"Hey," he says quietly.
"Hey," I answer.
He walks me back toward the bedroom slowly with him following close behind me, his hands sliding from my waist up to my breasts and I hear him do that, Jace, little chuckle.
That sound does what it always does to me, reaches past every careful layer I spent five years constructing and finds the part of me that stopped being careful the night I chose him.
The bedroom is quiet and dark.
He takes his time. He takes my shirt off over my head. He is still behind me so he unsnaps my bra. I feel the roughness of his hands over my breasts. He is slow and methodical without hurrying.
With the focused attention of a man who decided somewhere along the way that this was worth doing properly. I stop thinking in complete sentences approximately thirty seconds after the door closes.
There is nothing held back tonight.
He turns me around and undoes my pants, slides them down my legs so I can step out of them along with my panties.
I reach for his shirt and he lets me take it, his hands dropping to my hips while I work the buttons. When my palms find the warm skin of his chest, he exhales in a way that tells me I'm not the only one feeling this differently tonight.
He lays me back against the pillows and takes his time working his way down, his mouth finding the curve of my throat, the line of my collarbone, my breasts one by one, learning all of me with a patience that makes restraint feel like a genuine waste.
His hands find me hot and wet. He massages my clit with his fingers. He slips two fingers inside me. My body arches and a moan comes out that I try to hush.
His mouth is still on my breasts. His teeth grazing just enough to make me squirm. His hands and his mouth work together in a way that suggests he has been paying attention to every response I've ever given him and is applying that knowledge deliberately and without mercy.
I stop being quiet about it.
There's no point. Hadley is at Grandma's house.
He looks up at me once, his eyes dark and certain in the low light. "You good?"
"Don't stop," I tell him.
He doesn't.
By the time he finally settles over me I am not thinking of anything outside of this room. I have stopped caring about all of it entirely.
He moves slowly at first, watching my face, staying connected to my eyes when he slides inside me. He starts slowly moving in and out. “Harder,” I tell him, "I want it harder, I want to explode with you." He doesn't hold back.
I can hear the bed moving below us. I can't concentrate because it feels so good. I don't want it to stop. Suddenly I'm there. I'm right on the edge and he can see it. "Let it go baby," I hear him whisper and I do. My whole body shakes and arches. He follows right after. We work to catch our breath as we lay tangled in each other.
He pulls me close. my head resting on his shoulder, his arm heavy and certain across my waist, his breathing slowing in the dark beside me, and I lie there in the quiet feeling, the kind of settled that can't be constructed or decided on. It just is. The way he is. The way this is.
I close my eyes.
Sleep comes fast and without argument.
I don't know how long I've been under when his phone lights up the room.
He reaches for it quickly. The transition from sleep to alert taking half a second because some habits don't leave when you have kids.
I watch his face in the glow of the screen.
Every muscle in his body goes tight.
He turns the phone so I can see the screen, and what's there makes my stomach drop clean through the mattress.
A message from Brooks. Four words and a photo.
