Her body underneath is familiar and still arresting, the swimmer's shoulders, the scar on the right one that tells the story of the career that ended and the purpose that replaced it, the freckles that scatter across her collarbone in a pattern I have memorized and still haven't finished mapping.
She pulls my shirt over my head and presses her palm flat against my abdomen, fingers spread wide, and the contact sends heat directly south.
My cock has been hard since the kitchen, since she put her hand on my jaw and looked at me with the expression of someone who'd read every poem and decided the man who wrote them was hers to keep.
"The poem about my hands," she says, looking up at me. "You said my fingers find the damage underneath with accuracy that borders on intuition."
"Slant quote. Close enough."
Her fingers trace down my ribs, following the topography of old scars with the attention she brings to assessment. She knows them now, each one cataloged: the shrapnel mark below the eighth rib on my left side, the long pale line across my hip from a training accident. She knows which ones make my musclestighten and which ones I've stopped feeling, and the distinction in her touch tells me she remembers every one.
"I'm going to find every piece of damage on you, Aldridge. Starting now."
Her mouth follows her fingers down my ribs, across my abdomen, and her hands work my belt open with the focused efficiency she brings to everything.
When she wraps her fingers around my cock, the grip is firm and knowing, the pressure exactly right, and the sound that leaves me is low and rough and not something I would have let her hear a week ago. Before the notebook. Before the last wall fell.
She strokes once, slow, her thumb dragging across the head, and my hand finds the back of her neck, fingers threading into her hair.
"I want to taste you," she says, and the directness of it is so completely Ireland that the wanting spikes through me hard enough to narrow my vision.
Her mouth closes over me, warm and wet, her tongue pressing flat along the underside, and the sensation drops through my spine and bottoms out in my hips.
She has learned the rhythm that takes me apart, refined it across two weeks of learning my body with the attention and patience to find exactly where the response lives. The confidence in her tells me she knows what she's doing and enjoys the control of it.
My fingers tighten in her hair. Red hair falling over freckled shoulders, her lips around me, her cheeks hollowing with each slow pull, and the sight of her burns into the place where I store the things I will carry permanently.
The losses are in that place. And now this: Ireland on her knees with her mouth on my cock and the notebook open on thekitchen table and the trust it takes to be this vulnerable going in both directions simultaneously.
I pull her up and shed the rest of my clothes before I lose the choice.
Her eyes open and the question in them is answered when I lower her onto the bed and settle over her, my weight on my forearms, her hair fanning across the pillow in a color I will write about later when the deck is quiet and the memory of this is the ink.
"Tell me," she says.
"Tell you what."
"What you see." Her voice is open and her eyes hold mine and the invitation is not about sex. It is about the notebook, the practice of putting into language what I observe, and she is asking me to do it here, with her body underneath mine and the evening light turning her skin to amber.
"Red hair on a white pillow," I say, and lower my mouth to her throat. "A pulse under my lips that speeds up when I do this." My tongue traces the tendon in her neck, and her hips rise against mine, the friction of her center against my cock pulling a groan from somewhere low in my throat. "Hands that have memorized every muscle in every patient they've touched, gripping my shoulders hard enough to leave marks."
"I don't leave marks."
"You left marks last time." I find the spot below her ear that makes her gasp, and she gasps, and the confirmation settles in my teeth. "I checked."
"You checked."
"I'm thorough."
She laughs, breathless, and the laugh turns into a moan when my mouth drops to her breast, my tongue circling her nipple before I pull it between my lips. Her back arches, pressing intome, and her fingers dig into my shoulders with the strength she has never lost.
The same attention to the other breast, and her hips grind upward against me, the patience she usually brings to this dissolving under the same rawness that has been running through me since the kitchen.
My hand slides between her thighs and my fingers find her slick and swollen and ready, and the heat of her against my fingertips makes my cock ache where it presses against her hip.
I know how she likes to be touched here. Two fingers, curled, a rhythm that matches the pace she sets with her hips. I give her that rhythm and watch her face change, watch her jaw go loose and her eyes lose focus and her lips part around a sound she doesn't bother shaping into words.
The power of knowing exactly how to make this woman's body respond is a kind of possession that has nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with devotion. She is mine in the way poems belong to the person who wrote them: not because I captured her, but because I paid enough attention to earn the right to the language.
