Page 46 of Patch

He reached for my face. His hand was warm and rough at the tips, and his thumb found the hinge of my jaw and held there. The same grip as the first time. Exactly the pressure needed.

“Tell me what you want.”

“You. Here. Now.”

My voice didn’t waver. It never did when I was frightened. It got faster and more technical, and today it was doing both.

His mouth found mine, slow and careful, a man using something he’d already learned. His beard was rough against my chin. He tasted like coffee and something darker under it. He tasted the same as he had the first time, and the second, and I had never in my life appreciated consistency the way I appreciated it that afternoon.

I pushed his cut off his shoulders. His Henley went over his head. That white scar across his left ribs… I put my palm flat over it the way I had the first time, and his heart came up hard against my hand. Steady. Elevated but not racing.

He got my scrubs top off and the sports bra after it, and this time he didn’t stop to look, because we’d done the looking.

I pushed him back onto the couch and pointed at his boots. He toed them off without a word, one and then the other, and the sound they made hitting the floor was more satisfying than it had any right to be.

“Anything else?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“These cushions have opinions,” I said.

“They’ve had worse.”

I laughed. Actually laughed, for the first time in about nine hours, and his hands tightened on my waist when I did it.

Then I got his belt open and his jeans down and I went to my knees on that broken-in floor between his boots.

“Maren.”

“Is that a no?”

“That’s not a no.”

I took him in my hand first. He was already hard, thick and hot, and I worked him slowly from base to tip and watched what it did to his face, which was considerably more than he wanted it to.

Then I put my mouth on him.

He said something that wasn’t a word. His hand went into my hair and gathered it back off my face, and he held it there, not guiding, just holding it out of the way so he could see, and that turned out to be the thing that got me. Not the taste of him or the weight of him on my tongue. His hand keeping my hair back like it was a job he’d been assigned.

I took him deep and pulled back slow and set a rhythm, and his thighs went rigid under my forearms.

“You have to stop,” he said. “Maren. Sweetheart, you have to stop.”

I stopped and sat back on my heels and looked up at him. “Sweetheart,” I said.

“Get up here.”

“That’s the second time you’ve called me that.”

“I’m forty-nine years old and I’m about to come in a woman’s mouth on a couch I’ve had since Clinton. Get up here.”

I got up there.

He hauled me onto his lap with my knees either side of his hips and got my scrub pants off, which took some doing and involved both of us laughing at one point, and then his hand was between my legs and any laughing stopped.

His fingers were exactly what they’d been the first time. Long, scarred, absolutely steady. He slid two of them into my pussy and found the angle inside of four seconds, because he’d been paying attention last time the way he pays attention to everything, and he’d filed it.

“You remembered.”