Yours, Whether You Like It Or Not

CHAPTER 4 — THE NAME

She woke up to his mouth on her shoulder.

She made a sound into the pillow and he pulled her back against him and she felt how awake he already was and stopped thinking about sleeping entirely.

She turned over and he was looking at her in the grey morning light the same way he had looked at her the night before, like she was something worth his full attention. She put her hand against his chest and felt his heartbeat, already faster than his face was letting on.

"Morning," she said quietly.

"Morning," he said, and kissed her before she could say anything else.

She hummed as his lips claimed hers. It was slower than the night before. More passionate, it seemed like they were real lovers. He moved like they had the whole day and she found herself not minding that at all. His hands were warm and he remembered everything she had shown him in the dark, every place that made her breath catch, every sound she had made and why, and he used all of it with a patience that was almost unbearable.

She pushed him onto his back at some point and he let her, hands moving to her hips, and she looked down at him and he looked up at her and their eyes held as she rode him with earth-shattering rhythm.

If she knew his name, she’d have screamed it.

He groaned as he held on to her hips, matching her rhythm with animalistic vigour. He was whispering something she couldn’t hear, his eyes looked up pleasingly at her. She could tell he was close.

She leaned down and kissed him and his grip on her hips tightened and she knew she was close too. She threw her head back with a moan when he claimed her beaded n****e in his warm, loving mouth.

He flipped her over without warning and she gasped and he pulled back and looked at her face.

"Okay?" he said.

"Don't stop," she said.

He didn't.

The morning light shifted across the walls. Her fingers found his hair. He said something low against her neck that she felt more than heard and she pulled him closer and the city outside became completely irrelevant.

It built the same way it had the night before, slow and then faster and then completely beyond managing, and when it broke she heard herself make a sound she did not recognise and he followed right after, his breath ragged against her neck, and held her there without moving for a long moment.

She lay against his chest afterward and listened to his heartbeat come down. He pressed his mouth to her hair and stayed there and she closed her eyes and let herself have that for a minute.

She could have stayed like that for a long time. That was the problem. She was not a person who lingered and she was very much lingering and she could not entirely make herself stop.

He shifted after a while.

"I should shower," he said.

"You should," she agreed because she didn’t know what else to say.

He looked at her for a moment. Then he kissed her once more, unhurried, like he had all the time despite what he had just said, and got up and crossed the room and the bathroom door clicked shut and the shower came on.

She lay there for a moment listening to the water run.

Then she sat up.

She told herself she was just looking for her things. Her dress was at the foot of the bed and she pulled it on. Her shoes were near the window. Her coat was by the door. She was going to dash out before he returned. She was being practical and forward moving.

Then she noticed his side of the nightstand.

A glass of water. A set of keys. And a thick journal pushed to the edge, the kind that came by subscription, heavy and expensive looking. She reached over to move it out of the way of her phone and picked it up and turned it over.

The mailing label was on the back.

Dr. I. Ashby.

She read it once.

She sat very still.

She read it again and this time her brain snapped fully awake and started running the name against everything. The surname she had been attached to for a year through Cormac. The conversations that always stopped just short of something. The family photo on Cormac's bookshelf with the man she had asked about exactly once. The way Cormac had said the name quickly and moved on and she had let him because his tone had made it clear there was nothing to ask.

An uncle. Gone for ten years. Nobody in the family talked about him.

She turned the journal over again as if the label might have changed. It had not. She looked at the jacket on the chair. The lanyard on the laptop bag across the room. The stack of medical charts on the desk. She thought about the way he had sat at that bar, the specific quality of his stillness, the kind that came from years of being the most capable person in the room and not needing anyone to know it.

She put the journal down on the nightstand very carefully.

She needed to leave. Right now. Before he came out of that bathroom and she had to stand in this room and look at his face with everything she now knew sitting between them. She needed her shoes and her coat and her phone and she needed the door.

She stood up.

The shower turned off.

She froze.

Silence from the bathroom. Then movement. The sound of the door handle turning.

She turned around slowly.

He came out with a towel around his waist and his hair damp and pushed back from his face and he was already looking at her when he stepped through the door. His eyes moved from her face to the journal sitting on the nightstand and back to her face.

Neither of them spoke.

She looked at him standing there in the morning light and he looked at her holding herself very still next to his side of the bed and she watched something shift behind his eyes. He was not shocked nor was he panicked and she understood in that moment with complete clarity that he already knew what she had just figured out.

"You knew," she said.