Page 42 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

She laughed and it was the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard.

The house was dark when we pulled in. I'd been living in maybe four rooms of it, and it had the stillness houses get when nobody fills them, and I was suddenly embarrassed by it, the empty fridge, the unread mail, the whole museum of my own failure. She stepped into the front hall and stood there a moment, looking around at the dark, and I hovered behind her with my keys in my hand like a man showing a property he knows won't sell.

"We can eat first," I said. "I'll order in. We can also only eat. Whatever tonight is, it can be that and nothing else, and I'd still call it the best night of my⁠—"

She turned around and kissed me.

Her clutch hit the hall table. Her hands came up under my jacket and pushed it off my shoulders, and I stopped talking, because she'd made her point, and because her mouth was on mine and I wasn't going to spend one second of this on speeches.

"Stop treating me like I'll change my mind," she said against my jaw. "I decided before I said it. I don't say things I haven't decided. You should know that about me by now."

"I'm learning it."

"Learn faster." She took my hand and walked backward toward the stairs, pulling me with her, and the look on her face undid eight years and rebuilt them in the space of about four steps. "Take me to bed, Damon."

We made it up the stairs slowly, stopping twice, her back against the wall on the landing while I kissed her throat and she worked my shirt buttons with the efficiency of a woman who had decided. The bedroom door stood open. I hadn't been sleeping there much, the bed was too big and too much hers, and I had one bad moment in the doorway where the months caught up to me all at once.

She felt it. She put her palm flat on my sternum.

"Hey. I'm here."

"I know. I'm catching up."

"Catch up later." She reached behind herself and drew the zipper of the green dress down, and the linen slid off her shoulders and pooled on the floor, and my catching up was over.

I'd been married to this woman for eight years. I had to be honest about what that had looked like. Late nights, half attention, the lights off, my mind on a merger more often than I will ever forgive myself for. I had eight years of her and I could not have drawn her body from memory. So I took her to bed and I started memorizing.

I laid her down and went slow, and when she shivered I noted it, and when she sighed I noted that too, filing every sound like the most important data of my life, because it was. I kissed her throat and the line of her collarbone and the inside of her elbow, which made her laugh and then made her stop laughing. I learned that there's a spot below her ear that makes her grip my hair, and that she likes her name said low against her skin, and that eight years of neglect had left a map nobody had ever bothered to read, and I read it. All of it. Slowly enough that she started to squirm.

"Damon."

"Mm."

"You're being thorough."

"I have years of inattention to answer for," I said, kissing my way down her stomach. "I've prepared remarks."

"Oh my God," she said, half a laugh, and then I settled between her thighs and put my mouth on her and the laugh broke apart into a sound I had never once heard in eight years of marriage, and I nearly came undone just from that, from the fact that I had never heard it, from everything that sound said about the husband I'd been.

I made up for it. I took direction. Slower, she said, and I slowed. There, she said, and I stayed there, her fingers tight in my hair and her heel pressing into my back, and when she came it was with her whole body, arching off the bed she'd left me alone in, saying my name like it was finally worth saying.

I kissed my way back up to find her flushed and bright-eyed and entirely unembarrassed.

"You never used to do that," she said.

"I was a fool. We've covered this."

"Cover it again," she said, and pulled me down.

She pushed me onto my back and straddled me, and I let her set everything, the pace, the angle, the depth, her hands braced on my chest and her hair down around her face, and I held her hips and watched my wife take what she wanted from me at last. The sight of her like that, above me, in charge, taking, was the single best thing I have ever seen, and I told her so, and she rode me harder for hearing it.

"I love you," I said, because it was true and because I'd rationed those words for eight years like a miser and I was done. "Maddie. Look at me. I love you. I'm yours. Whatever years I get, however you'll have me, I'm yours, and I will never make you wonder again."

She slowed, deep and deliberate, and looked down at me with her hands on my chest.

"Show me," she said.

So I sat up with her in my lap and wrapped my arms around her, skin to skin, nothing between us and nowhere to look but each other, and we moved like that, slow and close, her forehead against mine, and it stopped being anything I have clinical words for. She came again with my name in her mouth and her nails in my shoulders, and I followed her over with my face buried in her neck, saying hers, just hers, like there had never been another word.