Chapter 18
ADELAIDE
Jaxon carried her to the bedroom. A drift, a slow migration that involved stopping twice to kiss against the hallway wall, her back against the plaster and his body warm and solid against hers. His thigh pressed between her legs and the pressure made her gasp and pull him closer by the belt loops.
The bedroom. Simple. A wide bed with a quilt of blue and white squares.
He laid her down with his hands at her back, lowering her gently, and then he was above her, forearms braced on either side of her head.
The proximity. The realness. The fact that this was Jaxon, her Jaxon, the boy from the quarry and the truck and the sidewalk and the ten lost years.
"I missed you," she said. "I missed you so much I didn't even let myself know I was missing you."
He pressed his mouth to her neck. "I know." His voice rough against her skin. "I did the same thing."
She arched into him. His mouth trailed down. Collarbone. The hollow at the base of her throat. The curve of her breast, and she reached behind and unclasped her bra herself because the waiting was over, all of it, every kind of waiting, and she was done with distance.
He exhaled when her skin was bare. A long, shaking breath she felt against her ribs. His mouth found her breast and his tongue circled her nipple, slowly, and the sensation shot through her, bright and concentrated, and her fingers dug into his shoulders and she said his name.
"Jaxon." Not a question. Not a plea. Just his name, spoken with everything she felt.
His hand traced down her side. Over her hip.
Along the waistband of her jeans. He undid the button.
Drew the zipper down. His fingers paused against her skin, just above the elastic, and the pause was attention.
He was reading every sound she made, every shift in her breathing.
She had never been attended to like this.
Grant had been skilled, efficient, knowing exactly what to do.
But competence and attention were different things.
Grant had touched her body. Jaxon was touching her.
She lifted her hips. He slid her jeans down. Then her underwear. When she was bare beneath him she felt no impulse to cover herself or arrange herself or perform. She lay there, unguarded, and let him look.
"God, Addie," he said. His voice wrecked.
She pulled him down and kissed him while her hands found his belt, unbuckled it, pushed his jeans and boxers down. She wrapped her hand around him and felt him shudder, a full-body tremor. He pressed his forehead to hers and breathed.
"I'm not going to last," he said. "If you keep doing that."
"Then don't."
"No." He caught her wrist gently. Kissed her knuckles. "Not like that. Not the first time."
First time. Because they were not young. Their first time had been clumsy and sweet and over too fast, and they'd lain there laughing about it afterward. She hadn't let herself think about that night in years.
This was different. This was everything they'd learned since then. Every year of absence informing every touch.
His hand slid between her thighs. She was wet, had been since she kissed him in the yard, and when his fingers found her she arched off the bed and grabbed the quilt in both fists and made a sound that was not dignified and not composed and not anything she would have allowed herself to make in the apartment she shared with her ex husband where composure was a habit she wore to bed.
He touched her with unhurried attention.
Reading her. Adjusting. Finding the rhythm she needed without her having to ask.
His thumb moved in slow circles and his fingers moved inside her and the pleasure built in layers, each one deeper than the last. She kept her eyes open because she wanted to see his face while he did this, the concentration and the hunger and the tenderness coexisting in his expression without contradiction.
"Look at me," she whispered, and he did, and their eyes held while his hand moved, and the intimacy of that, his gaze on hers while he touched her, was so far from anything she'd experienced in years of efficient, mechanical sex in her king-sized bed that she felt tears at the edges of her vision even as the pleasure crested.
She came with his name in her mouth and his eyes on hers and his hand holding her through it.
The orgasm was not a performance. It was a dismantling.
Something she'd been holding together for a very long time came apart in the best possible way.
She shook with it. He held her. When it subsided she lay there breathing hard and looking at the ceiling and feeling, for the first time in longer than she could remember, completely unselfconscious in her own body.
Jaxon kissed her hip. Her stomach. The underside of her breast. He moved up her body slowly. She could feel him hard against her thigh, and when he settled between her legs and paused there, braced above her, she reached up and touched his face.
He entered her slowly. She felt him fill her and her breath left her in a long, uneven exhale, and the sensation was beyond physical.
It was the closing of a circuit broken for ten years.
His body inside hers. His forehead against hers.
His breath mingling with hers. The irreplaceable feeling of being joined to someone who knew you before you became the person you were pretending to be.
He moved slowly. She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him deeper, and the sound he made, low and broken and completely unguarded, was the most honest thing she had ever heard.
Nothing performed in it. No technique. No strategy.
Just Jaxon, inside her, moving with a rhythm that matched her breathing rather than his own, paying attention, always paying attention, even now when his arms were shaking and she could feel the effort it was costing him to hold back.
"Don't hold back," she said against his mouth.
He groaned. The rhythm changed. Deeper. Faster.
His hand found her thigh and hitched it higher, changing the angle, and the new depth sent a sharp bolt of pleasure through her that made her cry out.
She gripped his back and felt the muscles moving beneath his skin and dug her nails in and heard him hiss and felt him thrust harder in response, and the feedback loop built something between them that felt too large for the room.
She came again. With him inside her, his body moving in hers.
The sensation deeper, fuller, spreading outward from her center in slow waves.
She felt his rhythm break. Felt him lose the control he'd been holding.
He thrust deep, and then he was coming too, his face pressed against her neck, a sound torn from him that she felt in her own chest. His body shuddered against hers and she held him through it, hands on his back, legs around him, mouth against his temple, whispering his name and yes and I love you.
Afterward, they lay entwined. The quilt was half on the floor. Adelaide's head was on Jaxon's chest and his hand was in her hair and Beau had crept into the doorway and lain down with his nose on his paws, bearing witness.
"You okay?" Jaxon asked. His voice rough. Stripped. The voice of a man who had been undone and had not yet put himself back together.
"Yes." She traced a line along his collarbone. "More than okay."
She listened to his heartbeat. Steady and unhurried.
The heartbeat of a man who had waited without asking her to hurry.
Who had turned her away when she wasn't ready and opened the door when she was.
Who had let her come to him on her own terms and in her own time and had never once tried to make her into someone she wasn't.
She was home.
Not the house. Not the town.
Him.
She had always been home with him. She had just taken the long way back.