Page 44 of The Drifter

Then, I took my time, the way I'd promised.

I started at her ankle. She laughed at first—"Clint, what are you—"—and then, she stopped laughing, because I meant it. Her ankle bone under my mouth. The long muscle of her calf. The back of her knee, which made her breath catch and her fingers find my hair. I crossed her like country. That's the only way I know to say it. I intended to survey every acre of her that had gone unappreciated. I was in no hurry, because for the first time in my adult life, the not-hurrying wasn't leaving. It was staying.

Her thighs, inside and out. Her hip bones, which turned out to be sensitive enough to make her swear. The soft of her belly, trembling. I spent time along her ribs. I found the line of her waist with the flat of my tongue. She arched and said my name like a complaint, like praise.

"You're taking a survey," she breathed.

"Something like that."

"How long does a survey take?"

"Depends on the country." I kissed the underside of her breast. "Some country, a man wants to be thorough."

When I finally took her nipple in my mouth, she came up off the bed into me. I gathered her there, one arm under the small of her back, holding her bowed while I learned one breast and then the other, slow, patient, until her breathing had gone ragged and her hands were pulling and her hips had started rolling against nothing, looking for me.

"Clint."

"Almost."

"You are the slowest⁠—"

"Yes, ma'am."

I moved down her.

When I settled between her thighs, she was already trembling. I didn’t go straight to the center of her. I kissed everywhere around it, the creases of her, the soft insides of her thighs gone slick, until she was gripping the quilt with both hands and making sounds with no words left in them. Only then did I put my mouth where she needed it.

I licked her. I tasted her.

She cried out like something breaking loose from a dock.

I went slow, even then. Especially then. Long and flat and patient, learning her, listening to her the way I listen to ground—where she went tight, where she melted, what made her thighs shake against my ears, what made her hand slam down into my hair and hold on.

I found the rhythm that undid her and then I kept it, exactly, without varying, without mercy, the way you hold a heading. I felt the storm build in her from a long way off, the way you can watch weather come across open land for miles before it arrives.

It arrived.

And God, did she taste good.

She broke with her whole body, bowing up off the bed, my name coming apart in her mouth, one long wave and then the after-waves. I stayed with her through all of it, gentling, slowing, until she pulled me up by the hair with both hands.

Her face was wrecked and lit and wide open, none of the built voice anywhere on it.

"Come here," she said. "Come here."

I came over her, braced on my forearms, her thighs cradling me, the whole warm length of her under the whole length of me. There was one more pause—the last one, the deep one. We were bare. Nothing between us and nothing reached for. I held at her entrance and looked the question at her, plain.

"Yes," she said, to all of it. "Yes. Just you. I want to feel you."

Her hand wrapped around my cock and guided me there.

I pushed into her slow.

There aren't good words for it. Slick heat, and the tight give of her, and taking it in fractions—an inch, a breath, an inch—her mouth falling open, her hands gripping my shoulders, her eyes on mine and staying there, both of us watching each other feel it. When I was seated to the root in her, we both went still, and the room went still, and the light off the harbor moved on the ceiling. She exhaled a sound like a long journey ending.

"Oh," she said. Just that.

"I know."