Something Wilder(67)

The sight of her teasing him this way meant his undressing was far less seductive—a shirt discarded as quickly as possible so he didn’t lose sight of her fingers flirting with the strap of her simple cotton bra; jeans kicked off in an effort to not trip when she hooked her thumb into the waistband of her underwear and slid them down her legs.

He hadn’t seen her naked in so long, and for a while, looking and touching and tasting was all he could do. But when he drew his tongue over her and her back arched from the sleeping bag and her hands dug into his hair, Leo felt like he was waking up, as if the intervening ten years had been a nightmare, as if he’d just closed his eyes at the ranch and a lifetime of anguish passed behind his lids, and then he opened them again and found Lily exactly the same: skin flushed, soft thighs open, heels digging into the bed, wanting him.

Inside their tiny cabin, he loved her with his mouth and his fingers until she cried out, pulling him up and over her. He’d forgotten the width of her smile and the mischief in her hazel eyes, the way her kiss could turn from sated and soft into searching and biting, the way she rolled over onto him, pinning his hands over his head, scraping her way down his body to taste and lick, to make him crazy.

His hands dug into her soft tangle of hair, touching and tugging and begging with his fingertips, and she scaled back up his body again, rolling him over her. Wrapping her arms and legs around him in a wild coil of clasping limbs and arching hips, asking him with words and gestures to touch her and tell her what he felt.

She asked him if he wanted to—of course he wanted to—and they dug around, finding the condoms in the bag.

“There’s a joke here about a dead man’s condoms,” Leo told her, pulling out the box Terry had packed.

Lily pressed two fingers to his lips. “Let’s make it later.”

He couldn’t believe that his hands were shaking as he tore open the packet and rolled on the condom, but they were. Sex was sex, but love was a different language, and Leo hadn’t spoken it in ten years. He felt rusty. Whispering as he focused on the task at hand, he said, “I do want to point out that they’re ribbed for her pleasure.”

“Literally no woman cares about this.”

“Well, don’t tell Terry. It was the one thoughtful thing he ever tried to do.”

“Leo, I swear to God.”

He sat back on his heels looking at her, running his hands up her shins and over her knees.

“I want you on me,” she said, so simple. Leo threaded his fingers with hers and lifted them over her head. She slid her legs around his thighs, pulling him close, and then, with a mind-bendingly perfect shift forward, he was there.

I want you on me, she’d said, like he could ever forget what worked so well for her. All he wanted to do was watch her come undone from above. He wondered if, looking down, the stars ever felt like falling, lovesick, onto the planets. The instinct was in him when he was over her, moving, unable to believe that she was real and her quiet sounds were real and the way she looked up at him was real. Just fall. It’s okay. She had to see this truth tattooed in his eyes and scrawled across every feature: that he had always loved her, was loving her still. Leo would love Lily Wilder forever.

He’d realized—after he’d left her, after he’d managed to pick his head up and return to class and go through the motions of finishing his education—that when he learned a new action, his brain would use spatial cues: turn left here, take these stairs, touch this, go deeper. And then a different part of the brain would take over; the movements wouldn’t be guided by the environment anymore but by the innate sense of space, of where to turn because it felt correct; left versus right was habit, directions were instinct, and muscles reacted.

I guess we never forget those, Leo thought, watching her neck flush and lips part. He slowed, pulling her leg higher, tilting. Her eyes were greedy, tracking over his face, his shoulders, between them, back to his mouth. He could notice all this because making love to Lily was hardwired.

Her neck arched, nails dug in. Leo recognized that tightness in her expression, the hope that the moment was imminent and fear that it wasn’t. He reached down, remembering, stroking her with the pad of his thumb, and witnessed the clearing of tension when pleasure hit her like a flood. The telling sound tore from her, thankful and overcome and amazed; her body beneath him was a fevered riot of shaking, clutching relief. It could have ended there, he truly meant it, with her collapsing limp and sated, but it didn’t. She wouldn’t. Lily wanted what he’d just had—the same view, but from beneath: planets staring up at the stars.

What a relief to find she was hardwired just the same, there was no left or right for her, either, just hips and rhythm and the unreal heat of her hands. Just heat and the delirious wet of her kiss until Leo was grasping at the sleeping bag under her head, clawing the ground, pushing them with desperation across the makeshift bed until they were a wrestling madness. Strong legs squeezed and she was over him, pinning him, finishing him, staring down with victory at the mess she’d made of him.





Chapter Twenty-Four


AS THEIR BREATHING calmed and their bodies cooled, they talked about everything. About Archie’s Bar and the handful of people in her life who mattered a little, and about Nicole, who mattered the most; about the little restaurant near Leo’s apartment where he and Cora would have okonomiyaki on Thursday nights because it tasted just like their mom’s. He talked about how much he loved his sister and how disorienting it was to be facing a future where she didn’t have to come first in his every waking thought.