"Beck," I say, and then his mouth closes over my nipple and my head tips back and I stop caring about words entirely.
He knows where I make a specific sound. He knows to stay there until I make it more than once. He knows I'm impatient, and he uses this information with the completely unapologetic calm of a man who has decided patience is a tactical advantage.
"I know exactly what you're doing," I manage.
"I don't know what you mean," he says, and his mouth moves to the other side.
"You know exactly what I mean."
His hands move and I lose the argument entirely.
The flannel shirt has two buttons that stick — I've laundered it enough times to know this intimately — and I deal with them while he deals with everything else. He's warm under my hands, the breadth of his shoulders solid and real, familiar now in the way that still makes my breath catch. His breathing has gone uneven and I drag my hands down his stomach and feel the muscles jump under my fingers. I like being the thing that does that to him.
He works his way down my body, mouth tracing my sternum, my stomach, and when he hooks his fingers into my underwear and pulls it down I lift my hips to help him. His hands settle warm on the inside of my thighs, holding me still in that patient, deliberate way, and he takes his time until I'm pulling at his shoulders and saying his name in a way that isn't a question and isn't quite a sentence either.
When I reach for him he goes still for a moment, forehead against my hip, just breathing.
"Hey," I say quietly, the same thing I said the first time. "It's okay to want this."
His exhale is unsteady. He lifts his head and looks at me in the dark — really looks — and then he moves up my body and I feel him there, and I pull him closer, and when he pushes inside me I make a sound into his shoulder that he catches with his hand gentle against my mouth because Ivy is home and we are being careful.
We're quieter than usual for exactly that reason, which makes everything slower and more deliberate and somehow more intimate. He moves with the same unhurried attention he gives everything, and I match him, and the room holds us both. His mouth finds mine. When he shifts the angle I feel it everywhere and my fingers curl into his back and his breathcomes out ragged against my jaw, and that — the sound of his control slipping — gets to me every single time.
He knows what I need before I ask. He knows the difference between when I want slow and when slow is going to make me absolutely insane, and his hand slides between us and he acts on that knowledge without being asked. My whole body tightens. I press my face into his neck and come apart as quietly as I can manage, and he follows me there not long after, his forehead dropping to mine, his hips stilling, my name low in his throat like it's the only word he has left.
There is a graceless moment afterward — the rearrangement of two people and a quilt — and it's fine, it's good, it'sus. His knee finds mine. I shift and he shifts and his mouth is warm on my jaw.
And then his elbow finds the headboard.
Not hard. Just connects with it. A quiet, flat thud.
"Ow," he says.
The exact tone he uses when Clarence knocks something off the counter in the night and he hears it from the bedroom.
I lose it completely.
The laugh works up from my chest and I have no defense against it; I press my face into his neck and shake. He waits with the patience of a man who has been waited out by a stubborn six-year-old on the subject of whether dinosaurs need their own dinnerware.
Outside, the pine trees do their thing.
His hand reaches up and very deliberately locates the headboard. Taking its exact measure. Logging the information.
"Are you done?" he asks.
"Probably not," I manage.
He waits.
"Okay," I say. "Now I am."
He comes back to me and the laughing dissolves into something warmer and I'm still smiling when his mouth finds mine and he takes the smile too. That's us right there — the elbow and the laugh and the keeping going anyway — wanting someone this much and not minding the graceless parts because they're part of it too.
Afterward, the house is quiet and the sheets are tangled and I'm on my back with his arm warm across my stomach and the ceiling is doing nothing interesting and I don't mind at all.
I reach up and trace his jaw. This is what I notice first: how unclenched it is after. The muscle that lives there the rest of the time, that he holds so precisely — it's simply gone. Just the line of his face, in the dark, at rest.
He lets me trace it.
