The staff cleared everything and left around ten. The compound went quiet. Just us and the desert and the stars and the ring on my finger that I kept looking at like it might disappear if I stopped.
Quest found me on the glass balcony off the master bedroom. I was leaning on the railing looking out at the mountains with my heels off and the champagne still warm in my chest. He came up behind me and put his hands on my hips and pressed his mouth against the back of my neck and I felt his breath on my skin and his body against mine and the ostrich feathers from my dress brushing against his legs.
“Take this off,” he said against my ear. “I want to see my fiancée.”
“Your fiancée.” The word tasted new in my mouth. “I like that.”
“Get used to it.” He unzipped the dress slowly, one hand pulling the zipper down my spine while the other held my hip steady. The dress fell to the glass floor in a pool of pink andfeathers and I stood there in nothing but the ring and the moonlight and the desert air on my skin.
He turned me around and looked at me. Really looked. Like he was memorizing every inch of my body against the backdrop of the Sedona mountains and filing it somewhere permanent.
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “And you just agreed to be mine forever. Do you know what that does to me?”
“Show me.”
He kissed me hard and walked me backward until my back pressed against the glass railing and I could feel the cool air behind me and the warm night in front of me and his hands moving down my body with purpose. He dropped to his knees on the glass floor and put my leg over his shoulder and buried his mouth between my thighs and I grabbed the railing behind me with both hands because if I didn’t hold onto something I was going to fall off this balcony and die happy.
His tongue was slow and deliberate, working me in circles that tightened with every rotation. I looked down at him on his knees in his black suit with his mouth on my pussy and the diamond on my finger catching starlight and I thought this is what it feels like to be loved by a man who worships you. Not the dungeon kind. The real kind.
“Quest, I’m gonna…” I couldn’t finish because the orgasm hit me like a wave that started at his mouth and rolled through my entire body. My legs shook and my grip on the railing tightened and I came against his tongue with the mountains behind me and the stars above me and his name on my lips.
He stood up and unbuckled his belt and lifted me onto the railing. My ass was on the cold glass with nothing but open air behind me and he was standing between my legs holding me steady with both hands gripping my thighs. I wrapped my armsaround his neck because he was the only thing between me and a very romantic death.
“I got you,” he said. “I’ll always have you.”
He pushed inside me and I gasped and pulled him closer and felt every inch of his dick filling me up while the desert stretched out behind us in every direction. He fucked me on that railing with the patience of a man who had nowhere else to be and nothing else to prove. Deep and slow, his forehead pressed against mine, his hands holding my body like I was the most valuable thing he’d ever touched.
“This pussy belongs to your husband now,” he said against my mouth. “You understand that?”
“You’re not my husband yet.”
“I’ve been your husband since the day I met you. The ceremony is just paperwork.” He thrust deeper and I moaned and dug my nails into his shoulders and he picked up the pace until the railing was shaking and my body was trembling and I was so close to the edge in every sense that the line between pleasure and freefall had completely disappeared.
“Come with me,” I said. “Together.”
We came at the same time, his face in my neck, my legs locked around him, both of us shaking on a glass balcony in the Arizona mountains while the stars watched and the desert held its breath.
Afterward we lay on the balcony floor with a blanket pulled over us and the glass cool beneath our backs. I held my hand up above my face and turned the ring back and forth and watched the diamond catch the moonlight and scatter it across the ceiling.
“Peach,” I said, reading the inscription.
“Peach,” he repeated. And pulled me closer. And said nothing else. And that was enough.
44
Quest
Rita was on the dance floor hitting a two-step with Cannon that had absolutely no business looking that smooth for a woman who couldn’t see the man she was dancing with. Lavender dress, a hat big enough to pick up satellite signals, and moves that told me my grandmother had been somebody’s problem back in the day. She was having the time of her life and I was watching from the VIP section thinking this is what we almost lost. All of it. The family, the casino, the music, the laughter. Niggas tried to take this from us and we’re still standing here pouring Banks Reserve and two-stepping like the world didn’t try to end us six times this year.
Everybody came through. Prime and Zainab with the twins knocked out cold in a double stroller by the bar because those babies could sleep through a hurricane and frequently did. Justice had Dream by his side and Storie was actually acting like a human being for once, probably because Rita had recently introduced her to a leather belt and the Holy Spirit in that order. Creed and Riot were posted near the bar with their wives. Serenity was glowing with her ginger ale, the only sober person in the building and completely at peace with it. Mehar’sclassmates from school were huddled by the champagne table doing what women do at parties, which is take forty-seven pictures before posting the one where everybody’s angles are right.
Mekhi showed up around nine. Didn’t expect that. He walked in and congratulated me, and posted up at the bar without making shit weird. I appreciated the gesture even if my gut still had questions about his recent pivot to peace. But tonight wasn’t about that. Tonight was about the woman in the white dress who had my ring on her finger and my last name on her future.
Bryce caught me near the back bar about an hour in. Suit on, fresh cut, looking like a kid at a job interview which is basically what this was about to be. Samaya was nowhere to be found. Apparently she left him after her brother and cousin were murdered in jail. That wasn’t my call but I really ain’t give a fuck. They played the game and lost. They shot up my casino and paralyzed Zephyr, so they had it coming. But Samaya had a problem with it and broke up with Bryce, according to Mehar.
“Can I holla at you for a sec?” he said.
“Talk.”
