Page 47 of Brother in Law with Benefits

“Grant!”

I kiss the rest of the sentence out of her, and she stops trying to win the argument, hands sliding back into my hair, pulling me down over her with a want that's stopped bothering to hide itself.

I move over her, and she meets me there, and for a long stretch of time there's nothing in the room but the two of us — her hands mapping my shoulders, my back, the old scar at my hip she still hasn't asked about and I still haven't offered; my mouth at her throat, her jaw, the soft spot behind her ear that makes her gasp every time without fail.

I watch her the whole time. There's just her, present-tense, mine, for as long as either of us wants that to be true — which, as far as I'm concerned, is forever, a word I have never once let myself use about anything in my adult life until this exact room, tonight.

She gets close again, faster this time, her nails dragging down my back in a way that's going to leave marks I intend to enjoy noticing tomorrow. I feel it happen before she says anything — the particular way her whole body goes still, right before it doesn't.

There’s a word sitting in my chest that I’ve been circling since “baby girl” slipped out of me in her kitchen five months ago. Neither of us mentioned it again. Both of us pretended it hadn’t landed the way it landed. I’ve never said the other one. Never let myself.

I’ve earned it now.

I lean in close, mouth against her ear, and give it to her low and deliberate at the exact moment she’s got nothing left to defend herself with.

“That’s it. Good girl. Daddy’s got you.”

The words hit her like a live current. Her whole body seizes around my cock—tight, then impossibly tighter—and then she breaks. A broken, helpless sound tears out of her as she comes, hard, and I feel the sudden wet rush of it, hot and filthy, soaking my cock and the sheets beneath us. She’s gushing around me, pulsing, shaking so hard she can barely stay under me.

“Fuck—” The sight of it, the feel of her coming that hard just from the word, snaps something clean in half inside me. “That’s it. Look at you. Soaking Daddy’s cock like a good girl.”

I don’t slow down. I fuck her through it, harder, deeper, chasing the wet mess she’s making, and every thrust pulls another broken noise out of her. She’s still coming, or coming again, I can’t tell anymore—her cunt keeps clenching and fluttering and spilling more slick around me until the wet sounds in the room are obscene.

“Daddy—” she chokes out, like the word has been sitting in her mouth this whole time too, waiting. “Please—don’t stop—”

“Not stopping.” My voice is wrecked. I hook one of her legs higher, open her wider, and drive in harder, watching the way her body takes every inch like it was made for this. “You feel that? How wet you got the second I called myself your daddy? Fucking filthy for it.”

She nods frantically, eyes glassy, mouth open, and the confirmation makes me lose the last of the careful man I’ve been trying to be with her. I drop my forehead to hers and fuck her like I’ve wanted to since the first time I had her under me—raw, relentless, the headboard slamming the wall in a rhythm that leaves no doubt what we’re doing in this room.

“Come again,” I tell her, voice low and rough against her mouth. “Come on Daddy’s cock one more time. I want to feel you gush for me again.”

She does. A second, longer wave rips through her, even wetter than the first, and the way her cunt milks me—tight, rhythmic,desperate—pulls me right over the edge with her. I bury myself to the hilt and come hard, groaning her name and the word she just gave back to me, pulsing deep while she keeps shaking and clenching around every drop.

We stay locked together afterward, both of us breathing like we’ve been running, my cock still twitching inside the mess we made. Her face is buried against my shoulder. My hand is still fisted in her hair.

Neither of us says anything for a long time.

The word is out now. There’s no putting it back.

Afterward, when she's got enough air back to form sentences, I hear her huff out something that's half laugh, her face still pressed into my shoulder.

"What?” I ask.

"Nothing. Just—" She pulls back enough to look at me, eyes still wet at the corners, mouth twitching toward a smile she's fighting and losing to. "Oh. That's what that was. I've been half-waiting for it since the coffee runs, if I'm being honest, and I genuinely did not expect to find out I'm — that. I'm twenty-eight years old and I have a med school loan I will be paying off until I'm dead, and apparently I also have a very specific thing I did not know I needed until a forty-three-year-old man with a tactical watch said four words in my ear."

"You're taking it well."

"I'm taking it extremely well, considering. Give me a minute, I might still have a full crisis about it later, possibly in the shower. Right now I'm just, well," She exhales, settles back against me, tucks her head under my chin like it's the most natural motion in the world, like she's done it a thousand times instead of a handful. "Right now I'm just really glad my walls are thick, is all I'm saying, because Copper Falls does not need to know what I just found out about myself. Diane would put it on the contact sheet."

We lie there a while, the room dark except for the streetlight coming in sideways through her blinds, striping the ceiling in thin bars of orange. Her head's on my chest, one leg thrown over mine, her hand tracing slow, absent circles over the old scar at my ribs like she's memorizing it properly this time, now that there's no clock running.

"Tell me about the Sullivan job," she says eventually.

So I tell her about the project; Route 9 water main, the timeline, the fact that half the existing pipe is older than I am and nobody's touched the schematics since the Reagan administration, which is either a scandal or a miracle depending on how you look at it. It's boring, technical, unglamorous work — trenching depths, flow rates, a crew of eleven guys and one very territorial backhoe operator named Deb — and she listens to every word of it like it's the most interesting thing she's heard all week, asking real questions and not just being polite while she waits for me to stop talking.

"So you're basically playing plumber," she says.

"It's slightly more technical than that."