Page 51 of The Drifter

Long strokes. All the way out to the edge, all the way back home. I watched myself disappear into her and thought I might not survive the watching. I watched her spine, the sweet channel of it, the muscles moving under her skin. Her hair had fallen forward. One of her hands left the shelf and reached back and found my forearm and gripped it, not to steer, just to hold. Something about that grip put an ache in my chest that had nothing to do with the rest of it.

It wasn't just my body in that kitchen.

I've had my body places without the rest of me. Most of my life, if I'm honest. And standing there behind her with the light dying gold on her shoulders and her hand locked on my arm, I was all the way present—every acre of me. What I was full of, along with the heat, was something close to gratitude. For the small of her back. For the sounds she'd stopped guarding. For the trust in a woman who couldn't be looked at an hour ago, bent bare over her own refrigerator with a man's name in her mouth. I moved in her slow and thorough and thought, take care of this.

Whatever else you do. Take care of this.

She came with the cold air rolling over us and her forehead dropped against her own wrist, shaking, clenching around me in long pulls that nearly took me over with her. I held on. Barely. I wrapped an arm around her waist and held her through it, still buried deep. I kissed the back of her neck while she came down.

She shut the refrigerator.

Then, she turned around in my arms, flushed and lit and loose-jointed, and she looked up at me for a long moment with something in her face I couldn't read.

She went to her knees on the kitchen floor.

"Sasha—"

"Hush," she said. "My house."

Her house. Her rules. Her mouth.

She took me in slow, the way I'd taken her. I put a hand back and found the counter's edge. She was merciless about it—long and wet and thorough, her hands working my cock with her mouth, her eyes coming up to mine and holding there. The sight of her, this woman, on the floor of her own kitchen with her hair everywhere and her lips around me and her eyes on my face like she was checking her work—I had to go somewhere else in my head twice just to last. I put my hand in her hair, gentle. She hummed around me at that, pleased with herself. The sound nearly finished the argument.

"Enough," I finally managed, rough. "Come up here. Come up here before this ends embarrassing."

She came up grinning like she'd won something. She had.

I took her by the waist and lifted her. She went up light as a saddle. I set her on the counter by the sink and spread her knees and dropped to my own.

Turnabout. Old law. The oldest.

She was soaked and swollen. She cried out at the first pass of my mouth, her heels finding my back, her hands going to the cabinet doors, the faucet, my hair, anywhere, nowhere.

I took my time.

I'd learned her once in the bed and I checked my work now, every note of her, slow, flat patience until her thighs were trembling against my ears and her voice had gone up somewhere past words. When she broke, she broke with her hand slammed flat on the countertop and her whole body bowing. I stayed with her all the way through it and gentled her all the way down, kissing the inside of her knee while she shook.

"Clint." Wrecked. Barely a word.

"Right here."

"I need—" She reached for me, both hands. "Up. You. Now."

I stood. She slid off that counter and into me and climbed.

That's the only word. She got her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist. I caught her under the thighs and took all of her weight like it was nothing, because it was nothing, because I've carried rucks heavier that gave me back a lot less.

She reached between us and lined me up. Then, she sank down onto my cock with both of us standing in the middle of her kitchen floor. Her head went back and mine went into her throat. The sound the two of us made together belonged out on open land somewhere.

Standing. Her whole weight in my hands. Nothing under her but me.

I walked us two steps and put her back gentle against the refrigerator door, for the leverage. She gasped at the cool of the steel and then laughed, breathless, delighted. The laugh turned into a moan mid-flight when I moved.

I held her and drove up into her, slow and deep. She rode down to meet me, and we found it—that old rhythm, the one from the bed, the one that had our names on it now—and kept it going in the last of the light.

I watched her the whole time.

That was the thing I wanted, more than my own finish. Her face from this close, inches away, nothing between us. The flush up her throat. Her eyes, which kept trying to close and kept coming back open to find me, like she'd decided she was done missing things. This close, I could see everything she'd stopped hiding, and I thought—clear, in the middle of it, like a bell in fog—there is not one thing about this woman I would change. Not one. The strength or the fear or the mouth on her or the empty room down the hall she thought I hadn't understood. All of it. Whole.