Her breasts are fuller than they were. Heavier, the skin there faintly mapped with new veins I can see in the warm light. I put my mouth on the curve of one and she inhales and her hand comes up to the back of my head. I take my time. Slow, careful, tasting the skin that's warmer than it used to be, that seems to carry its own heat now. My mouth on the underside where she's most sensitive, and her back arches and her fingers tighten in my hair and she makes a sound that is surprised and wanting.
"I'm bigger than I was," she says. Self-conscious in a way that's rare for her.
I pull back enough to look at her face. "I know."
"It's weird. Everything's different and I feel like—"
"You're the most beautiful thing I have ever seen." I say it plainly because that's how I say things and because it's true. "You have been the most beautiful thing I've ever seen since the first night and you are more so now and I am going to show you that if you'll stop talking long enough to let me."
She looks at me. Something shifts in her expression. The self-consciousness giving way to something warmer.
"Okay," she says. "Showing me. Go ahead."
I put my mouth back on her breast, then lower. Then her stomach. The roundness of it, the taut warmth of her skin stretched over the life we made. I press my cheek there and I can feel her breathing and underneath it, deeper, the faint flutteringthat might be movement or might be my imagination and that I am not going to examine too closely because either way it is the most extraordinary thing I have ever felt against my face.
I put my mouth on the curve of her stomach. Not a quick kiss. I stay there. My lips tracing the arc of her, the new geography of a body I thought I knew completely and that keeps teaching me how much I don't know. The stretch marks starting at her hips, faint and new, and I put my mouth on those too and her hand tightens in my hair.
"Declan, you don't have to—"
"I'm not doing anything I have to." I press my mouth to the stretch mark on her left hip. "I'm doing what I want."
She's quiet for a moment. Her hand in my hair, her breathing uneven. I can feel her watching me the way I watch her and it occurs to me that this is what she's been giving me since the beginning. The watching goes both ways. It always has.
I move lower. The inside of her thigh, where the skin is softest, and she shivers. My mouth on her hip bone, which is harder to find now under the new softness and which I locate by memory and by the sound she makes when I get there. Then I settle between her thighs and put my mouth on her.
She makes a sound that fills the room.
I take my time because this body deserves my time, every version of it, and this version — the one carrying our daughter, the one that's rounder and warmer and more sensitive than it's ever been — this version I want to know the way I know every other version. Thoroughly. Completely. With my full attention.
My tongue on her clit, slow and deliberate, and she is so sensitive now that her hips jerk on the first pass. I hold her steady with my hands on her thighs and I work her with my mouth and she grips the sheets with one hand and my hair with the other and the sounds she's making are louder than she means them to be and she doesn't try to manage them.
I make a sound against her that vibrates and she gasps and says something that isn't a word.
I bring her to the edge with my mouth and keep her there, not rushing, because I want her to feel all of it — the attention, the reverence, the specific devotion of a man who is worshipping the body that is carrying his child and who intends to take as long as this requires.
"This is embarrassing," she says, her voice wrecked, her hips moving against my mouth. "I'm going to — the hormones are doing something and I can't.Declan!"
She comes against my mouth with her thighs shaking and both hands in my hair and a sound that is loud and surprised and real. I hold her through it, my mouth still on her, drawing it out, and she pulses against my tongue and I feel every second of it.
She lies there breathing. Her hand still in my hair. I rest my cheek against her thigh and look up at her and she looks down at me and her face is flushed and wrecked and she is smiling.
"Smug," she says.
"A little."
I move up her body. I take my time with it — her stomach again, because I'm not done with her stomach, and her breasts again, and her throat, and her jaw — and by the time I reach her mouth she is pulling me down with both hands and her thighs are parting around me.
"Daddy," she says against my mouth. Murmured. Easy. The most ordinary word in the world. Not a stage or a scene or a dare or a question. Just how she talks to me now.
That's the arrival.
I push into her slowly and the warmth of her around me is something I will never get used to. I don't want to get used to it. She wraps her legs around me and pulls me deep and I move inside her carefully, attentively, watching her face for what feels good and what feels different, because her body is differentnow and I'm learning the new version of it the way I've learned everything about her — by paying attention.
She wraps her arms around my neck. Close, as close as we can get, and I move inside her and she moves with me and there is nowhere either of us needs to be.
"You know what I was thinking about," she says. Conversational. While I'm inside her.
"No."
