I moved back up her body and took her face in my hands and kissed her slowly, with all the patience I had, and felt her hands come up to my chest and relax there, and I pulled back and looked at her and said, "I've got you. The whole night. There's no hurry."
Something in her face changed, a loosening around the eyes, the expression of someone who had been braced for something and found it wasn't necessary. "Okay," she said softly.
I kissed her again and worked my way back down her body with more deliberateness than before, taking longer at every place that made her breath catch, building her up with unhurried patience until she stopped thinking about what came next and started existing only in what was happening right now, which was exactly where I wanted her.
When I put my mouth on her she gasped and her hands flew into my hair and I held her steady and took my time withher, learning her, until she was trembling and saying things that weren't quite words and then saying my name very clearly and falling apart under my hands with a completeness that told me she had given up every last defense she had.
I moved up her body while she was still shaking and she pulled me down to her mouth and kissed me with a hunger that surprised us both and I thought that there was the woman underneath the careful composure, and she was extraordinary.
"Please," she said against my mouth. "Con, please."
I looked at her, at her dark eyes blown wide and her hair wild on the pillow and her mouth swollen from mine, and thought I had never wanted anything more in my life.
I pressed into her slowly, watching her face the whole time, giving her every opportunity to breathe through it, and she held my gaze without looking away even when her brow furrowed and a small broken sound escaped her. I went completely still and brought my mouth to her temple, her cheek, the corner of her jaw, and whispered against her skin that she was perfect and I had her and we had all the time there was.
She breathed out slowly, a long deliberate exhale, and her body softened around me, and then she tilted her hips in a way that was unmistakably an answer, and I moved carefully and she moved with me, and whatever I'd expected from this night it wasn't this -- this feeling of something finding its place, this woman who matched me in ways I was only beginning to understand, who made sounds that were going to ruin me for anything else, who dug her fingers into my shoulders and said my name like it was the only word she had left.
I took her apart slowly, learning what she liked, building her up with deliberate patience until she was shaking under me, and when she finally came it was with her whole body, long and shuddering, and I held her through every moment of it and feltsomething shift in my chest that I wasn't ready to put a name to yet.
She pulled me back down to her mouth afterward, her hands in my hair, her body still trembling slightly, and kissed me with a tenderness that was different from the hunger of before, something quieter and more deliberate, and I kissed her back that way and let myself feel it fully rather than managing it from a safe distance.
"Again," she said softly, and looked up at me with dark eyes and a smile that was new, something entirely for me, private and certain and warm.
I laughed against her mouth. "Give me thirty seconds."
She laughed too, and the sound of it in the warm dark room was the best thing I'd heard all night, which was saying something.
The second time was slower and deeper and she rose to meet every movement with a responsiveness that told me she had stopped thinking entirely, which felt like a gift from a woman who was always thinking. She wrapped her legs around me and pulled me closer and said things against my neck that I felt more than heard, and I buried my face in her hair and let go of the last careful distance between what I felt and what I showed.
When she came the second time she said my name once, clearly, like an anchor, and I followed her with her name in my mouth and my arms holding her as close as I could get her and thought that my father had told me to be worthy of her and that I intended to spend a very long time trying.
Afterward we lay tangled in the warm dark and her head was on my chest and her breathing slowed into something easier and I ran my hand through her hair and looked at the ceiling and felt, for the first time in longer than I could remember, completely still.
"Con," she said quietly, her voice already soft with the edge of sleep.
"Yeah."
Her hand pressed flat against my chest over my heart. "Thank you."
I covered her hand with mine. "Don't thank me yet," I said. "I'm not done with you tonight."
She laughed, low and warm against my ribs, and I thought I was going to hear that laugh for the rest of my life and that I was entirely at peace with that.
Outside Chicago was dark and cold and neither of us were thinking about any of it at all.
CHAPTER 12
CONSTANTINE
Dinner was painful.
Sitting so close to Cecelia after what she'd said in the library, after everything that had happened in that room and in the office before the ceremony and in the hallway outside with the buttons of my mother's dress under my fingers -- all of it was sitting in the room with us while I was supposed to be making conversation and eating food and behaving like a man with ordinary concerns.
She was across the table from me in the candlelight with her hair coming slightly loose and her eyes bright from the wine and she was laughing at something my father had said, a real laugh that changed her whole face, and I was watching her the way I'd been watching her for five days except that now she was my wife and the distance between here and the end of the evening was the only thing I was actually thinking about.
She caught me looking at one point and held my gaze for just a moment before looking back at my father, and the color that moved across her cheekbones told me the distance was not exclusively my problem.
My father was in remarkable form. Whatever combination of the occasion and Cecelia's company was responsible, he was sharp and present and funny in the dry specific way he was funny when he was feeling well, and he held the table with the easy authority of a man who had been doing it for forty years. My mother watched him with the expression she wore when she was storing something up, committing it to memory, which she had been doing more often in recent months. I looked at them and thought about forty-one years and felt the particular weight of it tonight more than usual.
