Page 44 of Love All
I’ll cop to having pictured it. A man pictures things. But every version I ever managed had her in command, Charlotte running the encounter the way she runs everything, setting theterms, keeping the score. I never once managed to picture this: Charlotte handing me the terms. Charlotte watching me with her guard gone and her breath already uneven before I’ve done anything but look at her. It rewrites the whole fantasy in real time, and the rewrite is better, because the rewrite is true, and nothing I have ever invented comes close to a real thing she decided to give me.
I get her out of the soft worn shirt, and then the bra, and take a moment to just look — because I’ve earned that much — until she flushes and says “don’t,” and I say “not a chance.”
Then I sit back on the edge of the bed and pull her into my lap, her back against my chest, and hook my hands under her knees and spread her legs over the outside of mine, opening her up, leaving her bare to the cool air of the room and nothing else, because there is no one else. Just my chest at her back and my mouth at her ear.
“Ben—” Already unsteady.
“I’ve got you. Just feel it.” I bring my hands up and palm her breasts, slow, rolling her nipples between my fingers until she arches back against me with a sound she’d deny under oath.
“You have no idea,” I say into her ear, low, “how long I’ve wanted you exactly like this. Spread open in my lap.” I roll her nipples again and feel the gasp move through her whole body. “You’re so beautiful and sofuckingwet.”
She shivers. Her thighs tense over mine. I feel the precise moment the dirty talk stops embarrassing her and starts wrecking her.
Then I drag one hand down her stomach, slow, and finally touch her where she’s been aching for it, and she gasps and bucks in my lap. I smile against her ear and get to work.
Here’s the thing about giving Charlotte Astor what she wants: I have no intention of giving it to her on her schedule. The second she pushes her hips up for more,Ben, please, faster— I slow down. Deliberately. Maddeningly. Two fingers circling her clit at a pace that gives her nowhere near enough. And the second she tries to take the wheel back, tries to direct me,not like that, harder, do it— I go slower still. Patient. Punishing. Holding her right at the edge and refusing to let her over it. Because she does not get to run this. That’s the entire point. That’s the thing she came here to hand over, and I intend to make her actually hand it over.
“You,” she gasps, furious, ruined, “are doing this onpurpose—”
“Obviously.” I kiss the side of her neck. “You said you wanted to find out what you are when you’re not in charge. I’m finding out. You’reexquisite.”
She swears at me, and I turn her head with my free hand and kiss her, open, sloppy, all tongue, swallowing the curse whole — and keep my fingers moving at the exact unhurried pace that’s driving her out of her mind. She makes a broken sound into my mouth, half a sob, tears standing in her eyes from the sheer overwhelm of being held at the edge by someone who will not,will not, let her control the fall.
It’s a battle of wills. Everything with us is a battle of wills. And there’s only one way to win this one: make her surrender on purpose.
“Say it,” I murmur against her wet, open mouth. “Not the safe word. The other one.”
She holds out. Of course she holds out, until she’s shaking, until she’s crying into my mouth, until every furious clever thing in her has burned down to a single syllable. And then Charlotte Astor, who has never asked anyone for anything in her life, breaks, and says it against my lips, wrecked and desperate:
“Please.”
“Good girl.”
I give her all of it at once, pressure, speed, my thumb on her clit and two fingers curled deep — and she comes apart in my lap so hard she nearly comes up off it, my name and that onepleasestill in her mouth, and I hold her through every wave of it, and kiss her pouting, bitten, gorgeous mouth, and do not let her go.
She’s boneless after — pouty-lipped, kiss-drunk — and she twists around in my lap and looks at me with her control in actual rubble and says, “Bed. Now,” and doesn’t bother with the rest of the sentence, and doesn’t have to.
I lay her back and get the condom from the nightstand. She watches me roll it on with open, unhidden want. I push into her, slow, all the way, both of us groaning — and then I have to stop, buried in her, forehead to hers, because the feel of her is going to finish me and I want this to last a year.
“Don’t you dare stop,” she breathes.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Then it’s the other thing — not the slow torture. This: hot and wet and desperate, the two of us finally moving like one thing with nothing between us, her legs wrapped around me and her nails in my back and her hips rising to meet every stroke. And I talk her through all of it, because I’ve learned, in the last half hour, that the litigator who hates being told anythinglovesbeing told this — “There you go. That’s it. You’re doing so good, baby. Look at you, taking everything, so good for me—” and she comes apart on the words as much as on anything. Gasping. Swearing. Gone. Moving the way she has never moved with anyone, and the loosening is hers, and new, and handed to me — the one thing in my whole coasting life I already know I’ll spend years trying to deserve.
She’s climbing again, right at the edge of it, and I feel her start to tense. The old instinct. The bracing. The part of her that fights the fall even now. I get my mouth to her ear.
“Let go,” I say, driving into her, meaning every word of it down to the floor. “I’ve got you, Charlotte. I have never wanted anything in my life the way I want you, and I’m not going anywhere. So let go. Let go for me.”
And she does. She comes with my name in her mouth, clenching around me so hard it drags me straight over the edge with her, and I bury myself deep and let go too, shaking, undone, and the whole white-knuckled world goes quiet and gold.
For a long moment neither of us moves or speaks, just our breathing, and the bad movie still going in the other room, throwing its idiot light down the hall. I have her heartbeat under my palm and her weight against me and the specific, unrepeatable knowledge that Charlotte Astor just came apart in my arms with my name in her mouth and let me watch every second of it. And I understand that whatever happens after, whatever the cost she keeps swearing is coming for us, I have already been paid in full. In advance. More than I will ever manage to earn back.
***
After, she doesn’t put the wall back up.
That’s the thing I keep waiting for that doesn’t come. I braced for it, the wall, the brisk reassembly, thewell, that was a tactical error,the deflection she runs on instinct the second she’s shown anything. I figure I have about ninety seconds before Charlotte Astor remembers who she’s supposed to be and gets her face back under management.
