Naked, I subconsciously ran a hand down my belly, wondering how different it would look in a couple of months. I heard that stretchmarks were something that were inherited, that that was why some women had smooth bellies and others earned tiger stripes. Not knowing my birth mother, I had no idea what mine would look like when all was said and done.
Catching the small movement because he caught every damn thing, he moved closer, one arm going around my back, the other resting over mine on my lower belly. He ducked down slightly, resting his forehead to mine. We stood that way for a long moment, me taking a deep breath and exhaling it slowly, letting the worry about my body fall away for the moment.
I shivered, my nipples prickling, my skin breaking into goosebumps. "Let's go get you warmed up," he suggested, hand falling but only so he could grab mine again, then pulling me into the shower, letting me hog the water until I warmed up, then moved in with me, plastering my body to his, just wrapping me up tight, holding me for a long minute.
I wondered then how many nights or mornings he might come home to me just like this- tired, adrenaline-drained. I wondered too if it would always be intimacy, comfort he wanted or if there would be nights he would come home, wound up, needing an outlet for the energy and fucking me hard and fast and dirty until he was spent.
I found I was anxious to find out.
It should have been scary.
All I had really known was men I shouldn't trust who I had misjudged and poured everything into.
But I had come to Sawyer with my life in pieces around my feet and he hadn't shied away from the mess, from the work. He had rolled up his sleeves, gotten out the glue, and helped me reconstruct it.
I could trust him.
And I would trust him.
Not just with me.
I could and would trust him with the life we had made and possibly with the lives of children we might adopt in the future.
"Alright, water hog. You're clean. Meet me in bed," he said, slapping my ass and moving under the spray as he reached for his soap.
I dried off and headed to the bed, crawling under the sheets naked because I figured that was what he had in mind and, well, I did too.
He came in five minutes later, a towel slung indecently low on his hips, his Adonis belt muscles catching the small bit of light from the side of his bed. He moved to the foot of the bed, standing there for a long moment before reaching for the comforter and slowly sliding it downward, the smooth material slipping sensuously down my skin, making it almost feel electric in the aftermath. He didn't stop pulling until the whole thing slid to the floor at his feet, exposing me completely.
"This is uneven," I said, moving to fold up and crawl toward the edge of the bed, a motion that made his eyes heat and his breath hiss out of his mouth. My knees hit the edge of the mattress, my body a few inches from his.
I watched his face as my finger pressed between his pecs then moved an excruciatingly slow line downward between his abs, over the small trail of hair that disappeared into the towel, then across his stomach to where he had the material tucked, snagging it and pulling.
The towel fell.
And he was naked before me, his cock hard and straining, a drop of precum already beaded at the head.
"So," I said, moving my chest forward so it pressed into his, the scratch of his chest hair making my nipples harden further. My lips pressed into his neck. "You know what I was wondering before?"
"Hmm?" He asked, his chest rumbling with the sound.
"I was wondering if, after a job, you came home needing sweet and intimate or hard and rough and dirty?"
When I pulled back, his lips were tipped up. "Babe, I'll take you whatever-the-fuck way you'll have me."
"Well, see," I said, my hand moving downward to touch the hipbone muscles I found so fascinating, "we're already so clean..."
Taking the cue, his hands finally reached out, sinking into my hips, and throwing me backward on the bed.
I landed with a small bounce, laughing, liking the fact that he wasn't suddenly treating me like I was fragile. When I moved to sit up, he grabbed my ankles, yanking me back down a couple feet until my ass was teetering at the edge of the bed. Pretty much the second my body stopped moving, his hands pressed my inner thighs down until they spread wide and he lowered down to his knees.
His mouth was on me before I could draw a breath. There was nothing slow or sweet or reverent about it.
He was devouring me.
His tongue traced my clit, pressed into it. His teeth scraped it. His lips sucked it hard.
"Fuck," I cried out, my hand slamming into the back of his head as his eyes opened and looked up at me as his tongue started tracing again. He made a "mmm" noise and the orgasm that had been quickly building crashed through me.
But he didn't keep licking and sucking me through it.
He rose up, knees to the edge of the mattress, and slammed inside me, the invasion making another wave crash through me, making me arch up off the mattress and fist the sheets in my hands as I let out a loud moan.
"Fucking love your pussy milking me," he growled, reaching down to hook my knees and yank them up, holding onto them as he started pistoning into me- hard, fast, unrelenting.
He pushed my knees into my chest, half curling over them, getting as deep as he could, eyes intensely holding mine. "My fucking pussy," he growled, arching his hips up when he slammed deep, making me feel a delicious little pinch that I wanted again so when he slammed forward again, I dropped my hips down to get more of it.
Just when I was sure nothing could feel better, he pushed my legs together and rolled them to the side, cocking them up on an angle and creating a new sensation.
"Fuck yeah," he growled as my walls started tightening around him. "Come for me," he added, hips shoving harder into mine and if his hands weren't planted on my ankles and my ass, I would have been halfway up the bed with the pressure behind them. "Come," he demanded again, voice more harsh, losing control himself.
Then just like that, I did.
And he was only seconds behind with my name on his lips.
His body fell down behind mine, his legs cocking up under mine, his arm over my belly, pulling me tight to him.
"I have a request," I said after a silence fell between us for a long minute, both of our breathing leveling out.
"Anything."
"Anytime you come home from a job, wake me up to that."
His answer was a low, rumbling laugh as he scooted back and pulled me onto my other side, facing him.
"Think I can manage that," he said, leaning forward and claiming my lips. "In fact, I think you will wake to that in, say, six hours from now."
"Mmm," I said, closing my eyes a little. "But that time, I get to be on top."
"Then maybe we should fall asleep like this," he suggested, hooking an arm around my back and rolling onto his, somehow snagging the edge of the comforter that was still stuck to the corner of the bed and kicking it up. He pulled it up to my hips and wrapped his arms around me. "Just to make it easier."
"Sounds like a plan," I agreed, nuzzling my face into his neck as he traced shapes over my back. Despite having slept a bit and gotten a nap, I felt beat. Blame the sex, the sickness, the worry, the trip to the police station, but I was dead tired.
I woke up about five and a half hours later, fuzzy, still half-asleep but somehow turned on. And it wasn't until I realized what was causing it that I fully snapped awake.
What caused it was Sawyer's hard cock pressed against my cleft, his hips moving in a slow, deliberate pattern that had me already halfway to an orgasm before I even woke up.
"There you are," he smiled up at me when I planted my hands and pushed up to look down at him. "Been trying to wake you for ten minutes."
"Mmm," I mumbled, reaching between us and lifting his heavy cock to press it into me, closing my eyes on a moan as I did so. "Oh my God," I groaned, pressing my forehead into his shoulder, never realizing how good it would feel
to wake up already wet, already ready, and feel that need immediately satisfied. Somehow, every nerve ending felt more sensitive, more receptive to each sensation.
Sawyer's arm went around me as he folded upward, crossing his legs under my ass to support me. I wrapped my legs around his back, my arms around his neck, and started rocking, deciding right then and there that I had a new favorite position, not only because it felt the best, but because it was intimate. I got to look in his eyes; I got to feel his body against mine, his heart against my breast, his breath against my hair.
I started soft and slow and sweet, but before long, my body craved release and I rode him faster, harder, until the headboard made an almost alarming thud against the wall as I completely shattered apart, clinging to him with everything in me.
Even broken apart, I had never felt more complete before.
EPILOGUE
Riya- 39 days
Maybe a part of me wants to claim some grand and romantic things transpired over the next three weeks. But the reality is, it was a blur of throwing up, working, coming home, eating dinner, cleaning, curling up on the couch and watching TV, then going off to bed and making love until we were both too spent to do anything other than sleep.
Perhaps, though, that was what was so wonderful about mine and Sawyer's story. It was born of extraordinary circumstance and grew around a mystery removing a year of my life from me.
But it wasn't wild.
It wasn't crazy.
It was positively freaking domestic.
And it wasn't lost on me how crazy it sounded to say a man like Sawyer who spent most of his young adulthood in trenches, in trees, in deserts and swamplands with nothing but a backpack, a gun, a knife, and his best friend, living the kind of danger that you see in movies then came home and started a business that involved hunting people down, in figuring out mysteries, in trying his damnedest to save girls like me, could ever be described as something as boring, as uninspiring as "domestic".
But that was the truth.
That was our story.
People with guns didn't come shooting up our apartment.
I didn't have a stalker or a dark, twisted past.
His old demons didn't come to hunt him down.
We simply... settled down.
And I was more than okay with that.
The thing with Michael, yeah, it was more than enough crazy to last me a lifetime. He stole three-hundred and sixty-seven days from me. That was time I would never get back. But that loss brought me to Sawyer who I planned to spend the rest of my days with.
Sawyer-
"No," Marg snapped, shaking her head at me, blocking our way into the restaurant.
"Marg, no really. The men come now. That's how this is done," Riya tried to reason.
Marg made some kind of disagreeing noise and waved a dismissive hand. "No. This is not how it's done. There are traditions. This is not about silly bingo games or diaper pyramids. This is about women. This is about sharing our stories, about pulling you into a circle of mothers. This is sacred. Plus, mija, do you really think he wants to know all the details about afterbirth and chapped nipple remedies and..."
"Yup. I'm out," I said with a smile, shaking my head at Riya when she tried to small-eye me into staying beside her.
Truth was, she was nervous. While, as a whole, she had taken the unexpected pregnancy as a trooper, there were aspects about it that made her skin crawl. Any talk about birth for example.
"It's barbaric," she snapped when I was reading a passage from one of the pregnancy books I had bought her that she had read up to then after the chapters about delivery.
"It's natural."
"She's going to rip her way out of my body. That's barbaric. If anything else ripped its way out of a person, there would be none of this 'oh, it's so beautiful' nonsense."
"Babe, you need to know what to expect."
"Oh, blood and pain and having to have parts of me cut so other parts of me don't tear. I got it. It's cool."
"That procedure would be called an episiotomy."
"Who cares what it's called? It's horrific."
I laughed at that, tossing the book and wrapping her up.
Like I said, she was good if not great about most things. That binge she had with Barrett was her last. She drank God-awful green smoothies before each meal, meals that were two-thirds rainbow vegetables and one third protein. She took her vitamins even when she was queasy. She adopted a light but religious workout routine. She helped me decorate the nursery though I wouldn't let her in when we painted it.
When we went to the doctor for the first real ultrasound to hear the heartbeat, she had been more nervous than I had ever seen her, was stiff as a board as she laid down and got her belly covered in jelly. But the second the whoosh-whoosh came from the machine, her arm flew out and her hand squeezed mine harder than I thought she was capable.
But when Marg suggested a baby shower, holy fucking shit did she flip out.
"No. Absolutely not!" she hissed when I told her about the plan so Marg didn't surprise her.
"Babe..."
"No. No. You don't understand. They talk about it. They all sit and talk about labor and all the gross things that happen and how they were on the table for freaking twenty hours and had needles stabbed into their spines to stop the pain. Nope. I'm not doing that."
But when Marg had somehow talked her into it or, more likely, guilted her into it, she had agreed, but demanded I go with her.
I wasn't exactly keen on the idea of sitting around and having clothespins tagged to my shirt and shit, but if Riya needed me there, I would be there.
That being said, Marg was right. Riya needed to talk to women. She had never really made any close friendships which was, in part, my fault. I had been selfish with her. No one would blame me. When you had a woman like her in your life, you wanted to keep her all to yourself. But I wasn't doing her any favors by being her main source of support. Especially in something that I could never even remotely understand.
I figure that, seeing as she made the decision to not have children, all the ideas and fears and resignations about that possibility that most women go through were something she never even gave a thought to. She was having a decade of freaks out in the course of nine months.
But as much as I wanted to always be her hero, to always be able to solve her problems and smooth over her fears, that wasn't realistic.
I didn't understand what it felt like to be pregnant, to have parts of your body no longer belong wholly to yourself, to feel a life growing inside you. And I damn sure knew nothing about what it was like to push that life out.
She needed Marg and the collection of women Marg had gathered with a wealth of knowledge, of wisdom, of comfort between them.
I felt like I was letting her down by leaving her there, especially after telling her I would be there for her, but she needed me to leave, whether she realized it or not.
"I can't believe you're doing this," she snapped, ripping her hand from mine and charging past Marg and inside.
"She's scared," I told Marg as soon as she was out of earshot.
"I know, mijo," she said, giving me a knowing smile. "That's why she needs us. That's why she can't have you here to hide behind."
"Don't give her any horror stories."
"Horror?" she asked, looking honest-to-God taken aback at the very suggestion. "No horror. Nothing but beauty here."
"And don't be all up in her face about how this makes her a woman or nothing will compare to the love she has for a baby she gave birth to."
"Mijo," she said, shaking her head, "being a mother has nothing to do with giving birth. I know she was adopted and I know this will be her only birth baby. But no one here is going to make her feel like less because she is making that choice. She's going to be a great mother. To this baby and to all the babies or children you two bring into your lives in other ways. But that's not what today is about. Today is about not making her want to stick her fin
gers in her ears and hum anytime someone mentions childbirth. It's not as scary as they make it sound on TV." She reached out then, placing a hand on my cheek in a way she did when she was proud of me. "You, you are such a good man," she said, her eyes watering up. "You worry more about her than she worries about herself. But you can trust her with me."
With that, she gave me a watery smile and moved inside.
And I took my ass over to Brock's place to get a drink.
"Heya Pops," he greeted me at the door. "Thought you'd be knee deep in pink ribbons by now."
"Riya needed some girl time," I said, pushing past him and into his kitchen to get myself a drink.
"You guys settle on a name yet?"
"Don't," I warned, shaking my head.
The name. Jesus fucking Christ, the name.
Never having named anything ever before, not even Slim who Tig had inadvertently named after I had had him for a week and he used it to greet him one day in lieu of a name. After that, it stuck.
We had searched every ever-loving site. We had bounced names off each other until we were blue in the face.
Nothing felt right.
I was starting to worry the poor kid would just leave the hospital named "Baby Girl Anderson".
There was a high likelihood of that at this point.
"Just got back from Barrett's," Brock said oddly, drawing my attention away from my whiskey.
"Is he working on a case for you?"
"Nah, he wanted my opinion on his baby gift to you guys."
"Oh, fuck. Is this some retaliation shit for the goddamn guinea pig? I swear to fuck I tried to talk her out of it."
Brock snorted, giving me a grin. "He talks a good game about it, but he loves that stupid rodent. It's good for him to have something to go home to that isn't a coffee machine and empty bed and takeout menus."
"What is it then?" I asked, genuinely curious.
Barrett, being Barrett, wasn't exactly the type to go all soft-hearted at the idea of a tiny human. I once slapped him behind the head when he said to an old friend of our's that it looked like all the other babies and it was completely impossible to tell if it would look like either of the parents for a full six months to a year and that she wouldn't be interesting until a good five years from then.
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