Chapter 16 #2
"I want you," I tell him, hips lifting into his hand, voice low and sure. No fight in it. Just want.
"I know," he says, and the sound he makes when I wrap my hand around his cock, thick, hot, heavy in my palm, is the same one from the beach. Rough at the edges but soft underneath.
I stroke him slow, feeling him twitch against my fingers, the heat of him matching the low ache building in me.
He settles between my thighs, the blunt head of his cock nudging at my entrance. He pauses there, forehead to mine, breathing with me while the waves fill the quiet.
"Yes," I say, wrapping my legs around him, pulling him closer. "Please."
He pushes in slow, inch by careful inch, the stretch deep and sweet, filling me until we're flush, every beat of his heart against mine.
The surf seems to move with him as he starts to thrust, slow and deep, each drag of him inside me pulling soft sounds from both of us.
My hands map his back, the muscle shifting under my palms, the old scar on his ribs rising and falling with his breath.
He feels it too, this tenderness. His hands cradle my hips like I'm worth keeping whole, and he kisses the corner of my mouth between thrusts like it's a promise he intends to keep.
We stay like that a long time, the waves carrying every wet slide of him in me, every shared breath, every low sound.
When I come it rolls through me slow and deep, clenching around him in waves that match the ocean outside.
He follows soon after, hips pressing flush, the hot pulse of him spilling deep inside me as that same rough-soft sound breaks from his chest.
After, he rolls us just enough that I'm half-draped over him, ear over his heart, the steady beat under the endless sound of the surf still coming in through the open windows.
The sheet is kicked somewhere down by our feet.
Salt and sand still cling to both of us.
For once I don't feel like I've won anything.
I just feel here, held, the water still moving through the room like it never left.
I should feel triumphant. I usually do, after, some small flag planted. I don't. I listen to him lie awake instead, trying to find the floor under what just happened.
It was tender. That's the whole problem in two words. We did the one thing I was sure we could keep mean, it wasn't, because he has gone very still under me, the stillness of a man who suspects that if he moves he'll feel how far in he is.
"Don't," I say, to his sternum.
"I'm not."
"You're thinking."
"I'm always thinking. It's the only thing I'm reliably good at." His hand moves up my spine, slow, and stops at the back of my neck. "You first. What are you not telling me?"
"What makes you think I'm not telling you something?"
"You've had a thing behind your teeth for four days.
You carry it into a room before you carry yourself.
You put it down here, on the beach, for about an hour, then you picked it back up the second we stopped moving.
" He says it without accusation, plainly, like he's sorry to be right.
"I notice everything about you. It's a problem I've stopped trying to fix. "
I prop my chin on his sternum so I can see his face in the dark. "That's either very romantic or extremely threatening."
"Both. Most true things are." His thumb moves once at the nape of my neck. "I'll trade you. You tell me your thing, I tell you mine. I have a great many, and I have never traded a single one. You'd be the first."
It's the most he has ever offered me, said into the dark of a house where nobody can hear it but me, and it nearly works.
He has held the door open for me, the one I've been not walking through for four days.
I could tell him now. The fence. The bright cut ends.
The thing I came up the coast to stop thinking about.
His hand is warm on my neck, the surf is covering us, and there has never been a safer time to say a frightening thing out loud.
I don't say it. I tell myself it's the wrong night to put a knife on the bed. The truth is I want one more hour of the version of him that holds my face like that before I hand him a reason to go back to being the other one.
"I'm cold," I say. It's a lie, and it's the only true thing I can manage. "Get under the sheet."
He's quiet a moment. I can feel him weigh whether to call me on it.
"Cold," he repeats.
"Freezing."
"All right." He doesn't believe me, I can hear that he doesn't, but he lets it stand.
From a man who picks every lie apart on principle, who has built a whole dangerous life out of doing it, that's its own kind of gift.
He gets the sheet. He pulls me in against him, and I feel him decide not to push, feel him fold the question up to take out later.
I let him. We're both doing it tonight, both holding one true thing back, and on this one night that almost feels like a kind of fairness.
His phone lights up on the nightstand. I'm closer. I can see the name without meaning to. Dima, and under it a sliver of the message, something about numbers, about a crypto fund that's short ten million it should have, before the screen goes dark again.
"Your brother," I say. "At midnight."
"Dima keeps banker's hours for a man who has never held a real job." He doesn't reach for it. His arm stays around me, his mouth in my hair. "Whatever it's can argue with me in the morning. He's coming this week. You'll meet him. You'll like him more than me inside an hour, everyone does."
"Impossible."
"You'll see." He says it easy, almost asleep, the most relaxed I have ever felt a body that size go. "Sleep, Nora. Nothing's getting in here tonight."
He believes it. His breathing finally evens out, the first time I've ever heard him sleep all the way down, and that is what keeps me awake.
He thinks nothing's getting in. I'm lying in his arms with the proof that something already cut its way to the edge of our fence, and I tell myself I'll hand it to him tomorrow.
I keep deciding that. Tomorrow. It's getting to be the most dangerous word I own.