Page 59 of Devoured

Dean was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. "They down?"

"Out cold. Levi didn't make it through the socks."

"He never does." He caught her hand as she came off the last step, and his thumb moved over her knuckles once, and his voice dropped. "My room. Now."

"I have chairs to stack —"

She didn't get the rest out, because Dean bent and got a shoulder into her middle and stood up with her over it like a sack of feed.

"Dean —" It came out as a squeak. She grabbed a fistful of his shirt. "Dean Royston, put me — there are people still here!"

"They can stack their own chairs." He was already moving down the hall, one arm clamped over the backs of her knees, entirely unbothered, while she hung over his shoulder laughing too hard to put up a real fight, the blood rushing to her face, swatting at his back to absolutely no effect.

"This is undignified," she informed the back of his shirt.

"You're giggling."

"I am not!" She was. She gave up halfway through the denial.

He shouldered open his door, kicked it shut behind them, and dropped her onto the middle of the bed so she bounced, and she came up breathless and flushed and grinning, hair half out of its twist, and he stood there over her and looked at her like the sight of her thrown across his quilt laughing was a thing he wanted to remember. The lock turned. The noise of the cleanup fell away behind it.

The laughing went somewhere lower as he came down over her. He undressed her without hurry in the last of the daylight through the curtain, his hands going exactly where they knew to go, and she got him out of his shirt and put her mouth to the warm skin over his heart and felt his breath go ragged.

He had her under him on his own bed, in his own room, in the house where his children slept down the hall, and he looked at her the way he did.

"Lara." Just her name, the way he said it, the word that held the whole of it.

"I know," she said, because she did, because it held the whole of it for her too. "Come here."

He came. He kissed her slow and deep, one hand sliding down her body and taking its time about it, learning her all over again like the first time hadn't counted, and she arched up into the heel of his hand and heard herself make a sound she'd be embarrassed about later and wasn't embarrassed about now.

"Dean." His name, half a warning, all a plea. "I don't want slow."

"No?"

"You know I don't. Quit showing off."

He huffed a breath against her throat that might've been a laugh, and stopped showing off. When he settled over her and pushed in she gripped his shoulders and held on, the whole long breath of it leaving her at once, and he dropped his forehead to hers and stayed still a second like he needed it too.

Then he got a hand in her hair and turned her face up to his.

"Look at me," he said, rough. "Look at me. I want your eyes."

She gave him her eyes. She gave him everything, in his bed in the dark, the two of them moving together like they'd been doing it for years, his name and yes and right there spilling out of her, his mouth at her throat, his hand between them, the old iron bed frame telling the whole quiet house exactly what they were doing, and neither of them caring at all. She went over first, with his name in her mouth, and he followed her with his face in her hair, and for a while after there was nothing in the room but the two of them breathing and the dark coming down.

He didn't let her go. After, when a body might roll away toward sleep, he gathered her in instead, pulled her back against his chest and wrapped himself around her and held on, his face in her hair, his arm a bar across her like he meant to keep her there.

"I want this every night," he said. Into her hair. Low and rough and unguarded, out of him before the careful part could stop it.

Lara lay still inside the circle of his arms. She could have made it nothing. Made a joke, kept it light, given him the easy out. But he'd said it plain, the wanting right out where she could see it, and she wasn't going to be smaller than he'd just been.

"...Then have it," she said.

She felt him go still behind her. The whole length of him.

"Lara," he said.

"Yes," she said.