Chapter 23 RONAN
Ronan
“Two more,” Tessa says.
She’s on the gym mat with her arms around her knees, protocol long since finished, staying anyway. The leg is pressing weight it couldn’t take a month ago and the shoulder is finally coming back. I do the two. She smiles. I do two more, because she smiled.
I rack the weight and cross the gym to her. No cane, just a hitch the leg press left in my stride, and I pull her up off the mat and against me.
“You’re disgusting,” she says into my chest, making no attempt to leave.
“You counted my reps. This is the fee.”
She tips her head back, laughing, and I kiss her, sweat and all, in the room where she once handed me a five-pound weight like a crayon.
“You know,” she says, “at this rate you won’t need a nurse much longer.”
“I know.” I push her hair off her face. “I’m counting on it. I’d rather you stayed for better reasons than my femur.”
She smiles at that, and tucks her face into my neck where I can’t see it. I hold her tighter.
* * *
A week goes by unlike any week of my life. Mornings she swims and I watch from the terrace with my coffee, and neither of us pretends anything anymore. Days I work less than I should and don’t regret it once.
Frank video-calls Thursday—Petra’s people still like proof of life—so I’m in the good shirt and a tie for Zurich particulars. The clause came back softened the way Valence wanted, and now they’re signing drafts instead of threatening to walk.
“You look better every week,” Frank says. “It’s unsettling.”
“Zurich, Frank.”
“Zurich’s fine. Everything’s fine. That’s what’s unsettling.” Papers shuffle somewhere off-screen. “Boston, last week of the month. Petra lands the twenty-sixth. She thinks the close goes faster with you in the room.”
She’s right. It would.
I pull up the calendar while he talks. The last week of August already has something in it. Eight weeks to the day from the morning Sadie put a nurse in my house, and neither of us has said one word out loud about what happens after.
“Move it up,” I say.
“Move what up?”
“All of it. Two weeks from now. One day, Boston, done. I’ve spent a summer being handled, Frank. Enough.”
A pause. “Petra’s in Zurich.”
“Then Petra gets on a plane.”
I can hear him decide not to argue. “I’ll make the call.”
I shut the laptop. The last week of August belongs to her, whatever she decides to do with it, and I’m not spending a day of it in a boardroom.
I’m coming around the desk when she appears in the study doorway.
“Done being important?” She crosses to me.
“For the day.” I catch her by the waist. “Zurich can wait until Monday to need me.”
She smiles, pleased, and kisses me.
* * *
That night, the house long since empty, she comes in while I’m undressing.
“Leave it.”
She’s in the doorway with a glass of ice in one hand and that look, the one from the gym when she’s about to take a weight out of my hands and dares me to argue.
“Leave what?”
“The shirt. I want to try something.”
I stop with a button half undone.
“I’m listening.”
“Hear it first.” She sets the glass on the nightstand and crosses to me, and takes both my hands.
“You run everything. All day, every day. The company, the house, your own recovery, me. Especially me. Every time we’re in this bed, you’re working.
Watching my face, counting, making sure I’m all the way gone twice over before you’ll take anything for yourself.
You have never once let it just happen to you. ”
“I hadn’t noticed you complaining.”
“I’m not. It’s a lovely problem to have.” Her eyes come up. “But I want a turn, Ronan. All of it, my way. And you can’t take the wheel if you can’t see me and can’t use your hands.”
For about two seconds it’s the best offer I’ve ever had. A woman I’m half out of my mind for wants to spend an evening running me into the mattress, and every cell I own votes yes before she finishes the sentence.
Then the rest of it arrives.
Blind. Hands down. Someone else deciding what happens to this body—the body I have spent two months clawing back one degree at a time, the body that got taken from me once already at an intersection I never saw coming.
She’s asking me to give up control. On purpose. Hand it to her and leave it there.
It’s the one thing I have never done in my life, and I’m not sure I know how. I’m not sure I’m built for it. She waits.
“Say stop and I stop,” she says.
I’ve built an exit into every deal I’ve ever signed. I’ve never once believed one until now.
She holds my eyes and waits me out. She’s been waiting me out since the day she walked into this house and refused to leave.
