when to do as I was told.
I suckled and Clover began to rock her hips, sliding the very core of her across my thighs. Touchdown Jesus, if she kept doing that, I was going to come in my pants like an untried eighteen-year-old getting his first lap dance.
Ask me how I know.
Well, I couldn’t let that happen. I gave her ass one last squeeze, most to say I’d see it later, and slid my hands up to her waist with every intention of picking her up and carrying her to my room.
But she surprised the shit out of my by using my hands to slide her panties down.
She wouldn’t be able to take them off in this position, but they went far enough that I got a little glimpse of the curls between her legs.
Ooh, I couldn’t wait to taste her there, and count her freckles, and lick them. I wondered…do clits have freckles? I was going to find out.
But my freckled queen wasn’t ready to go anywhere. She grabbed my hand again and pushed in into the rumpled material of her panties. “Let me ride your fingers while you suck on my nipples.”
It was my turn to give enthusiastic consent to that. “Hell yes.”
I adjusted my fingers so I could get two inside her pussy lips and fuck me, she was so wet, all ready for me.
But it wasn’t my turn right now.
I found just the right spot so she could use my fingers however she wanted. She found just the right position, one I was committing to memory, and she set the pace, and I followed every single yes she gave me like it was a route she was drawing and I was just grateful to be allowed to drive it.
I pulled the other nipple into my mouth and matched my sucking pulls to the thrusts of her hips. Then came her moans.
God they were like a song from the dirtiest and raunchiest of gods. Bacchus and Caligula and Aphrodite had nothing on my Clover.
“Oh, oh. Isak, I’m so close. I’m…” She wrapped her hand into my hair and held me tight to her breast. Then she was was coming and crying out my name.
It was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen in my life. I wish I did have that drone I’d recorded Declan’s proposal to Kelsey with. This would make the absolute best porn that would be only for me. Forever.
Yeah. I was thinking of forever. With Clover.
Afterward she stayed where she was. In my lap, facing me, her forehead down against mine, both of us breathing like we'd run something, the stars outside in the sky still sparkling, the cats asleep, the apartment ours and empty and quiet.
I waited for her to armor up. I'd learned the rhythm of it over a season, the small administrative pulling-back, the list reassembling itself, the woman stepping behind the woman.
I knew it was coming. I braced for the gentle redirect, the joke that put distance between us, the thing she'd do to make a thing she couldn't keep into a thing she'd only borrowed.
It didn't come.
She just stayed. Soft and heavy and there, her hands loose on my shoulders, her breath going slow against my neck, not guarding a single door.
"It's not running," she said, into my skin. Quiet. Like she was reporting something from a long way off.
"What's not."
"The countdown." She lifted her head and looked at me, and her face was wet again, and open all the way down, no edges, nothing held.
"I've had a thing running in my head since I was nine.
Counting down to when whatever I have gets taken back.
It runs all the time. It ran at the stadium, it ran when you were at the podium at the press conference. It ran on the elevator."
She pressed her palm flat over my heart again, the way she had when she walked in. "It's not running. I keep checking and it's just — quiet. I don't know what to do in the quiet. I've never been here before."
"Stay," I said. The only word I had that was the right size. "You don't have to do anything in the quiet. That's the whole point of it. I'll be the loud one. You stay and I'll be loud enough for both of us, I've got range, you've heard me at a podium."
She laughed, wet and helpless, and put her forehead back down on mine.
"Okay," Clover said. "I'll stay."
And the world was, somewhere out past my windows, still coming for us.
Monty's machine still grinding. The folder still sitting in her car.
The story still wrong in forty different feeds, the scandal I'd worsened with my own chest at a podium still gathering, the morning still coming with all of its trouble in both hands.
I had never in my life been so completely unbothered by an incoming disaster.
Let it come. Let all of it come. I'd spent twenty-five years making myself invisible so nothing I loved could be taken, and it had taken me a content shoot and a motorcycle and a vandalized parking lot and a brewery full of my own loud family and a woman brave enough to climb into my lap and decide where she stands, to figure out the thing my father had known the whole time and my mother had apparently died believing.
The only stuff worth having is the stuff you let everybody see.
So let them see. Let the morning come. She was staying, and I was loud, and we'd be exposed and we'd be together and those two things, it turned out, were the same direction.
Vito opened one eye, judged us, and went back to sleep.
"Your cat hates this," Clover murmured.
"My cat hates everything. It's how he says he's home.
" I pulled the green pillow off the back of the chair, the lucky one, the copy of the one my mother made, and tucked it behind her so she'd be comfortable staying as long as she wanted to stay.
"Welcome to the building. I'm a great landlord.
Five stars. Very responsive to requests. "
"I'm posting a review now," Clover said, settling in, getting the last word the way she always gets the last word, the way I was going to spend the rest of my life letting her. "Don't ever let me leave."
“Don’t worry. We’re just getting started.” I gave her a wink. “I think I can get eleven out of ten stars once you see my piercings.”
“Isak Bear Kingman. You do not have a dick piercing. That’s dangerous when you play contact sports.”
“Wanna find out?”
Clover did indeed find out. And she was very, very pro piercings. She also immediately ordered me a new cup that I swore was actual armor from the fifteenth century. Gotta protect the pierced family jewels.