"I'm not even close to finished."
I pull her up the length of my body and roll her beneath me, settling between her thighs with the weight and intent of a man who is done being taken apart and ready to do the taking. Her legs wrap around my hips, and the heat of her against my cock, slick and swollen, makes my jaw clench.
Her hand reaches between us, wraps around my cock with the firm, knowing grip that makes my breath leave in a rush, and guides me to her entrance.
I lower myself over her, bracing on my forearms, and the full contact of skin against skin from hip to shoulder pulls a sound from her that is all need and no composure.
I push inside her in one slow stroke, and the tight, wet grip of her body, still pulsing from the orgasm, pulls a groan from somewhere I can't reach on purpose.
The rhythm starts slow. Not the urgency of the kitchen. Not the discovery of the first time. Not the claiming fierceness of the night she rode me with her hands on the headboard. Tonight every stroke is deliberate, weighted with the knowledge that tomorrow I send this woman into a room that might be rigged to hurt people, and every inch of contact is my body's way of memorizing what it can't afford to lose.
Her nails rake down my back. Her hips rise to meet mine. The pace builds because her body demands it, her legs tightening around my hips, her breathing going sharp and fast. My mouth finds her throat, her jaw, the place behind her ear where the response is always immediate, and the sound she makes against my skin is half frustration and half desperate pleasure.
"Harder," she breathes. "I won't break."
"I know you won't."
I give her harder, my hips driving forward with a force that makes her cry out and her hand fly to the iron headboard above her, bracing for the impact. My thumb slides between us, finds her clit, swollen and slick, and the contact alongside the depth of each stroke makes her body start to tighten around me.
I stop moving.
I am fully inside her, my hips pressed against hers, every point of contact locked in place. My thumb stills on her clit. My mouth stills on her throat.
The absolute cessation of movement after the building rhythm is a kind of control I learned in a different context, the ability to go from motion to stillness in a fraction of a second. The application of it here, with Ireland's body clenched around my cock and her breathing ragged and her nails scoring my back, is the most deliberately cruel thing I have ever done to a person I love.
The stillness holds for three heartbeats.
"Boone." Her voice is wrecked. "Move."
"Tell me something first."
"I will tell you anything you want if you move."
"Come back to me tomorrow."
The words come out rawer than I intend, stripped of the operational calm and the deadpan delivery.
They come out the way the names come out when I write them in the notebook, bare and heavy with the weight of a man who has lost people and knows what losing costs.
Her hands leave my back and frame my face.
Her thumbs press against my cheekbones, and the look she gives me is ferocious and absolutely certain.
"I'm coming back to you tomorrow, Aldridge. And the day after. And every day after that until you run out of poems."
"I'm never running out of poems."
"Then I'm never not coming back."
My hips drive forward, and the rhythm that follows is hard and fast and nothing the textbooks would recommend.
Her body answers mine stroke for stroke, and the bed beneath us protests the physics of two bodies moving with an urgency that furniture was not designed to accommodate.
My thumb finds her again, pressing hard, circling fast, and her body starts to tighten around me with the escalating pressure that means she's close.
Her breathing fractures. Her thighs grip my hips hard enough to bruise.
The orgasm builds in the clenching of her body around my cock and the pitch of her voice climbing toward the register that means she's about to break.
