He finds me warm and wanting and makes a low sound against my breast that I feel in my chest. His fingers move slowly at first — finding the rhythm, learning what six weeks of this has taught him to look for, pressing and circling with the deliberateness of a man who is not trying to get anywhere quickly and knows it. I stop being quiet almost immediately. The compound is far enough. I have completely stopped caring.
He winds me up the way he always winds me up, building it slowly, varying the pressure when I start to chase it, keeping me right at the edge of it until my hips are moving against his hand and I'm saying his name in pieces and gripping the edge of the worktable.
He doesn’t rush it. He keeps the exact pace he wants until the orgasm breaks through me slow and enormous, my whole body involved in it, his fingers not stopping until I've wrung every second out of it.
He steps back. He drops to his knees in front of me on the worktable.
His mouth finds me and I make a sound that has nothing careful about it, nothing managed, loud in the amber evening air of the outbuilding. I don't care. He's learned me here too — the specific pressure, the angle, when to be patient and when to be relentless, and right now he's relentless.
His tongue works me with the specific knowledge of a man who has been studying this subject and intends to use what heknows. I grip his hair with both hands. My thighs are shaking. His hands on my hips hold me exactly where he wants me and he does not stop until I come hard against his mouth, my whole body clenching around the orgasm, his name in pieces and then not even that, just sound.
He stands. He looks at me — undone, flushed, sitting on my own worktable in the amber light — and his expression is the thing it always is when he looks at me like this. Like he made a decision a long time ago and he's still making it and he intends to keep making it.
He pushes inside me slowly.
I feel every inch of it. He doesn't move for a moment. His forehead drops to mine. Both of us are breathing. Just that — just the fullness of it, both of us present in it.
Then he moves.
Deep and deliberate, the way he moves when it's just the two of us and no reason to be anything except exactly this. I wrap my legs around him and he drives deeper. I make a sound into the amber air and he answers it with his mouth against my throat, his teeth finding the soft place under my jaw that he knows too well by now.
I drag my nails down his back. He shudders and drives harder.
He shifts the angle and I lose my breath entirely. He finds the exact thing and stays there, deliberate, his hips not varying, and I feel the orgasm building from somewhere deep this time, rolling up slowly, and he knows it's coming because he knows me and he doesn't let up. His thumb finds me where we're joined and adds to it, and the combination of it is more than I can hold together.
I come hard. Harder than the first two, my whole body clenching around him, his name wrenched out of me and thengone, just sensation, just him moving through every second of it without stopping, without slowing.
He follows me with his forehead against my shoulder, his grip past careful, going deep and staying there while he shudders through it with a sound against my skin that I feel in my ribs.
We stay like that.
The amber light goes blue around us. His weight is against me. The worktable is solid under us. Both of us are breathing, coming back.
We end up on the small couch I moved in during the second week, the one that only comfortably fits two people if the two people have decided proximity is acceptable, which we have. His arm comes around me. The outbuilding is settling into its nighttime sounds, the compound sounds coming through the walls.
My head is on his chest. His heartbeat is under my ear.
I'm thinking about the lease I signed, the shelves Pawn built, Remy's almost-smile, and what all of that means versus what it cost me. The cost is not what I expected. Nothing like what I spent seven years being afraid of.
"Don't make me say it first," I say.
His hand goes still in my hair.
"I love you," he says. Quiet and complete, the specific voice he uses for things he means entirely, nothing elaborate about it.
I close my eyes.
"There it is," I say.
He laughs.
A real one, not the controlled version, not the managed expression. A real laugh from somewhere in his chest, short and genuine, the sound of something coming unlocked that has been locked for a long time. I've heard him almost laugh before. This is the first time. I intend to hear it again.
I stay exactly where I am with his heartbeat under my ear and that sound still in the room.
"I love you," I say. Into his chest, not looking up. "You should know that."
"I know," he says.
