He Told Me I Lost Our Baby, and Five Years Later I Met Him at His Door novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Rule

He knocked at eleven exactly, one knuckle, twice.

I had been sitting on the edge of the bed since ten with the lamp off and the avenue light coming orange through the blind.

I had showered, and I had put on nothing but a long grey T-shirt that I had slept in for four years.

My hands were steady.

That was the part I had worked on longest, in Lisbon, in a bed with a chair under the door handle.

"It's open," I said.

He came in and shut the door behind him, and the room got small.

He stood with his back against it in his black coat, and he did not say a word.

His eyes went to my bare legs, and to my face, and then he looked at the floor.

"Take off the coat," I said.

He took it off and hung it on the hook.

He wore a dark sweater and jeans, and his hands hung at his sides, big and scarred across the knuckles.

"Come here," I said.

He crossed the room in two steps and stopped in front of me.

I stayed sitting, and from the bed my eyes were level with his belt.

"These are my rules," I said. "You keep your hands where I put them until I say."

"Yes," he said.

"You don't say my name like it's yours."

"No," he said.

"And when it's done, you go home to your own bed."

"Yes, Siobhan," he said, in a low, rough voice.

"Put your hands behind your back."

He clasped his own wrists behind him and stood there in the orange light with his chest rising.

He was a six-foot-two man in my rented room, taking an order.

I had not known I wanted to see that until I saw it.

I put my palm flat on his stomach, over the sweater, and the muscle under my hand clenched.

I slid it down, slowly, and felt him through his jeans, already hard and hot against my hand.

He shut his eyes and made a sound in his throat.

"Look at me," I said.

He looked down.

"I'm going to take this off you, and you'll let me."

I pulled the sweater up and over his head.

He bent to help, and he brought his hands back behind him the moment it was off.

His chest was broad and dark with hair, with a long pale scar along the left ribs that I had not seen before.

I put my mouth on it.

"Car accident," he said unsteadily. "Four years ago. I was driving back from Worcester."

"You went to Worcester after I left."

"Every month," Cormac said. "I sat outside your aunt's house."

"You didn't come in."

"You'd have called the police."

"I would have," I said against his skin. "Good."

I undid his belt.

It took me a moment, because my fingers had started to shake after all, and I felt him watching my hands.

I pulled him free, and he was thick and heavy in my fist, hot as a stone left in the sun.

"Oh, God," he said.

"Quiet."

I stroked him once, slowly, from root to tip, with my thumb over the wet head.

His whole body jerked, and his hands strained against each other behind his back.

I did it again.

"You still do that," I said. "The thing with your breath."

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