Page 110 of Her Rival

He slipped into me.

He went slow.

The slow was the entire scene. The slow was the chapter. And he did not let it carry me past anything. He sank in one unhurried inch at a time, watching my face do the thing it did, drawing back just as slow, every drag of him out and back in deliberate enough that I felt the whole length of it register, every nerve I had waking up under the patience of it. My hands came up and gripped his shoulders. My heels pressed into the backs of his thighs to keep him close, to keep him from speeding up, because the not-speeding-up was the thing taking me apart.

"That's it," he murmured against my mouth, his forehead dropping to mine, his breath warm and uneven. "Just like that. You feel that? That's me telling you. Every single one of these is me telling you. I'm not going anywhere. You're not getting away from me. I'm going to do this slow for the rest of your life."

"Jett."

"Say it back."

"You're not going anywhere."

"That's right."

He reached between us, his fingers finding my clit, circling at the same slow merciless pace as his hips, two rhythms timed to each other, and the pressure built low and wide and unhurried, a wave that took its time arriving because he was taking his time bringing it, and I felt it climb the whole length of me with nowhere to rush to.

"I've got you," he breathed. "Come on. Let me feel it. I want to feel it slow. I want to feel all of it."

I came around him with his forehead against mine and his breath on my mouth and his hand in my hair, and it came slow and total and from somewhere deeper than the fast ones ever reached, and I shook through it with my arms locked around his back and his name coming out of me in pieces. He didn't stop moving. He worked me all the way through it, slow, watching my face. When I finally went loose under him, he let himself follow. He came with my legs around his waist and his face in the side of my neck, a small low sound in the back of his throat that was the closest thing to a sob I'd ever heard him make.

He held me on the rug a long time afterward. He did not move. He did not get up to get me water. He did not get up to clean either of us up. He just lay on top of me, his weight pressing me into the rug. The way he'd pressed himself into me on Saturday night with the scars. The way you press yourself into a thing you're determined to keep. I lay underneath him with my arms around his back, and the late afternoon light came down on us through the glass, and I thought, with the specific small clarity I was learning to recognize as the inside of being loved:

This was the chapter. This was the entire chapter, of the entire book, of the entire life I have not yet lived. This was him telling me he'd heard me on Wednesday. This was him saying yes.

I closed my eyes. I held him.

After a while he rolled off me. He pulled me against him on the rug. He pulled a blanket off the back of the couch and dropped it over both of us. He kissed the top of my head.

"Hartley."

"Yeah."

"I'm going to tell you the size of the things I'm carrying from now on."

"I know."

"All of them."

"I know."

"Even the small ones."

"I know, Jett."

"Even the things I have not told a soul on this earth."

"Even those."

"I'm telling you now, in case it wasn't clear in the entryway, that the deal I'm making with you here on this rug is for the rest of my life. I'm not making a deal that ends at the article. I'm not making a deal that ends at the season. I'm making a deal that ends when I'm dead."

I opened my eyes. I looked up at him.

He was looking at me with the careful flat expression of a man who'd decided to say a thing once and hadn't built any flourishes around it.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay."