Page 86 of Graceless

"Better?"

"Shut up," I said, and pulled his shirt off him.

He rolled me under him, into the pile, all that weight held on his forearms like it was nothing because to him it is nothing, and he looked down at me in the starlight with the blue turned all the way up.

"I want everything tonight," he said. "Slowly. Tell me yes."

"Yes."

He started at my throat and went down.

He took his time at my breasts until I was pulling his hair and swearing at the sky, and then he kept going, unhurried, mouth and heat, down my stomach, my hip bones, the inside of one thigh — and the March air touched me for half a breath before his mouth did, hot as August, and my whole body arched up off the blanket into it.

"Raq—"

He hummed against me, pleased, thorough, and did not hurry for anyone.

He worked me with his mouth and the surf kept its count and I lost track of which was which — long patient waves, each one closer in, his hands pinning my hips to the earth like I might otherwise leave it, which was a fair assessment — and when I broke the first time I broke loud, no neighbors for a mile, my fingers in his hair, the stars getting an education.

He came back up my body slowly, kissing as he went, and settled between my thighs, heavy and hot, and held there — right there — with his forehead against mine.

"Caterina." Wrecked already, and he hadn't even⁠—

"Now," I said.

He pushed into me in one long slow thick stroke and the sound I made went out over the Atlantic.

He moved like the tide. That's the only honest report — slow, deep, relentless, each stroke arriving all the way and staying a beat before it went, and the blankets held our heat in a pocket of summer while the winter stood around us like a congregation, and I wrapped my legs around him and met him and said his name and other things, less printable, that made the low not-human sound tear up out of his chest.

"More."

"Everything," he agreed, and gave it to me — harder now, deeper, one hand fisting the blanket by my head, the other under my hips, angling me until every stroke hit the spot that whited out the stars, and I felt the iron control in him start to slip stroke by stroke, felt it and chased it, dug my nails into his back and told him exactly what I wanted in exactly the words Nonna's kitchen never heard.

When I broke the second time it took him with me. He came apart with his forehead pressed to mine and his eyes open, blue to brown, my name breaking in half in his mouth, his whole body shuddering into me while the surf counted us home.

For a long time neither of us moved. Steam rose off his back into the March air.

"Physics," I said, when I could.

He laughed — the real one, the rare one, rumbling under my hands — and rolled us so I was on his chest in the blanket pile, one ear on the slow immense heart, the ocean keeping its count, steam actually rising off us into the March air, and I started laughing and couldn't entirely stop.

"What."

"Steam. We're steaming, Raq. On a public beach. In March." I wiped my eyes. "I'm going to light a candle for whoever's on the boardwalk camera. Honest to God, by the grace of⁠—"

—grace of God.

The word went off in my mouth.

I sat up fast, hauling the blanket around me, and the cold took one bite of my shoulders before his warmth chased it off, and I looked down at him lying there under the stars.

"You said they took your grace."

He went still.

"Grace of God," I said. "God gives grace. Saved by grace. The nuns — twelve years, Raq, the nuns said we need God's grace to be saved, He gives it, it's a gift, it's the whole—" I stopped, because he wasn't looking at me anymore. He was looking at the stars, and he was too quiet, and I know his quiets now. "What exactly did they take?"

The surf ran three counts.