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Beau stirs, half-wakes, tightens his arm around me without opening his eyes, murmurs something that might be my name into the pillow, and settles back into sleep, trusting and unguarded and certain I’ll be there when he wakes.
I just lie there, in the warm and the wreckage, already — God help me, already — beginning to plan the exit I stopped cataloging weeks ago, the way I’ve planned every exit my whole life, because the only thing more frightening than being left is the part where you let yourself believe you won’t be.
Chapter 19
Beau
Iwake up and she’s still here.
That’s the first thing my brain does — not the time, not the shoulder, not practice. Just: she’s still here. Sloane Beckett is in my bed in the grey morning light, on her side, facing away from me, and I lie still for a second and look at the line of her bare back and the platinum blonde hair across my pillow and I think: that happened. That was real. She’s still here.
I don’t move, because moving might end it. I’ve learned that about good things — you hold still and let them last.
My shoulder reminds me it exists when I shift, a deep ache where twenty-two drove it into the glass, where I told her last night I didn’t care about it and meant it. I still don’t care about it. There’s a girl in my bed who let me see her not managing, once, for a whole night, and the shoulder can file a complaint with someone who’s listening.
She stirs. Comes awake the way she does everything, all at once and aware, and I feel the second she remembers where she is — a small stillness, a recalibration — and then she rolls onto her back and looks at me, and her hair’s a mess and her eyes are soft with sleep and she is, without a single thing done to her face, the best thing I’ve ever woken up to.
“Morning,” I say.
“You’re staring again.”
“Still no no-staring clause.”
“I’m going to draft one.” But there’s no heat in it, and the corner of her mouth goes, and I lean over and kiss her, slow, morning-soft, and she lets me, her hand coming up to my jaw, and for a second it’s easy. It’s so easy.
Then she pulls back half an inch, and something crosses her face I don’t catch in time, and she says, “I need a shower.”
“Yeah.” I drag my thumb along her hip. “You do.”
“That was an insult.”
“It was an invitation.”
She pretends to think about it, which is how I know I've already won.
She lets me pull her up out of the warm wreck of the sheets, and we go down the hall to the bathroom, her hand in mine, neither of us bothering with clothes we're about to not need. It's the one nice thing about this house — the bathroom my room shares, redone before we moved in, a walk-in shower big enough for two with no door to fight with, just a half-wall of glass gone foggy at the edges and a wide tiled floor that slopes to a drain in the center. Room to move. Room for a guy my size and then some.
I reach in and crank the handle and we wait the few seconds it takes the old pipes to think about it, her leaning against the counter watching me, me watching her watch me, until the water finally turns over and goes hot.
The water runs hot and the bathroom fills with steam and I get her under the spray and against the tile and there's nothing careful about it now, none of last night's slow first-time reverence — this is morning and she's wet and warm and laughing when I crowd her against the wall, the real laugh, and I swallow it out of her mouth
“The guys—” she starts.
“Have practice. They’re dead to the world. We’ve got time.” I get my mouth on her throat, down, over the slick skin of her collarbone. “Stop tracking the house.”
“I always track the—”
“I know you do.” I drop to my knees on the wet tile, shoulder be damned, and look up at her through the steam. “Stop. Just for ten minutes. Let me.”
And she looks down at me with her hair plastered to her shoulders and the water running between us and whatever argument she had dies in her throat, and she nods. I hook her leg over my shoulder and put my mouth on her pussy and she stops tracking the house.
She tastes like the shower and underneath it like her, and I take my time even though there isn’t much of it, learning the same things I learned last night and finding they still work. I start slow — broad, flat strokes of my tongue, no hurry, until her hips start to chase it — and then I give her what she’s chasing, my tongue on her clit, working it the way she likes, while I slide two fingers into her and curl them up. The sound she makes goes straight through me. Her hand fists in my wet hair and her thigh tightens over my shoulder and I hold her open with my thumb and stay right there, exactly there, because there is nothing in my life I’m better at than reading what a body wants a half-second before it knows, and her body is telling me everything in the only language I’ve ever been completely fluent in. I feel her start to go — the tremble building in her thigh, the way her breath stops — and I don’t change a thing, don’t get greedy, just keep the rhythm until it breaks over her. She comes with my name bitten off in her mouth and her thigh shaking against my ear and her hand pulling my hair hard enough to sting, and I stay with her through all of it, gentling, until she’s pushing weakly at my head, too much, too much.
I come up her body grinning. “Still got it.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“You came in about ninety seconds, Beckett, I’m allowed to be a little insufferable.”
