An Understated Dominance novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Ninety-One

On the ninety-first day, I woke before the alarm and lay still in the dark.

Colter was asleep with one arm flung over his head and his glasses folded on the nightstand.

It was January sixteenth, a Thursday, nine degrees outside, and I was due at the Denver City and County Building at ten.

I had spent most of the winter in this bed.

Sometimes his, in the room above the hardware store.

The cot there had been replaced by a real mattress on a frame he had built himself.

Mostly mine.

Neither of us had ever said the word moving in.

Neither of us had needed to.

He opened one eye.

"You're staring."

"I'm thinking."

"That's a dangerous thing to do at five-forty."

"I'm thinking that today I stop being married to you."

"Then I should make the most of the hours."

He rolled me under him before I could argue.

It was slow and warm and unhurried, and nothing like the garage or the cabin, because we had nothing left to prove to each other.

He kissed my forehead, my eyelids, the corner of my mouth.

I wound my legs around him and said his name, and I told him in the dark, plainly, that I loved him.

It was the first time I had said it.

He went still.

Then he said it back, in a voice so rough it barely worked.

We finished the morning with our foreheads pressed together and neither of us smiling and both of us crying a little.

After that we showered and argued about who was driving.

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