Page 65 of Lady and the Butcher
“You hold so much,” he said against my mouth. “Right now, you hold only me.”
The words did more than his hands. I held him. He told me to look at him, and I did. He told me to take what I wanted in the small, exact ways he allowed, and I did. He told me I was good, and I was. When I trembled, he didn’t stop. He steadied.
His mouth found my throat again, teeth grazing, tongue pressing into the thrum of my pulse until I thought he could drink me whole. His voice went rough, a quiet torrent, not asking, not even ordering—claiming. “Give it to me, Lady.”
I did.
My body tipped forward into him, every locked door inside me cracking open. The tension I’d carried for days knotted once, then snapped, releasing in a violent rush that ripped a cry from my throat. My pussy clenched around him hard and fast, pulsing like it was trying to drag him deeper with every wave. Heat tore through me in jagged bursts, the kind of orgasm that burned and bloomed at the same time, rolling up my body until I shook against him. I broke open without shame, a clean ruin, slick and trembling in his arms while his hands held me steady through every spasm.
Heat rolled through me and out again, a tide that pulled at my bones and left me gasping. My thighs shook around his hips. My nails dug into his shoulders because I needed to hold on to something real as the room blurred. The city outside sharpened into a constellation of points—bridge, harbor, hotel windows—that I could count and not count, infinite and finite at once.
He didn’t stop when I shattered. He slowed, held me through it, his thrusts long and deep, the rhythm of a man who wanted to watch me feel everything. He filled me so completely, I forgotwhere my edges were. I breathed in hard, desperate, then softer, trying to find my voice but losing it again when his hand slid up my ribs and closed gently around my throat, not to choke, only to remind me whose body this was right now. Mine, yes—but claimed by him.
“Good,” he said, proud, his voice a rough benediction. He kissed the corner of my mouth, then deeper, his tongue claiming the soft sounds I couldn’t swallow fast enough. “So good for me.”
I wanted more.
And he knew it. His hips shifted angle and the next stroke pulled another cry out of me, rawer this time. He caught it against his mouth like he’d been waiting to hear me break twice. My legs trembled and he held me steady, one hand splayed wide at the base of my back, the other pressing me down onto him like he’d graft me into place, if I tried to float away.
I thought of all the nights I’d fallen asleep alone, body tired from giving and giving. None of them mattered now. This wasn’t gentle and it wasn’t safe, but it was alive, and so was I.
He turned me onto my back. He anchored me with a palm at my sternum. It was a touch that said stay. A touch that said safe.
“Again,” he said.
I made a sound that would have embarrassed me once. It didn’t now.
The world had narrowed to this room. He traced a path down my body that felt like he was blessing each part with his mouth, then with his hands, then with his mouth again. Slow. Slower. He coaxed me to the edge and pulled me back. He did it twice on purpose. The third time he let me fall.
He kept me there until the quiet after turned thin and sweet. He wiped his thumb under my eye like there might be a tear. There was.
It made no sense. It made all the sense.
He moved me as if I weighed exactly what he could carry. He set me on my side and fit his body to mine. He pressed a kiss into my shoulder with the care a man brings to a place he intends to return to. When he slid inside me again, he exhaled through his teeth like he had been holding the breath for a decade. I took him and the room shifted around us to make space. He set a slow pace that had my name in it. He told me to keep my hand where he placed it. He told me to take his wrist and hold on. He told me to sayyes.
I did, over and over. It stopped being a word. It became the ground.
He worked me open until I was nothing but response. I didn’t count the ways. I didn’t note the positions or the geography of the room. I only knew the feeling of being guided and seen and used in the holy way that doesn’t take, the way that gives back more than it asked for.
He didn’t ask for permission to be possessive. He didn’t need to. He earned it and then spent it on me, careful and exact. He marked me with his mouth where a dress neckline would hide the proof. He praised me for things that used to embarrass me and made them my favorite parts. He called me good when I struggled. He told me to breathe when I forgot. He held me there when I needed to be held.
He allowed me to stop thinking.
When he unraveled, it was with his face pressed into my neck like he was smelling a future. He didn’t bury the noise. He gave me the sound he made and I took that, too. He held me still with one hand flexed on my hip and his mouth at my pulse. I felt the shudder move through him and I moved with it, a tide answering a tide.
We lay there in the aftermath, the glass and the water and the bridge bearing witness to a thing that had moved through us and left the room different.
The quiet changed texture.
21
Atticus rolled onto his back and pulled me with him.
I went, unworried, my leg thrown over his hip, my cheek on his chest. His hand found the base of my skull. He liked me there. I liked being there, which was a revolution I hadn’t known I was marching toward.
He didn’t let me drift far. He checked in with the smallest touches. The press of his palm. The sweep of fingers along my back. My body answered with small aftershocks, pleasure turning into a kind of peace that felt like a lake after storms.
“Water,” he said, after a while.
