Page 44 of Perdition
“I’m home, Em,” he replied, his voice husky with emotions he’d locked away for months.
She smiled, but the tears still slid down her cheeks.
His heart jerked in his chest.
“Oh Em, oh baby, don’t cry,” he choked out, his throat right.
She opened her arms, and he opened his, and the world was almost right again.
He crossed the room slowly so that the minutes stretched between them and didn’t feel like a rush. Enraptured, his gaze caught on the small, private things: the freckle at the corner of her jaw, the way her hair had escaped the knot and softened around her neck, the way she smiled with her whole body. He reached for her like he reached for the best parts of himself — without pretense, without measurement.
Fuck. I missed this.
His Em was in his arms again.
He closed his eyes and...breathed.
Emily smelled like her shampoo, honey lavender, that against her warm skin was an aphrodisiac to his scenes. Goddamn, he needed her.
Their first contact was casual and then not. His hand, resting for a second on the small of her back, was a promise and a question. She leaned into it, letting the familiar pressure settle into her. The room narrowed to the two of them: the glow of thereading lamp by the end of the couch, the smell of wet asphalt through the cracked window, the soft carpet underfoot. Outside, traffic moved in patient glints; inside, the world contracted to skin and breath and the small shared language of touch.
“I missed you,” she whispered, her breath warm against his cheek.
“I missed you, too,” he replied. “Are the twins asleep?”
She nodded. “They’ve been down for an hour.”
Thank fuck!
Without another word, he slammed his mouth down onto hers, and she welcomed his kiss, opening her lips to offer him what he’d been craving for months.
They spoke with their mouths and with everything else. Kisses started like punctuation, tentative and polite, and then became sentences, then paragraphs. Mads traced the line of her collarbone with the flat of his thumb, memorizing the landscape beneath his touch. Emily’s hands found his face as if rediscovering a landmark she loved, palms warm against the sensitive flesh of his cheek. She hummed against his mouth, a small sound that braided itself into the rain’s rhythm. For a moment they simply existed in the space between inhalation and exhalation, two steady heartbeats learning the same tempo.
A rush of need so strong cascaded over him, he could barely breathe with the collision of it.
“Need inside you, baby,” he growled, and she moaned in response.
Damn, his baby was just as needy as he was.
They moved with the easy choreography of people who had loved one another for years and were still discovering new ways to say yes. Clothing became incidental—loosened buttons, sleeves sliding down shoulders—handled with reverence rather than haste. When fabric fell away, it felt less like the removal of barriers and more like the revealing of stories they had beenstoring inside each other all day. Each brush of skin was an exhalation, a letting go; each pause, a careful listening.
Mads let his hands speak in a language Emily had taught him: gentle, curious, steady. He memorized the tiny differences tonight—how her breath hitched when she laughed, the soft tremor in her fingers when she tucked hair behind her ear, the weight of her hand when she laid it flat against his chest. Emily answered with the same attention. She pressed the heel of her palm into his shoulder, traced the line of his jaw with slow certainty, tugged him closer with a look that said everything and nothing all at once.
When he finally sank inside her, he was speechless from the pleasure, the overwhelming sensation of coming home, of finally connecting to the one thing that gave him life.
They explored the familiar as if it were new territory. The room seemed to lean in around them; even the ordinary furniture took on a domestic holiness, witnesses to the small ceremony of reconnection. Outside, the rain quieted into a steady hush, like applause softened at the edges. Inside, their world was a series of small lights: the sheen of skin, the gloss of wet hair, the brief flash of a smile in the dark.
It was a symphonic masterpiece of sighing strings, and breathy woodwinds, and moaning percussion.
Together, they were life and light and soul and salvation.
They were beauty and comfort and passion and blinding, brilliant adoration.
It wasn’t just sex, it was the colliding of continent and sea, the world birthing eruption of fire and air, devastating yet stunning, staggering yet magnificent.
It was creation from the destruction of their time apart, that distance that only fed the fire that scorched the earth on which their love was built.
Speech was sparse and exquisite when it came.