Everything in me is telling me not to do this—the same voice that’s kept me alive and alone since I was eleven, and it is very loud right now. I could tell her no. She’d let it go and climb into bed and we’d have a good night anyway, and the voice would win, quietly, as it always wins.
I’m tired of it winning.
“With what?” I ask.
“You’ve got some very nice ties in that closet.”
I go to the closet. Two ties. One for my hands, one for my eyes.
I come back and hold them out to her.
She looks at them. Then at me. She knows exactly what I’ve just handed her, and it isn’t the ties.
She kisses me, deep, both hands going back to the buttons she stopped me at, and the voice that runs my life says take over. I keep my hands at my sides. It costs more than I expected.
She undresses me piece by piece and she doesn’t hurry.
Shirt off one shoulder, then the other, her palms flat on my chest as it goes.
The belt, and I hear every part of it come undone.
Every second I spend doing nothing is a second I have to stand here and feel it.
Her knuckles at my waistband. Her breath going warm across my chest. Cool air on skin she’s just uncovered.
I’m harder than I have ever been in my life. Under it, something close to panic.
The backs of my knees find the mattress and I go down onto my own sheets, bare, watching her.
She takes my wrists and lifts them to the headboard, and the tie goes around them—snug, sure, a knot that means it. Nobody’s pretending here. Every second I stay is a second I chose.
“Still with me?” she asks, right against my ear.
My own words, straight back at me.
“Yes.”
She stands up off the bed, steps back where I can see every inch of her, and undresses.
Her eyes on mine the whole time. The tie pulls taut at my wrists because my hands have already decided what they want, and she watches that too, flushed and sure of herself, enjoying exactly what this is doing to me. I memorize her. All of her.
She picks up the second tie.
I close my eyes before she reaches me.
She folds it, leans over me, and takes my sight.
Dark. The ocean. The bed shifting as she settles over me, and then her mouth, finding mine first. She kisses me.
Just when I thought I couldn’t get any harder.
My jaw. My throat. The scar at my ribs she knows better than I do.
Every place her mouth finds is a small surprise now that I can’t see, and my hands pull once at the silk just to be closer, and she waits until they settle.
Then ice.
She’s got a cube in her mouth—I feel the shock of it before I understand it, cold dragged across one nipple, and my whole body comes up off the sheets.
Then heat, her mouth closing hot over the same place, and the difference between the two is obscene.
She does the other one the same way. Cold, then heat, cold, until I don’t know which one’s coming and both of them wreck me.
I groan, loud, and I feel her smile against my skin. She does it again. Lower.
She comes up to my mouth and kisses me, and passes the last of the ice between my lips as she does it—cold and then her, and I take both. She licks the melt off my bottom lip.
And then she starts down. Her mouth open against my throat, my chest, her tongue and her lips and the drag of her teeth, kissing and licking a line down the center of me while her hands go everywhere I can’t watch them go.
Her breath comes faster the lower she gets—I hear it, ragged, right against me—and knowing what this is doing to her nearly finishes the argument on its own.
She gets to my hip and stops. Circles close, her mouth right there, everywhere but where I need it, until I’m straining at the silk and about to lose whatever’s left of my composure.
“Tessa.” Low and rough, all command. “Put your fucking mouth on me.”
It works—her hand wraps around me and I come up off the sheets.
She strokes me once. Then her breath. Then her tongue, flat and wet, dragging up the underside of me and circling the tip, again, and again, while her hand works the base.
I can’t see a thing. I can only feel it coming.
Then her mouth takes me in. Warm and tight and all the way down, and she holds me there, and drags back up with a pull that whites out everything behind the blindfold.
“Where the fuck did you learn that?” How is she still—
She does it again. A little faster. Again, finding a rhythm, her hand following her mouth. Every pass is worse than the last one, and I hear my own breathing go to pieces in the dark.
“Just like that.” My voice isn’t mine. “Exactly like that.”
And then she gives me everything. She takes me deep and fast, her hand working the base while her mouth does the rest, wet and relentless, and my hips buck and her palm pins them flat.
