The silver at his temples when he leans over me in the lamp light. The gray in his stubble against my throat when he puts his mouth there. His hands moving down my stomach. I've watched my own body on camera hundreds of times and I've never felt what his hands feel like and there is a difference, there is an enormous, humbling, slightly devastating difference between a performance and a man who knows what he's doing touching me like I'm something he's been thinking about for longer than he'll say.
I make a sound.
Something in his expression goes very certain. His hand slides between my thighs, his fingers find my clit, and I make another sound, better than the first. He says “Good girl.”low against my ear.
Oh.
Those two words land somewhere in the center of my chest and then drop straight down at speed and my whole body responds before my brain catches up and I say "oh" out loud because apparently that's a thing I'm doing now. Having verbal reactions to praise from a forty-eight-year-old man in my bed like it's the most natural thing in the world.
It kind of is. It's the most natural thing I've ever felt and I have a lot of questions about that and I'm going to save all of them for a time when his fingers aren't doing what they're currently doing, which is moving in a slow, deliberate circle around my clit that makes thinking in full sentences a genuine challenge.
I am absolutely losing my mind,says the functioning part of my brain.Also please don't stop.
He works me up steadily. Two fingers inside me, his thumb on my clit, learning my pace with the patience of a man who has all night and no interest in rushing. His hands are bigger than mine. His fingers curl in a way mine physically can't, reaching something I didn't know could be reached, and I have been wound tight since I ended that call and he reads that immediately, the way he reads everything, and he uses it.
"Declan!"
"I've got you."
I've got you.Low. Certain. The voice he uses when something matters. The voice I've heard at Sunday dinners and in doorways and now here, in my bed, with his fingers inside me and his thumb working my clit and his mouth close enough to my ear that I can feel his breath. The experience gap between us is so wide it's almost funny. He knows exactly what he's doing and I am discovering in real time what it feels like to be the focus of that, and the discovery is making me fall apart faster than I have any interest in admitting.
I come embarrassingly fast. Clenching around his fingers, pulsing, my thighs pressing together on his hand. I was already most of the way there when he walked through the door and he knew it and went straight for it like a man who has been paying attention, and the sound I make is not one I've ever made on camera. Those sounds were a performance.
This is Declan's hand and his voice in my ear saying “That's it, sweetheart, I've got you.”and I press my face against his shoulder and I let it happen completely. My orgasm rips through me like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. My whole body trembles and I let out a sob.
When it's over I'm breathing hard and gripping his arm.
"Good girl," he says again, softer. His thumb is still moving, drawing it out.
"Don't," I say, into his shoulder. "Say that again and we'll be here all night."
"Is that a threat or a promise?"
I pull back and look at him. He is looking back with the expression of a man who has just learned something he fully intends to use at the worst possible moment.
I've done it now,says my brain.I've handed him a loaded weapon and I am completely fine with that, which tells me everything I need to know about my decision-making capabilities tonight.
Declan is far from done with me. He holds both my wrists above my head in one hand.
I didn't see this coming and I should have. The reality of it: my wrists caught easily, no effort, his hand warm and firm and not letting go. Something in my brain goes very quiet and something lower goes very loud and this is all so new.
"Okay?" he says.
"Extremely okay," I say. "Please."
"Please what, baby girl?"
I close my eyes. I open them again. "I hate how much I like that."
Declan presses his mouth to my throat. My collarbone. The freckles across my nose, and he takes a moment there, his mouth soft, and the gentleness of it does something completely different from everything else. Something that catches me in a place I wasn't guarding. I've been ready for desire and intensity and the physical reality of him. I was not ready for tenderness, and tenderness is what undoes me.
Then he settles between my thighs.
"Mine," he says quietly. “You’re mine.”
There is a flash. My dad's kitchen table. Sunday dinner. The pot roast and the gravy. All of it pressing through at once: who this is, what it costs, whose friendship is the foundation of my family's life.
It's there. I let it be there. I don't push it away and I don't drown in it. It sits alongside the wanting and they coexist, because that's what's real. The cost is real. The wanting is real. I am choosing the wanting with my eyes open.
