Page 44 of Knot the Plan
I have to slap a hand back on the counter to stay standing. He groans against me, low and filthy, the vibration of it going straight up my spine, and his hands tighten on my hips like he's been starving for exactly this.
“So sweet,” he murmurs into me, lips dragging, not letting up. “Knew you would be. Could do this for hours. Could live right here.” His tongue circles, slow and merciless, and my knees go. “That's it. Ride my face, Porter. Don't be polite about it. I want you greedy.”
I am not polite about it. Six years of careful comes apart at the seams. I'm rocking against his mouth and he's letting me, encouraging me, that low hungry sound rumbling out of him every time I gasp, and when he seals his lips over my clit and sucks I hear myself make a noise I have never made in my life.
“That's my girl,” he breathes, doing it again, watching me from down there with his eyes blown black. “Get loud for me. Nobody here but us. Want to hear exactly what I'm doing to you.”
He slides two fingers into me, easy, I'm so slick, and curls them, and the heel of his hand grinds against me while his mouth works and I'm gone, climbing fast, sobbing his name.
“Hudson, I'm—I'm gonna?—”
“I know. Can feel you.” His fingers thrust deeper, his tongue doesn't stop. “Clenching around my fingers, so tight, so close. Come on, sweetheart. Soak my hand. Let me feel it.”
And the worst part, the part I'll think about for weeks, is that he's not even taking. He's giving. He drove eighty minutes and got on his knees on my floor and aimed the whole of his attention at one thing, which is wrecking me, a thing I have apparently never once let anyone do without earning it first, and he's acting like getting to do it is the best thing that's ever happened to him.
That, finally, is what takes the last of me down.
I come apart with my hand fisted in his hair and his name in my mouth, clenching around his fingers in pulses while he groans and works me through every aftershock, my whole body singing a note I've spent six years and one little pill a day pretending I couldn't hear.
He doesn't stop until I'm pushing weakly at his shoulder, too sensitive, shaking. Then he presses one last open-mouthed kiss high on my thigh, slow and reverent, and sits back on his heels and looks up at me, mouth slick, eyes dark, the most undone I have ever seen Hudson Grant.
“That,” he says, hoarse, “was better than I thought it'd be. And I thought about it a lot.”
After,he gathers me down off the counter and into his lap on the kitchen floor like I weigh nothing.
There's a sound coming off him, low and steady, a rumble in his chest I can feel through my whole back. It takes my heat-soft brain a long moment to understand he's purring. That I did that. That the unflappable charming man who jokes about everything is sitting on my kitchen tile purring because he made me come and now he's holding me.
I should panic. I will panic. I can feel the panic out there at the edge of things, waiting its turn, with all its very good points about deadlines and fake packs and the fact that none of this was the plan.
But right now there's a warm steady purr at my back and juniper and rain all through my kitchen and a man pressing a kiss to my shoulder like I'm something worth being slow about, and I let myself have it, just for a minute. Just one.
“You okay?” he asks, quiet, his arms around me.
“No,” I say honestly, and feel him laugh.
“Yeah.” He tucks my hair back, the purr still going, unhurried. “Me neither.”
He doesn't say anything after that, and I'm grateful for it, because I don't think I could survive him saying anything right now. He just holds me, his thumb moving slow over my hip, the purr rumbling warm against my back, and lets the kitchen be quiet around us. Whatever this was, he's not rushing to name it. He's just here, easy, like he's got nowhere he'd rather be and all the time in the world to be there.
It would be so much simpler if he'd made it a joke. Hudson makes everything a joke. The fact that he isn't, right now, is the most dangerous thing he's done all day.
And I sit there in his lap on my kitchen floor, sated and undone and falling.
I do not tell him about the suppressant bottle I've been into three times today. Or that whatever he just quieted in me is already stirring again, even now, even after this. That if anything it's worse. I'm done lying to him, he says. I let him believe I am.
Because that's the one thing I can't say out loud yet, even now, even here. That this isn't going to stop when the reunion does. That my body has already chosen, even if I haven't let myself, and it didn't choose one of them.
It chose all three.
Chapter 15
Josie
Ido not sleep much Wednesday night, on account of the fact that a man got on his knees on my kitchen floor and rearranged my entire understanding of myself and then, for once in his life, didn't make a single joke about it, and I spend most of Thursday in a state I can only describe as structurally unsound.
Because I keep doing the same math and hating the answer.
I let Hudson do that. IwantedHudson to do that. And I'd spent the whole drowsy, boneless afterward of it tucked back against his chest, thinking not only about him but about Logan's pink ears over a pile of olives and the way Finn watches my water glass like it might flare up if he looks away.
