Not carefully. I’d done carefully. I’d been doing carefully since I was twenty-three years old, and I knew exactly where it had gotten me, and I was in a barn in Frognot, Texas on a Sunday morning and I was done with it.
He made a sound against my mouth — surprise, and then not surprise at all — and his hands came up to my face, and he stopped being gentle about it.
HE WALKED ME BACK EXACTLYtwo steps until I hit the barn wall and his body came up against mine. I felt the full length ofhim, the solid weight of it, and said something against his mouth that didn’t have a subject or a predicate.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
The wall was rough through the thin cotton of the shirt and I didn’t care even slightly. He had both hands framing my face, then one slid into my hair, and he kissed me the way he had the night before, like he had all the time available and intended to spend it. My hands went to his chest and then to his collar and I pulled him in closer. He took the point.
He pulled back just far enough to look at me, bright and warm and with the smile he got when things were going where he wanted them.
“Morning,” he said again.
“You already said that.”
“Worth saying twice,” he said, and dropped his head to my throat.
His hands moved down my sides and pushed the shirt up, his palms warm on my skin, and I’d stopped thinking about anything except this. We were a property away from a catering cleanup crew and I was aware of this the way you’re aware of weather — technically present, not the most urgent variable.
He moved down my body, hands sliding the shirt up as he went, and crouched at my feet. I felt his breath against my inner thigh and then his mouth on my pussy, and I said his name before I’d decided to.
He had both hands hooked at my hips and I had both hands in his hair and it was fast, faster than the night before, which had been slow and deliberate and attentive to the point of ruin. This was morning and the barn and the slanted light and his mouth, and he knew by now exactly what he was doing and wasn’t wasting any time about it. He found the right place with his tongue and settled in. I pushed against his hold and said his name. He said “Let go” against me and I stayed with him.I was done in under two minutes, which I wasn’t ashamed of. He worked me through every second of it and kept going past the point where I would have stopped, past the point where any composed version of me would have pulled it back. I had no interest in being quieter. I said his name again and let it be what it was, and I came hard against the barn wall, fingers in his hair, heels against his shoulders, one breathless “fuck” that I stand by completely.
He stood up, unhurried, and looked at me against the wall with the expression of a man very pleased with the start of his Sunday, and transparent about it.
“You look—” he started.
“Don’t,” I said. “Come here.”
He came here.
I got his belt. I got his jeans. I got my hand around his cock and he exhaled with the careful control of someone for whom it had become an active project. He was hard and warm and I stroked my thumb over the head of him and he put one forearm against the wall above my head and said my name in the low rough register that had been rearranging my priorities since the cocktail hour.
“Jules.”
“I know,” I said. “Wall.”
He looked at me. The warmth in his expression went focused, went direct and intent.
“You sure?” he said.
“I kissed you first today,” I said. “I’m fully sure.”
He put his hands on my hips and lifted me. I wrapped my legs around him and he pushed into me against the wall, and I made a sound that also lacked grammatical structure. He stilled, watching my face.
“Good?” he said.
“Don’t stop,” I said.
He didn’t stop. He moved slow at first, deep and steady, and I had the wall at my back, his hands at my hips, his mouth at my throat. “You feel incredible,” I said. “Since this morning.”
“You feel so fucking good,” he said, near my ear. “Since Friday. Since that van. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.” He moved, and moved again; I’d nothing left to hold back. I pressed my face into his shoulder. “Let me hear you,” he said. I let him hear me.
The wall was solid at my back and he was working a slow deep rhythm calculated to take me apart, and I wasn’t interested in control. I had his shirt bunched in my fist at his shoulder and my mouth at the side of his neck, the barn quiet around us except for the cleanup crew, far enough away to be theoretical. I rolled my hips forward and changed the angle myself and he said “Fuck—” against my hair. I saidthere. He saidyeahand stayed there and picked up the pace, and I could feel the weekend not mattering, could feel Manhattan not mattering, could feel nothing except Dutch and the barn and the morning and the wall at my back, and I was close when he slowed deliberately.
“Dutch—”
“Not yet,” he said, which was an extraordinary thing to say to a person.
