Page 12 of Deacon

“Don’t you dare.”

He laughed, low and rough, and bit my earlobe. “Where’s your bed?”

“Upstairs.”

I knew what he was. Everybody in Salvation did. I knew there was a club behind that cut, and things he did for them he’d take to his grave before he told me. I wanted him anyway. I’d wanted him for years, and tonight I was done pretending the wanting was a crush I’d grow out of.

The stairs were narrow and he kept kissing me as we went up, so it took a while. I wasn’t complaining.

In my apartment, with rain on the windows and only the streetlight through the blinds, he let go of me long enough to shrug out of his cut. He folded it once and laid it over the back of my kitchen chair, careful as a man putting down a sleeping child. For some reason that, of everything, made my knees go.

Then he came back for me.

My shirt went over my head. His followed. There was ink across his ribs I’d never seen, a whole world of it, and I put my mouth on it just because I finally could. His breath punched out of him. My bra was the ugly beige one I wore for work and he had it off before I could apologize, and then his hands were on my breasts, thumbs dragging over my nipples until I arched into him and made a sound that surprised us both.

“There she is,” he said.

He walked me back to the bed, peeled my jeans down my legs and knelt at the end of it. His beard dragged along the inside of my thigh. I grabbed the headboard.

“Deacon.”

“Four years I’ve wanted you,” he said, and kissed the crease of my hip. “Let me have this.”

Then his mouth was on me, hot and unhurried, and every thought I owned left through the top of my head. He licked into me like he had all night and meant to use it. When I bucked, he pinned my hips with one forearm and kept going, and when he slid two thick fingers inside me and curled them, the whole room tipped sideways. I came apart with one heel dug into his back, his name breaking in half on the way out.

He kept going until I shoved at his shoulder.

When he stood, he was breathing like he’d run up the stairs. I got my first real look at him and my throat went dry. He saw it, and he looked far too pleased with himself.

“Everybody’s favorite good girl, look at you.”

“Shut up and come here.”

He fitted himself to me and pushed in a little at a time, watching my face the whole way. It was a lot. It was a stretch that bordered on too much and then tipped over into exactly enough, and when he was all the way in, he stopped and held there with his arms shaking on either side of my head.

“Every time you handed me that bag,” he said, voice wrecked, “I thought about this.”

I hooked my legs around him and pulled.

After that, gentle went out the window. He drove into me deep and hard, the old bed frame knocking the wall in time, rain battering the window like it wanted in. I dug my nails into his back and he swore and went harder. He got a hand under my knee and pushed it up toward my chest, and the angle changed, and I stopped being able to form words at all. The second climax built slower than the first and hit wider, rolling out from the base of my spine until my whole body clenched around him.

He followed me with his face buried in my neck, my name coming out of him rough and broken, like it had been stuck in his chest for years.

For a long while we lay there. The rain eased off to a patter. His weight pressed me into the mattress and I let it.

Eventually he rolled to his back and pulled me onto his chest. His heart was still pounding under my ear.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Ask me again at four when the alarm goes.”

He laughed, and I felt it through his whole body. Then he wound one of my curls around his finger and studied it in the streetlight, like a prize he’d finally collected.

Somewhere at the back of my mind sat that gray sedan and a stranger in a pressed shirt. I’d tell him in the morning. I wanted to just have this moment.

The alarm was set for four. For the first time in six years, I hoped it broke.

I was in this now. All the way in.