She would make Sawyer Alburn a mess. A beautiful, quivering, undone mess.
That hand on the driver’s seat headrest held on for dear life.
When Nellie finally eased up—just marginally, just from relentless to slow—Sawyer made a sound that might have been her name or might have been something else, something with no particular linguistic content, just breath and aftermath. She sank backward, catching herself a split second before she sat directly on Nellie’s chest and then clumsily rearranged her long limbs until she lay against Nellie in the narrow space on the patchwork quilt.
“That was incredible,” Sawyer mumbled into Nellie’s neck, “but, how…?” Her sentence trailed off as she stretched one leg until her knee gave a loud click.Nellie had to bite her tongue against a sympathetic laugh. “How do you live like this?”
Nellie wrapped her arms tightly around her still-quivering companion and kissed her temple.
“With tremendous joy,” she said. “Obviously.”
28
CHAPTER 28 – SAWYER
Sawyer’s heart was pounding so hard, she was sure Nellie would feel it.
Not the frantic sprint it had been doing a few hours ago, when the whole narrow world of Dolores had condensed itself into Nellie’s mouth and the unceremonious soundtrack of two grown women trying to be sensual in a space built for hobbits. That pounding had resolved itself alongside the toe-curling orgasm. This one was the lingering, low kind. The kind that just kept tapping at her sternum with a persistent insistence, reminding her that this was all new and overwhelming and extraordinary.
If she felt it, Nellie didn’t comment. In fact, Sawyer wasn’t sure if she had dozed off completely. Her arms were wound tightly around Sawyer’s rib cage as though she wanted to keep her as close as possible—something that wasn’t entirely necessary in this space where Sawyer couldn’t physically move away—and her legs had threaded themselves so thoroughly between both of Sawyer’s that untangling them would requireeither a formal negotiation or scissors, no lesbian pun intended there.
Sawyer did not mind. She lay there, studying the curve of the van ceiling, and let herself be held.
The strangeness of it landed slowly. She was accustomed to being the one who did the holding, if she could even claim to be accustomed to any form of holding at all. The architecture of her romantic history, such as it was, had always arranged itself that way: Sawyer with her arms around someone, Sawyer with her chin resting on a head, Sawyer providing the structure. She had never examined this. It had simply been the configuration that made sense for her body and her temperament and probably, if she was honest, for the particular story she’d always told about what kind of person she was.
With a faint sigh, Nellie nuzzled her temple. Sawyer exhaled.
It turned out that being held was exceptional. It was warm and it was heavy and she could feel the steady comfort of Nellie’s breathing where their bodies pressed together. The net result of all of these inputs was that Sawyer Alburn, who had not once in her adult life experienced difficulty knowing exactly what she wanted, found she did not want to be anywhere else on the planet.
Which was, she thought, looking at the ceiling of a converted van, a slightly alarming realization for a woman who owned a penthouse.
“You’re doing some serious thinking,” Nellie said drowsily.
Sawyer looked up. Nellie had not, apparently, been asleep. One eye was cracked open at her, bleary but watchful.
“What makes you say that?”
“I can tell.” Nellie shifted, wriggling lower in the bed so that they were eye to eye. “Your jaw does a thing, I could feel it.”
“My jaw does not do a thing.”
“It absolutely does.” Nellie reached up and pressed two fingers to the hinge of Sawyer’s jaw. She pressed until she felt the tension Sawyer had not noticed she was holding. “There. That.”
Sawyer unclenched. She hadn’t meant to clench in the first place. “How do you notice such tiny details?” she marveled before Nellie could enumerate any other involuntary physical tells she’d apparently catalogued. “It hasn’t even been three months since we met.”
Nellie’s tired eyes snapped open completely.
“Did you mark the date?” Nellie’s mouth curved up at the corner. “Like on your official calendar?”
“Of course, I know what date it was. I entered into a legal agreement on a damn livestream.”
“That’s the most Sawyer Alburn way to say ‘I was counting the days since we met’ I have ever?—”
“The point,” Sawyer said, “is that less than three months ago, I drove out here to deal with a trespassing situation involving a woman who had chained herself to a tree.” The patchwork quilt rustled as Nellie burrowed into Sawyer’s neck and shook with suppressed laughter. “I genuinely thought it was going to take forty-five minutes for you to bow out, possibly an hour if you were particularly litigious. I had a particularly grumpy lunch at one.”
“What did you have?” Nellie asked, into Sawyer’s sternum.
“That’s not relevant.”
