I’ve finally identified the feeling that lives in the hollow of my chest now.
Happiness. That's what it is. Just happiness. Simple, stupid, terrifying happiness.
After dinner, Killian and I climb the stairs together. His hand finds the small of my back on the landing and the contact sends a current through me that's become familiar but never less electric.
Our bedroom. Our bed. The room that was supposed to be a cage and has become a sanctuary.
I sit on the edge of the mattress and watch him move through the room, methodical and unhurried. He shrugs off his shirt and drapes it over the back of the chair, the same chair, the same motion, the nightly ritual I've come to associate with the transition between the public Killian and the private one. The one who is just mine.
The planes of his back shift as he moves. The lean, defined musculature of a man who is strong without being ostentatious about it. The dark ink that traces along one shoulder blade, the tattoo I've studied with my fingers in the dark but never inthe light, and I make a mental note to ask him about it. Later. When my attention isn't so thoroughly occupied by the way his stomach tightens when he turns toward me and catches me staring.
I'm staring. I know I'm staring.
I don't stop.
"You're looking at me," he says, and there's a quality to his voice that tells me he's aware of exactly what my looking is doing to the air between us.
"I'm always looking at you," I say. The honesty comes easily now. Not because the fear is gone, but because the wanting is bigger than the fear. "You're worth looking at."
Something darkens in his eyes. Heat. The controlled, banked heat of a man who is capable of immense patience but is rapidly running out of it.
He crosses the room to me.
"Katya," he says.
My name in his mouth, low and warm and rough. The sound of it pools in my stomach and spreads lower.
I reach up, hook my fingers into his belt loops, and pull him closer.
Killian
She pulls me toward her by the belt loops and looks up at me with an expression that would have been unimaginable two weeks ago.
I stand between her knees and look down at this woman. This extraordinary, impossible woman telling me I'm worth looking at with a directness that strips the air from my lungs.
Every night since she knocked on the guest room door and told me she couldn’t sleep we’ve spent learning each other. Mapping the landscape of what makes her gasp and arch and come apart. Seven nights of watching my wife discover that her body isn't a contract or a commodity, but something that belongs to her, can give her pleasure so intense it makes her cry and then laugh and then reach for me again.
I've learned things.
I've learned that she watches me after. In the dark, when she thinks I'm falling asleep. She traces the lines of my face with her eyes the way I trace the lines of hers.
I've learned that she's brave in bed in a way she's still learning to be brave everywhere else. That the composure she maintains during the day dissolves entirely the moment I put my hands on her, and the woman underneath is vocal and demanding and unafraid to tell me what she wants.
And right now, what she wants is me.
Her fingers tighten on my belt loops. She tilts her head back, holding my gaze from below, and the angle does something to the line of her throat that makes my pulse kick.
"I want you," she says. "Please."
Thepleaseis what finishes me. Not because she's begging, it's not that kind of please. It's the please of a woman who has learned that asking for things is allowed, and is still slightly startled by the power of it.
I cradle her jaw in one hand. Tilt her face up. Run my thumb across her lower lip, the lip she bites when she's thinking, the lip I've been watching with an attention that borders on obsession.
I lean down and kiss her in the hungry way I know she loves. She doesn't always want careful and controlled and measured. Sometimes she wants consumed. Sometimes she wants to feel the full force of what she does to me, unfiltered and raw.
She opens for me immediately, her tongue meeting mine with a confidence that sends heat flooding through my veins. Her hands leave my belt loops and slide up my bare chest, fingers splayed, possessive in a way that she's still growing into but that already makes me feel claimed in the best possible sense.
I pull her up to standing, then keep lifting until she wraps her legs around my waist. The press of her against my already hard cock makes us both groan.
