Chapter 10 #2
“I’m not going to say it.”
“Good.”
He exhales against my skin. I can feel the words stacking up in his chest, the effort of them, the way his jaw moves against my shoulder before he speaks.
“Five years,” he says. “I haven't let myself—” He stops and tries again. “I don’t know how to want things out loud yet.”
Yet. That word sits between us like a door left open on purpose.
“You’re doing fine, Sullivan.”
His hands press against my ribs. I feel my heartbeat push back against his palms and think: he can feel that. He knows.
“Tess.”
“Mm?”
“I need you. Slowly.”
I shiver. “Yes.”
“I want you to know that I love you. Before anything else. I need you to know that first.”
Every nerve in my body pulls taut. Not a shiver but something deeper, structural, like a foundation shifting to make room.
“Take me upstairs, Sullivan.”
The loft is warm because the heat from the wood stove has been climbing all night.
Sullivan places me on the mattress and undresses me slowly, as if he’s unwrapping a gift. My glasses first, which he sets on the small bedside table. Then the flannel, easing it back over my shoulders. My t-shirt follows, his eyes on my face the whole time, asking with every inch.
Then he stops. He looks. His eyes drop to my breasts and stay there for a long moment, and his jaw works.
“Tess.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re so fucking beautiful.”
I give him the same look I’ve given my mirror for years.
The look that says I have lumps. The look that says I have stretch marks from the summer I was twelve and grew four inches in three months.
The look that says I have a stomach and hips and thighs that have never matched anybody’s idea of beautiful, including, on most days, my own.
“Sullivan, you don’t have to—”
“Stop.”
He doesn’t say it harshly. He says it the way he asks me if I’m with him during a kiss. Patient and anchored.
“Sit up for me.”
I sit up.
The mattress dips as he settles beside me. He puts his hand flat on my stomach, his palm warm and huge against the softness of me, his thumb tracing the fine silvery lines on my hip where my skin remembers being twelve.
“This body has carried you, Tess. Every part of you. Your laugh. Your stubbornness. The way you talk to trees. The way you throw Tupperware at a man you’ve known three minutes.”
My throat tightens, and tears sting my eyes.
He inhales a shaky breath as his hand covers my left breast. “And your extraordinary heart. I haven’t had words for a long time. But I have a word for this. For you. You are beautiful.”
Now I’m crying, the tears spilling down my cheeks.
He cups my face and thumbs away the wetness. “I see you, Tess. The whole of you. Every soft place I wanted to put my mouth since the first morning you waved at the trees. You’re beautiful. Not despite. Because. You don't have to believe me yet. I’ll just keep saying it until you do.”
“Sullivan?”
“Yeah.”
“I believe you.”
“Good.”
He kissed the corner of my mouth, the place under my jaw, the curve of my throat where my pulse is hammering.
“Lie back down. And let me look.”
I lie back down.
I let him look.
His eyes trace every part of me, every curve, every rise and fall and secret nook.
Then he strips slowly, letting me watch.
I’ve seen him naked before, but in the soft light of the loft, with the stove glow climbing the walls, I see him fully.
He’s huge and scarred and warm. The tattoo over his ribs is three names in fine black script, and I know all of them now.
I know what they mean to him. A long, pale scar extends from beneath his ribs to his hip on his right side.
I haven’t asked about it. I don’t ask now.
I trace it with my fingertip, and he closes his eyes and shudders.
His eyes are on mine as he settles between my thighs on the wool blanket, his huge hand splayed over my stomach, anchoring me. He looks at me there for a moment, his breath ragged.
He kisses my shoulder, my collarbone, the soft place under my ear that makes me sigh.
He kisses my breast, taking my nipple into his mouth until my back arches off the blanket and my hands thread through his hair.
He kisses the soft give of my stomach. The inside of my wrist where the pulse is fast and stupid for him.
Working his way down, he kisses the curve of my hip and the inside of my knee. He kisses the place where my thigh meets my body.
“Tess.”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to take my time.”
Oh, God.
He puts his mouth on me, spearing his tongue through intimate flesh.
My moan is low and wanton. He hums against me, like I've just told him a secret, and the vibration of it goes through me like a struck note.
His tongue slides over me in broad, patient strokes.
Then more specific, finding the spot that makes me arch, working it with focused attention.
His hand on my stomach is heavy and grounding.
His other hand slides down to my hip, holding me steady, his thumb stroking absently against my skin as if he's memorizing me.
“Sullivan.”
“Mm?”
“Don’t stop.”
“Wasn’t going to.”
His tongue circles and presses. His mouth seals over my clit, and he sucks, gently then harder. Two thick fingers slide into me, slow and deep, curling, finding the place inside me that makes me whimper.
“Sullivan?”
“I have you.”
“I’m—”
“I have you, Tess. Let go.”
I come slowly. I come hard. My back arches and my hand fists in his hair and the heat of him goes through me in long pulls.
His mouth is on me the whole time, his hand splayed wide on my stomach so he can feel every shudder.
He doesn't stop until I do. He doesn't lift his head until my hand goes slack in his hair and my boneless body melts into the mattress.
He kisses the inside of my thigh, the curve of my hip.
Moving up over me, he braces on his forearms. His eyes are wet. He doesn’t pretend they aren’t.
“I want,” he says roughly, “to ask you to come home with me.”
“Home where, Sullivan?”
“Havenstone.” His forehead presses to mine. “When the cabin’s stable. When the contractors are done. I want to call Henry, take the spot in the vet’s program. And I want you with me.”
A tear slips from the corner of my eye, leaving a cool trail before it’s absorbed by my hair.
“Tess? Will you come?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
His mouth drops to mine, and he kisses me deeply, hungrily.
He slides inside me slowly, watching my face the whole time.
His rhythm is different now, more deliberate, the rhythm of a man who has decided something.
His mouth is at my ear, and his voice when he speaks is vulnerable and sure all at once.
“I love you. Stay with me.”
“I’m staying, Sullivan. I’m staying.”
He comes with a ragged moan, every muscle tight with pleasure as he empties inside me.
After, we stay joined, his weight on me, his face buried in my neck.
His breath shakes. Mine does too. We hold each other in a loft in a cabin on a ridge in a town where he came to disappear, and for the first time in either of our lives, neither of us is alone.
“I love you, Sullivan Mercer.”
He doesn’t let me get up for a long time.
I don’t ask him to.