My eyes find his, and I watch while he thrusts into me deeper. My walls are clenching around him. The feeling of him against me after an orgasm is unreal. My body is shaking, and he knows it. He slides a hand under my knee and lifts it. He glances down and moans.
Then he pulls out quickly, looking right at me as he jerks himself off. I watch as his come fills the condom. He shudders and then leans down to kiss me through the tail end of it.
He eases back, breathing hard, and takes care of the condom, then cleans us both up gently with his discarded shirt. And then he picks the whipped cream up off the mattress, puts a little in his mouth, and arches an eyebrow at me.
“Want some?”
I laugh, wrecked, breathless, and stupidly happy. I open my mouth with a quick nod.
He props himself over me on one elbow, flushed, soft around the eyes. He gives me a mouthful and then he’s kissing me. I nearly spit the entire thing into his mouth. Some of it ends up on his nose and his chin. I start laughing, and now it goes in his eye.
“Sorry,” I mutter, covering my mouth. I swallow what I can, and then I bring his face to mine and lick him clean.
“I could get used to this,” he says, looking down at me.
He puts whipped cream on my boobs again and grins as he leans down to lick it off. I giggle, feeling it spark low through me all over again.
“Do you want to shower?” he whispers against my skin.
I shake my head.
“Do you want to cuddle?”
I shrug.
He laughs.
I grab his face. “What do you wantto do?”
“The truth?” He winces toward the door. “There’s a massive mess downstairs, and I really need to clean it.”
I smile. “Yeah. I’ll help.”
We get dressed and go downstairs to the kitchen, which is a lot worse than I realized. The pie was horrible, but I appreciate his effort.
Stanley props his phone against the fruit bowl and puts music on and proceeds to clean a kitchen the way nobody in history has cleaned a kitchen — singing, badly, into a spatula, catching me around the waist every time he passes to peck me somewhere, my cheek, my temple, the corner of my mouth.
Somewhere under the flour is the note from the Hawthorne House boys — clean the kitchen after. I laugh while reading all of their notes. They thought of everything.
Before he scrapes the pie into the trash, I make him stop.
“Wait.” I dig my phone out. “I need a picture.”
He poses with it — the tragic, lopsided ruin of it — proud as anything, and I take the picture, and I already know I’ll keep it forever. The worst pie ever made. By the best hands. For me. As promised.
Then a good song comes on, and he sets the spatula down and pulls me in by the hand, and we dance in the middle of his disaster kitchen. My face against his chest, and neither of us says a word. We just hold each other, and I smile because somehow this is more than enough.
We finish cleaning the kitchen, and then we go out and get food somewhere cheap and loud. He holds my hand across the table and steals my fries and cracks so many jokes that mycheeks hurt from laughing. And when he drives me home and walks me up, I stop at my door with my hand on the knob, and I don’t want the day to end.
“Do you want to come in?”
He doesn’t even pretend to consider it. “Yeah. Obviously, yeah.”
And later, with him wrapped around me in my own bed, I close my eyes and think about what all of this means. I take a tally of where every single thing stands, what everything means. And for the first time ever in my life, I find that everything comes to the same conclusion, which is that I have never been this happy.
I kiss his sleeping face, and to my surprise, he pulls me in closer.
“Don’t go, Linwood.”
