Page 31 of The Drifter

The air moved over my skin. That's all. Just air. My breath went shallow. My hand went flat on my stomach and lay there a moment, not doing anything, just being a hand on me.

He's in my building, I thought. He's under my roof.

And there it was—that low, hot, rolling thing, coming up out of me, from underneath, slow.

I let it come.

My hand slid down from where it had been resting on my stomach, fingertips dragging over warm skin, slow enough that I could feel every inch of the path I took. The sheet had already slipped low on my hips; I pushed it the rest of the way off with my feet and let my thighs fall open. No rush. For once, the time was mine, the room quiet except for the faint creak of the bedframe and the sound of my own breathing.

I thought of Clint’s hands—those big hands I’d watched. I pictured them on me instead, teasing my skin as they moved lower. My own fingers followed the thought, tracing the crease where my thigh met my body, then slipping inward to the slick heat already waiting. A soft sound slipped out of me when I finally touched my clit—light at first, just circling, teasing the ache that had been building since the moment he’d said my name in that low Texas drawl, like it was a road he intended to travel.

I kept the pace lazy, indulgent. One finger, then two, gliding through the wetness, spreading it up and over that swollen little bundle of nerves. My other hand moved to my breast, rolling a nipple between fingers the way I imagined he might—firm, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world to learn me. In my mind, he was behind me, chest pressed to my back, those thick forearms caging me in while his gravel-rough voice murmured my name against my ear again and again, each syllable a promise.

I dipped two fingers inside myself, curling them, and my hips rolled up to meet the thrust. The stretch felt good, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted more—wanted the weight of him, the scrape of his stubble on my neck, the way his shoulders would flex under my hands. Still, I took my time, fucking myself slow and deep, thumb working steady circles over my clit. Every time the pleasure started to crest too fast, I eased off, breathing through it, drawing it out until my thighs trembled and the sheets were twisted tight in my fist.

I let the fantasy sharpen: Clint Dane on his knees between my spread legs, eyes locked on mine while those strong forearms held my thighs open, his mouth replacing my fingers. The image alone pulled a broken moan from my throat. I pressed a third finger in, fucking myself harder now, greedy for the burn, for the wet sounds filling the room. My back arched off the bed as the coil inside me tightened, tighter, until it finally snapped.

The orgasm rolled through me in long, shuddering waves, my walls clenching around my fingers while I rode it out, hips jerking, his name a quiet, desperate chant on my lips. I didn’t stop moving until the last tremor faded, until I was boneless and gasping, slick all the way down my thighs.

Afterward, I lay in the wreck of my bed with my heart coming down slow.

I did not feel guilty.

I waited for it. I lay there and I waited for the shame to come and find me, because I have been well raised and church raised and I know how that goes. And it didn't come. Nothing came except my own breath, and the sound of the water outside, and the tick of the air in the vents.

What came instead was something I had no name for. I lay there and turned it over until I did.

I'm not dead.

That was it. That was the whole revelation.

I laughed. Out loud, alone, my arm over my eyes.

And underneath the laughing, way down, something that felt like grief. Because a woman doesn’t get to be that surprised about her own body unless she has been gone a very long time.

He’s waking me up, I thought.

And I didn’t like that. I didn’t like it one bit. That's a dangerous sentence and I know exactly what kind of woman it belongs to. I have checked her in, and I have handed her a key, and I have watched the doors close on her.

It isn't him. I sat up and put my feet on the floor. It is not that man. It's the question.

That's what I decided, sitting on the edge of my bed with my hair everywhere and the harbor going by. He had asked a question.

What would you be doing if you weren't standing there?

I got up. I made coffee. I stood at my window with the cup in both hands and looked out at the water, and past the water, and I thought about a lobby with a ceiling somebody built to prove a point.

Then, I sat down on my sofa, in my T-shirt, with my hair down and my legs folded under me, and I picked up my phone.

And I typed, with two thumbs, like a woman doing something illegal: how to get a passport.

10

CLINT

The knock came at three past seven. I was awake before the second rap.

I came up the way I come up—all at once, flat, quiet, hand already moving toward the nightstand. Then, a voice came through the door doing an accent I hadn't heard in a long time.