She’s making sounds around me. Small, muffled, and blindfolded I feel them more than I hear them. She’s enjoying this as much as I am.
I let her. I couldn’t stop this if I tried, and I wouldn’t try.
“Tessa.” It’s a warning.
She doesn’t stop.
“Tessa—”
She lifts off, one hand still wrapped around me, and I can hear the smile. “Not yet.”
“That’s not—”
And then she’s gone. No hands, no weight, nothing, just the dark and my ragged breathing and no way to find her.
“Tessa—”
Her mouth arrives at my ear.
“Take it up with management.”
Teeth on the lobe. Then gone again.
Jesus Christ. My own line, in her mouth, while I’m tied to my own headboard.
Then heat, and weight, and her thighs bracket my hips, and her mouth comes down on mine, wet and hungry. Her hand wraps around me again and guides me to her, and I feel how wet she is, how ready, slick heat right at the edge of me, and every muscle in my body locks.
“Fuck.” It’s out of me before I can stop it. I’m one motion from being done already and she hasn’t even—
She sinks down. Takes all of me, one inch at a time, until she’s flush against me and we both stop breathing. Her hands brace on my chest, and she starts to move.
Somewhere in it, I stop fighting.
And it isn’t defeat. The count that’s run in my head since I was eleven just stops. For the first time in twenty-one years there’s no number in me at all.
Her rhythm falters. She’s close; I know her sounds by heart now. Her hands leave my chest, and the silk slides up off my eyes.
“Look at me,” she breathes.
She’s above me in the moonlight with her hair everywhere and her mouth swollen and her whole body flushed from what she just did to me, and she gave me my sight back for one reason. She wants me looking at her when she goes.
When she goes, it’s going to be my doing.
“Enough.”
I pull. For a second the silk holds. Then it splits.
My hands are on her. Finally.
I flip her onto her back. Then I’m on my feet — the leg has an opinion about it and I don’t care — and hauling her down the mattress by the hips until she’s right at the edge, exactly where I want her.
“My turn.”
I hook one ankle up over my good shoulder, her other leg around my hip, and push into her, deep and all at once, and neither of us is quiet about it.
I take her hard and deep.
Her fists in the sheets, my eyes on her face and hers on mine, nobody hiding anything, the headboard keeping time against the wall.
“Ronan—” Her back arches. “Faster. Please—”
“Beg me again.”
“Please.”
I give her everything. Faster, then faster than that, her name and mine tangling somewhere over the bed, and she breaks first, hard, pulling me with her over the edge of it, and I watch her the whole way down, her face and nothing else, nothing between us at all.
After, we lie tangled in the wreckage—sheets half off, pillows on the floor, the ruined tie somewhere in it.
She’s draped half over me, her cheek on my chest, and for a while nobody says anything.
My hand moves up and down her back on its own.
Her fingertip finds the scar at my ribs and traces it, slow.
“You broke a very nice tie,” she says finally.
“I’ll buy the company that makes them.”
She laughs, and I feel it against my ribs.
“Did I ask too much?” She keeps her eyes on the scar, not on me. “Letting go like that.”
“It was terrifying,” I say. I catch her chin and bring her face up so she has to look at me. “And I’d do it again tomorrow. With you.”
She presses her mouth to the scar instead of answering, and I feel her breath go unsteady against my skin. She settles back down with her ear over my heart, and my arm comes around her and stays.
“I liked being in charge,” she murmurs, already drifting.
Then she’s asleep. Right there. Middle of the bed, middle of my life.
I don’t sleep. I watch the ceiling and feel her heartbeat against my side.
She’d like Boston. She’d laugh at Frank—really laugh, and he’d love her for it. The bathroom counter only has one drawer cleared and that’s absurd; she needs a drawer, she needs several drawers, she needs—
I catch it happening.
What the hell am I doing?
Planning. That’s what. A man who has never once planned past a deal’s closing date is lying in the dark allocating drawers.
Old habit sends my hand toward a pocket I’m not wearing.
I look over at the nightstand instead. The quarter sits where I left it a week ago, next to the clock. It hasn’t moved.
I leave it there.