I’d been addressing it. Thoroughly. Repeatedly.
Apparently we needed another session.
I pressed my mouth to her stomach, kissed her slow.
“You know what I’m thinking about when you walk into a room?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“I think about how you did this,” I said. “How your body just—decided to do this extraordinary thing.”
I pressed my palm flat against the side of her stomach, where I’d felt them move last week, and felt her breath hitch. “You’re growing two people, Maggie. Inside you. Right now.”
“I know, I was there?—”
“And your body is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.” I looked up at her from my knees. “Every single change. Every curve. Every part of you that’s different than September.” I held her gaze. “I am out of my mind for all of it.”
Her eyes were bright.
“Don’t,” she said. “You know I’ll?—”
“I’m not trying to make you cry,” I said. “I’m trying to get you out of these leggings.”
She laughed, but she let me drag the leggings down with her panties. I pressed my mouth to the inside of her thigh, tasting her—this different flavor than she’d had when I first knelt between her legs at the bar at Rick’s, when she was sad and hurting and already mine without me knowing it.
“You sore?” I asked.
“My back,” she admitted. “And…oh god…yeah, everywhere?”
“Here?” I pressed my thumbs gently into her hips, rubbing slow circles, and she made a sound that wasn’t entirely about what I was doing with my mouth.
“Yes,” she breathed. “God, yes.”
“Tell me what feels good,” I said.
“Everything you’re doing feels good.”
I laughed against her, then I just…devoured her. Breathed her in, felt how she was changing, how she was the same…how much she was still going to change. Reminded myself I got to be there through all of it, that I wasn’t missing out on this part, not this time. I learned her all over again, the new version, the December version—where she was sensitive, where she needed softness, where she needed more. She stayed as quiet as she could, one hand over her mouth and the other in my hair, her whole body trembling by the time I finally let her fall apart.
I held her through it.
Both hands on her hips, steady, while she came apart above me.
When she came back down she was looking at the ceiling with an expression I knew well—undone, satisfied, slightly indignant about how thoroughly she’d just been handled.
“Nash,” she said.
“Mm.”
“Get up here.”
I stood.
She was already reaching for me, pulling me back down, her mouth finding mine—urgent now, done with being patient.
“I want you inside me,” she said against my lips.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
