Page 37
“Brody.”
He hummed. Against her. She felt it everywhere.
“Brody, I —” She’d meant to say something. It went. “Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”
She didn’t care. It was building in her, fast, low and hot and climbing, the way nothing had built in her in a year, in longer, and she heard herself getting loud and got her other hand over her own mouth, and he pushed two fingers into her and curled them and put his mouth back where it had been, and she went over. Hard. With her heel in his back and her hand in his hair and her own palm over her mouth so the house wouldn’t hear, and it went on, and on, her whole body pulling tight and letting go and pulling tight again, and he stayed with her through all of it and didn’t stop until she pushed his head away with both hands.
“Christ,” she said, to the ceiling.
“Uh huh.”
“That was —”
“I know what it was. I was there.” He came up the bed. He was still in his jeans and she was in nothing, and he lay down beside her and put his hand flat on her stomach and looked at her, and he was pleased with himself, and he was allowed to be. “You’re loud.”
“I am not loud.”
“You had your hand over your mouth.”
“That’s called being considerate, there’s a child down the hall —”
“It’s called loud, Sunny.” He kissed her shoulder. “I like it.”
She got him out of the jeans herself, because he was taking too long about it and because she wanted to. He was as good as the yard had promised and the fridge had confirmed, and she’d stopped pretending she hadn’t looked. She put her hand around him, hot and heavy and hard for her, and moved it, slow, and watched his eyes shut and his head go back and his jaw do the small thing it did at supper when she laughed at Jett, and that was worth twelve nights on its own.
“Sunny.”
“Mm.”
“If you keep doing that —”
“I know what happens if I keep doing that. I’m thirty.” She did it again. “Take my hand off, then.”
“No,” he said, and she laughed at him, and kept going till he took her wrist.
“Nightstand,” he said.
She reached. There was a box, new, the seal broken. She looked at it and looked at him.
“Where’d you buy these.”
“Where do you think.”
“Earl’s.”
“There’s one store, Sunny.”
“Then Earl knows.”
“Earl’s known since the lot. Earl knew before we did.” He took the box from her. “You want to talk about Earl or you want to —”
“I don’t want to talk about Earl.”
“Good,” he said, and then he was over her, his weight on his arms and his hips between her thighs, and she got her hands on his back and her knees up, and he pushed into her. Slow. So slow she felt every inch of it, the stretch and the weight and the heat, and she heard herself say his name, and he stopped, all the way in, and held still.
He’d been talking the whole time, the way he did everything, and she’d been giving it back, and that had been what she wanted: a thing with no weight to it, a thing two people could do and laugh about and walk away from in November. Now he was inside her and he’d stopped. His face was six inches from hers in the lamplight and he wasn’t talking. He wasn’t smiling. He was looking at her the way he’d looked at her from the floor with her T-shirt in his hand, and slower than that, and the whole room had gone quiet, and something went through her that had nothing to do with her body.
She’d never seen it. Nobody had. She knew that as plainly as she’d ever known anything. The county got the grin and the talk and the swimming hole. This, the quiet, this man looking at her with nothing on his face but her, nobody had ever had. It was hers. He’d given it to her without being asked, in the dark, with his body still, and it frightened her so badly she couldn’t breathe.
