He Paid a Million for One Night, and the Contract Was Signed by My Mother novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: One Night

On the river house porch she reads her margin aloud, and the first night is hers: lights on, his mouth, her pleasure first. After, he asks for a second night with no paper.

His house sat on the batture road below the levee, raised on cypress piers, with a porch that ran the whole length of it.

I had never seen a porch that long.

Soren drove me there himself in a gray truck with a dent in the tailgate.

He said nothing for the whole nine miles.

I watched the river lights slide by on the far side of the levee and counted my own breaths.

At one in the morning, on Ash Wednesday, he parked and came around and opened my door.

He did not offer his hand.

I took it anyway.

The porch swing hung from two chains at the far end, and the cypress boards were cold through my shoes.

One lamp burned inside behind a screen door.

I could hear the river moving under the property, deep and slow.

"Page six," I said.

"Page six is yours," Soren said. "I'll go by the margin."

I stood on his porch in my black dress and my mother's pearl earrings, and my hands were shaking.

I hadn't been afraid in the cloakroom.

I was afraid now.

It wasn't him.

It was how badly I wanted to find out what he would do.

"Read me the first line," he said.

"Lights on."

He reached inside the screen door and turned the lamp up, then switched on the overhead, and the porch went bright yellow around us.

Every board, every moth, every freckle I had.

He stood in it with nothing to hide behind and let me look at him.

"Anything else?" he said.

"Come here."

He came.

I put my hand flat on his chest, on a white shirt gone damp at the collar.

His heart was going hard.

That loosened something in me, a knot I'd carried since the cloakroom.

I went up on my toes and kissed him.

It was not a polite kiss.

His mouth opened under mine at once.

His hand came up into my hair, found the pins, and took them out one at a time, and the whole mass of it fell down my back.

I heard myself make a sound.

He pulled back an inch.

"That was a yes," he said, low.

"That was a yes."

He turned me by the hips and walked me back two steps until the swing was behind my knees.

I sat.

The chains creaked.

He went down on one knee on the boards, in his good trousers, and put both hands on my calves.

"Nothing where anyone can see," he said. "This porch faces the levee, and there's nobody on the levee."

"How do you know?"

"I own the levee road."

I laughed, a short startled laugh, and he looked up at me with his gray eyes, and I stopped.

His hands moved up my legs under the hem of my dress, slow, thumbs on the insides of my knees and then my thighs.

The skin there drew tight under his palms.

"Tell me where to stop," he said.

"Don't stop."

"Then lift for me."

I lifted.

He drew my dress up and my underwear down in one long pull.

I felt the night air on me, cool against how wet I was, and then his breath.

I grabbed the chain of the swing.

His mouth was warm and sure, and he didn't tease.

He found me with his tongue and held me still with his hands on my hips and licked me slowly, all the way up.

My back arched and my head tipped against the chain.

"Soren," I said.

"Say it again," he said against me.

"Soren, please."

He made a low sound against me that I felt in my own spine.

He worked me in slow wide strokes, then tighter, circling, and I could hear how wet I was.

I should have been ashamed.

I wasn't.

I put my fingers into his hair, gray at the temples, and held on.

He slid two fingers inside me, thick and unhurried, and curled them.

Every muscle I had drew up toward his hand.

"There," I said. "Right there."

"I know."

He didn't speed up.

He kept the rhythm of his fingers and the flat of his tongue exactly where it was, and the swing rocked on its chains with the small movements of my body.

The river went on below us.

I came hard, my thighs shaking against his shoulders, my mouth open on a sound I had never made in my life.

He kept his mouth on me through all of it, gentler now, until I pushed at his head, laughing and gasping.

He rose and looked at me, his mouth wet, his eyes dark.

"Inside," he said. "The bed. Lights on, like you said."

I stood on legs that didn't feel like mine.

He took me through the screen door and down a hall of bare cypress to a bedroom with one big iron bed and a window facing the river.

He lit the lamp on both nightstands.

I stood in the middle of the room and reached behind me for my zipper.

"Let me," he said.

"No. Watch."

I drew it down myself.

I let the black dress fall to the floor and stood there in underwear I would not have chosen for this.

He looked at me from head to foot like a man taking something down that he did not intend to forget.

"Margo."

"Take your shirt off."

He undid the buttons one at a time, without hurry.

His chest was broad and hard with a scatter of gray hair, and an old scar slanted across his ribs on the left side.

I put my mouth on it.

He drew a breath through his teeth.

I pulled at his belt, and he let me.

When I had him free he was thick and hot in my hand, harder than I had expected.

I stroked him once, slowly, from the base, and watched his jaw lock.

"Bed," I said.

He lifted me and laid me down, and the old iron frame rang a little.

He came over me, braced on his forearms, and kissed me, the taste of myself still on his mouth.

I wrapped my legs around his waist.

"Do you want me inside you?" he said into my mouth.

"Yes," I said.

"Say what you want."

I held his face in both hands.

"I want your cock inside me, Soren."

He closed his eyes for a second.

Then he reached between us, and I felt him at my entrance, thick and patient, and he pushed in an inch.

I gasped.

He stopped.

"Don't," I said. "Don't stop. Don't be careful."

"I'm not going to hurt you."

"I know. All of it."

He gave me all of it.

He pushed in slowly, stretching me, filling me until I could not tell where my body stopped and his began.

He held still when he was in to the root, shaking with the effort, his forehead against mine.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked at him.

The lamps were on, and I could see everything in his face.

It wasn't the Barge King's face.

It was a man's face, wrecked and amazed.

He began to move.

The strokes were long and deep, his hips rolling into mine, and every one reached somewhere I had never been reached.

I clutched his back, the muscles sliding under my hands, and met every thrust.

"Harder," I said.

He gave me harder.

The bed rang against the wall, and I didn't care who heard it on the empty levee.

He slid a hand under my hip and tilted me.

The angle changed, and he hit something inside me that turned my vision white at the edges.

"There. There, Soren," I said.

"Come for me again," he said.

"I can't, I just..."

"You can," he said.

He slid his thumb between us and found my clit and rubbed it in tight circles, steady, matching his thrusts.

I broke apart on his cock with a cry that filled the whole room.

I clenched around him again and again.

He groaned, a long ragged sound, drove into me twice more, deep, and held.

He came with my name in his mouth.

He didn't pull away.

He stayed on top of me and inside me, heavy and warm, his breath hard against my neck.

The lamps burned.

Far off up the road, the town clock struck two.

He lifted his head and looked at me.

"That was the night," he said. "The paper's done."

"Yes."

"I'd like to ask you for another. And this time there's no paper."

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