Oh.
His mouth moved from her neck to the hollow behind her ear, and Chelsea's body was already answering before her mind had fully arrived, a softening, an opening, a warmth that started somewhere beneath her ribs and went all the way down. She had spent her first days as his wife trying to find words for what this man did to her, reaching for language the way she reached for her highlighters, certain that if she could just name it she could understand it.
But there were no words.
There was only this: his hands finding her in the half-dark, and her body rising to meet them with an eagerness that would have mortified her if she'd had any capacity left for mortification, which she did not, because the moment Olivio's mouth claimed hers and his weight settled over her, she was already gone.
Every morning. The same devastation. The same collapse that wasn't really collapse because collapse implied resistance, and Chelsea had none. Not anymore. Not since the conference room, not since their first night in this bed, not since she'd learned what it was to be wanted by a man who wanted the way other people breathed, completely, without apology, as if his need for her was simply a fact of his biology rather than a choice.
She came apart for him so quickly it was embarrassing.
That was the mortifying truth of it. No matter how many mornings, no matter how many times his body covered hers and his hands found the places that undid her and his mouth did things that she would need several more months of Bible study to adequately repent for, she was always so quick. So easy. As if her body had been waiting three years for exactly this man and now that it had him, it refused to waste a single second pretending it didn't need what it needed.
And every time, in the aftermath, while she lay trembling beneath him with her breathing wrecked and her fingers still gripping his shoulders, he would press his forehead to hers and his eyes would be open, watching her, and the expression in them was something she had no name for. Something that looked, if she were brave enough to call it what it was, like a man who had just discovered a room in his own house he didn't know existed and was standing in the doorway trying to decide whether to walk in.
And then, because this too had become part of the rhythm of their mornings, he carried her to the bath.
Chelsea's pulse did its usual acrobatics as he lowered her into the water, and then he was settling behind her, his thighs bracketing hers, her back drawn against his chest. The sheer scale of him still startled her every time, the breadth of his body surrounding hers, the way his arms could wrap around her with room to spare. She had the proportions of a teaspoon relative to this man, and the awareness of that made her want to laugh and also never move again.
His hands moved into her hair, and her head tipped back against his shoulder.
He shampooed her hair the way he did everything: with a thoroughness that bordered on the unreasonable. His fingers kneaded her scalp in slow, devastating circles, and Chelsea's toes curled underwater, and she thought, for approximately the forty-seventh time this week, that she needed to write a strongly worded letter to whoever had written the rehabilitation pamphlet titled "Adjusting to Life After Extended Hospitalization," because at no point in its twelve laminated pages had it mentioned this. Not once. Not a single bullet point addressing the possibility that one might wake from a three-year coma and find oneself married to a man who washed one's hair like it was his vocation and calling in life.
She would have appreciated a heads-up.
She'd been embarrassed the first time he had done this for her. Had tried to protest, tried to tell him she could manage, tried to explain that she had spent three years being bathed by other people and she didn't need—-
But Olivio had simply kissed away her protests. Literally. Every time she'd opened her mouth to object, his had covered it, and by the time he'd lifted his head, she'd forgotten what she was objecting to, and his hands were already in her hair, and a sound was escaping her that she would later categorize, during a very stern internal review, as entirely unnecessary and deeply incriminating. He had kept kissing her, kept touching her, gentle and relentless in that way of his that left no room for argument, until she had gradually given up and accepted that this was just how mornings worked now.
Eight mornings in, she craved it.
His hands moved lower, from her hair to her shoulders, kneading the tension there, and then lower still, beneath the water, to the place on her left thigh where the muscle knotted after long days. She hadn't told him about it. She hadn't told anyone except her physiotherapist, who found it with clinical fingers and worked it out with clinical pressure and asked her to rate the improvement on a scale of one to ten.
Olivio's fingers found the same place, and he worked the knot with the same thoroughness he'd given her hair, and Chelsea had to press her lips together very hard because the sound that wanted to come out wasn't pain. It was the opposite of pain. It was the sound of a body that had spent three years being handled by professionals finally being touched by someone who wasn't wearing gloves, wasn't timing the session, wasn't going to hand her a feedback form afterward.
Her eyes stung.
She blinked it away before he could see. But his arms tightened around her, just slightly, as if he'd noticed anyway and was choosing not to mention it, and that was worse, that was so much worse, because it meant he was paying attention to parts of her that she hadn't even shown him yet.
His hands moved lower still, and the memories came with them, arriving the way they did in warm water, loose and weightless and out of order.
Their first night together in this house, in this bed. How he had reached for her again and again, each time with a different quality, urgent, then slow, then desperate and almost tender in a way that had wrenched sounds from her she hadn't known she was capable of making, until she had lost count entirely. She had passed out in his arms, her body simply giving out before his hunger did.
On the second night, he had oh-so-casually informed her that his family and friends were coming over.
They will love you, tesoro. Trust me.
Chelsea had panicked. She could laugh about it now, barely, but at the time, her reaction had been immediate and total, and Olivio had only chuckled, pulling her close and kissing her forehead with the amused patience of a man who found her panic endearing rather than inconvenient, which only made her panic worse, because how was she supposed to calm down when he was beingthat?
But to her surprise and wonder, what he said turned out to be true.
Miguel and Selena healed something in her that she hadn't realized was still bleeding. She couldn't explain it any other way. Miguel had the eyes of a man who had walked through fire and come out the other side with more gentleness than he'd gone in with, and Selena looked at Chelsea with such warm recognition that the wound in Chelsea's heart, the one that had never stopped hurting since losing her parents, the one she had thought was as healed as it was ever going to get, eased. Just a little. Just enough for her to breathe differently.
And the others. Aivan and Sienah, so beautiful together that it was impossible to imagine they had almost ended their marriage. Adriano and Shayla, who could have entire conversations with just their eyes, their gazes meeting across the room and communicating things that words would only have gotten in the way of.
Please, God. Let us have what they have.
On the morning of the third day, Chelsea had her scheduled appointment at Stanhope Medical Center, and she was fully prepared to go on her own. Edgar had always taken her before, and she didn't want to bother Olivio with something so routine—-
