Eventually, he’s gasping, “Celeste, I’m gonna—” and I pull him tighter, wanting to feel it, all of it. He bucks up, hard, then pulls out at the last second, hot pulses striping my stomach, up to my breasts.
He doesn’t move. Just stands over me, hands braced on the couch cushions, head bowed, brow furrowed. Sweat drips from his chest, landing on my skin and mingling with the white stripes painting me from navel to sternum. I half expect him to collapse, but he just hovers, staring down at the mess he’s made of me with a kind of reverence. Not pride, not embarrassment—something rawer, almost holy.
“Sorry,” he says, voice shredded. “I didn’t know if you were on anything, and I didn’t want to risk?—”
I laugh, a little breathless, and run my pinky through the sticky trail on my stomach. “Saylor, I’m thirty-eight. I’m on everything.” I swipe a glob up, wipe it idly across my thigh. “You can finish wherever you want.”
His gaze flicks up to mine, and for a moment he looks surprised. Then pleased. “Yeah? In you?”
“Yes.”
“In your mouth?”
I pause, considering. “Sure.” I’ve never done that for any man, but I don’t tell him. I tuck the secret away, a private dare.
But the next thing I know, he’s dipping his finger into the pearl on my belly, swiping it up, and holding it to my lips. His eyes glint with mischief, but there’s an undercurrent of challenge—will I call his bluff? I part my lips and he slides his finger in. I taste him, salty and alien and strangely electric. He watches, transfixed, as I suck his finger clean, the taste not unpleasant—just strange, like I’m sampling a new cuisine for the first time and trying to place the notes. He grins, triumphant, and wipes the rest off my stomach with a wet paper towel he fetches from the kitchen.
He flops onto his back next to me, which only a couch of this size would allow. Both of us face the ceiling, arms and legs splayed like crime scene outlines. The movie’s long since rolled into credits and then into the algorithmic silence that comes when all the suggested content has been exhausted. He’s first to break the hush.
He pulls me on top of him, my naked body becoming his blanket. “Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“You okay?”
“I’m so far past okay I might need to invent new vocabulary.”
He grins. Presses his forehead to mine. I reach between us, giving his dick a gentle stroke of appreciation and I’m shocked to see he’s still hard. Not mildly attentive. Aggressively alert. I know he came…I tasted.
“Did you not get enough?” I ask, genuinely concerned.
“Enough of you? Never.” He chuckles as I continue to stroke his length, more out of sheer wonder than anything else. He adds, nonchalant, “This is kind of my superpower.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” I balk.
“Yeah, and how would that conversation go, Celeste? My super erections are on a need-to-know basis.”
Lucky. Fucking. Me.
I smile at him. “Let’s do it again.”
When he enters me, I close my eyes and make a sound that comes from somewhere behind my lungs. Somewhere underneath my ribs where I keep the things I’ve never said out loud. Not a performance. An arrival. The sound of a body that spent twenty years believing it was broken discovering it was only misassembled, and the right hands just put everything back where it belongs.
We find our rhythm together again. It’s not choreographed. It’s imperfect in places, clumsy in others, and infinitely better for every stumble because the stumbles are honest. I wrap my legs around him and his forehead drops to my shoulder and we breathe together in the amber light while the city hums forty-some floors below, a machine that has no idea what’s happening up here and wouldn’t care if it did.
The second time is slow and I cry at the end. Not from sadness. From the specific overwhelm of a body reclaiming something it believed was lost. He kisses the tears without comment, which is exactly right. No questions. No concern. Just acknowledgment. Just his mouth on my wet cheek saying: I see this. It’s okay. Keep going.
The third time is past midnight. We’ve migrated to my actual bed by then, stumbling through the hallway around eleven, wine-cooler-dizzy and laughing at nothing and bumping into walls because neither of us is willing to stop kissing long enough to navigate properly. It’s faster. Hungrier. My teeth on his shoulder. His hands knotted in my hair. The urgent, graceless collision of two people who’ve stopped negotiating and started claiming. I push him onto his back and ride him and his hands grip my hips and his eyes don’t leave mine and I have never inmy life felt more powerful and more vulnerable simultaneously. Both at once. Both essential.
I shut my eyes for what feels like mere minutes before gray light begins to press against the windows. Saylor’s already awake. He traces the length of my spine with his fingertips. I don’t know if this woke me, or he’s doing this to specifically wake me. But I shimmy backward, locking my ass into his hips, enjoying being the little spoon. We lie still in the wreckage. Sheets still tangled into modern art. Skyline eventually going gold through the windows as the city wakes up. His chest rises and falls behind my back in a rhythm steady enough to set a clock by. My fingers trace idle shapes on his arm that’s draped over my middle, holding me close. His other hand moves through my hair in long, unhurried passes, finding tangles and working through them with a gentleness that belongs in another century.
“I’ve been thinking about the nursery,” I say.
I feel his attentiveness that sharpens without stiffening. Like he’s straightening up to pay attention to an important conversation. “What about?”
“The sage green is perfect. You have a genuinely good eye for color.”
“Is that surprising?”
