He rolls me under him and puts his mouth to my throat and then my breasts — his tongue and teeth, unhurried, until I'm arching up and pulling at his shoulders telling him to keep going, don't stop, lower — and he works his way down my stomach and settles between my thighs and looks up at me once before he puts his mouth on me.
Two fingers and his tongue and that precise devastating patience — reading every sound I make, every roll of my hips, adjusting without being asked. He finds the right pressure and stays there and I stop trying to be quiet about any of it. I get both hands in his hair and hold on and say his name and say right there and say don't stop, and he doesn't, not until I'm shaking and pulling him up by the hair.
"Inside me," I say. "Nash. Now."
He moves up over me and I reach for him and guide him and he pushes inside me in one slow deliberate stroke, and we both go still.
Full. Deep. His forehead drops to mine. I can feel his heart going as hard as mine and the lamplight is warm on the plasterwork above and the sound of the party is somewhere far below and none of it exists. There is only this — his weight overme, the stretch and heat of him, the way he's looking at me like I'm the only thing in the room.
"Maple," he says. Just my name. But the way he says it.
"I know," I say. "I love you. I know."
He goes still for a moment. Pulls back far enough to look at me — that steady green taking me in all the way — and something in his face opens up that I haven't seen before. Something underneath all the capable and the careful and the quiet.
"Since the back parlour," he says. "For me."
"For me too," I say. "I just needed longer to say it."
He kisses me slow and deep and then starts to move and I stop being able to say anything coherent at all.
Deep and slow at first, each stroke deliberate, and I feel every inch of it. I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper and he groans against my throat, low and rough, and does it again. I drag my nails down his back.
"Harder," I say.
He gives me harder.
"Nash." I dig my nails in. "I mean it. Harder."
He grips my hips and pulls me down to meet him and I cry out at the ceiling. His mouth finds my ear.
"Like that?" he says.
"Yes," I say. "Right there. Don't stop. Don't you dare stop."
He doesn't stop.
"I'm not stopping." His mouth is at my ear. "You feel so fucking good. You have no idea."
"I love you," I say, because it keeps coming out of me, because I can't stop saying it now that "I love you," he says, against my jaw.
He picks up the pace and I stop being able to form words.
My hands are in his hair. My hips are up to meet him. He drives into me deep and hard and I say "right there" and he givesme more of it, exactly that, and I dig my nails in and say "don't stop."
"I'm not stopping." His mouth is at my ear. "You feel so good. You have no idea."
He goes deeper and I gasp and say his name and he says "I know" and does it again and I say "Nash, please" and he says "I know, come on, I've got you" and I stop thinking entirely.
I come hard, thighs clamped around him, nails in his shoulders, his name in my throat at a volume that is absolutely carrying through the original plasterwork to every remaining guest below. I find I have not one single concern about it.
He follows me down into it. His hips press flush and his arms pull me hard against him and he groans "Christ, Maple" into my neck. Then: "I love you." Low and wrecked and completely certain. Like he's done keeping it to himself.
Afterward he's warm against my side and the room smells like my perfume and the woodsmoke drifting up from the parlour fireplace below and the mountain is dark through the window and the house is quiet and full and exactly what it was always supposed to be.
"Ruth would have liked you," I say.
He's quiet for a moment. "Yeah?"
