Chapter 13: Two Days Left, One Tongue Deep

The second day began with Jason's mouth between her legs.

She woke to it—not gently, not with the tentative question of a lover testing boundaries, but with the flat, deliberate stroke of a tongue that knew exactly where it was going. His hands were under her thighs, holding them apart, and the morning light was barely gray through the curtains and he was already there, already working, his mouth hot and precise against her cunt like he'd been awake for hours planning the approach.

"Jesus—" Her hand came down on his head. Not to push him away. To hold on.

He didn't respond. He slid two fingers inside her and curved them forward and sucked her clit into his mouth and she came in under a minute, still half-asleep, her body seizing around his fingers while her brain caught up to what was happening. When she opened her eyes he was kneeling between her legs, mouth wet, hard, watching her with that expression she was beginning to recognize as specific to the mornings—the one that said he'd been thinking about this since before she woke up.

"Good morning," she said.

"I've been up since five." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I couldn't stop thinking about last night."

"Which part?"

"All of it. The chair. The scarf. The way you looked at me when you told me to get on my knees." His voice was steady but something underneath it wasn't. "No one's ever done that to me."

"Good. That was the idea."

He moved up her body and kissed her and she tasted herself on his tongue and felt his cock press against her stomach, hot and insistent, and she reached down and wrapped her hand around it and he groaned into her mouth.

"We have breakfast with Marguerite in forty minutes," he said.

"Then you'd better make this count."

He fucked her slow that morning—deliberate, deep, his hips rolling against hers in a rhythm that felt less like urgency and more like memorization. He held her wrists above her head with one hand, the same way he had the first night, but the grip was different now—lighter, less about restraint and more about connection, like he was keeping her in place so he could look at her properly while he was inside her.

"I want to take you somewhere today," he said, still moving, still slow. "There's a cove on the north side of the island. Private. No road access. You have to hike down from the ridge."

"Private?"

"Completely. Unless the fishing boats come through, which they do sometimes in the afternoon."

She tightened around him. "So there's a chance someone could see us."

His rhythm faltered. Just slightly. Just enough for her to feel it. "Is that something you want?"

"Jason." She pulled one wrist free and touched his face. "I spent yesterday sitting in your chair naked planning how to take you apart. Do you really think I'm scared of being seen?"

He came with a groan that she felt in her teeth, his hips pressing flush against hers, his cock pulsing deep inside her, and she felt the warmth of it spreading and she held him against her chest while his breathing slowed and his heart rate returned to something approaching normal.

"The cove," she said. "Today."

They hiked down at noon. The trail was steep and switch-backed through scrub brush and wild thyme and the air smelled like heat and salt and the crushed herbs under their feet. Jason walked ahead of her in shorts and a linen shirt, unbuttoned, and she watched the muscles in his back shift as he navigated the descent and thought about the way those same muscles had looked in the morning light on the terrace two days ago and how different he seemed now—not softer, not less intense, but opened, like a building with the walls stripped away, the structure visible, the bones of it honest.

The cove was perfect. A crescent of white pebble beach enclosed by cliffs on three sides, the water so clear it looked like a trick of the light. Jason spread a blanket in the shade of an overhang and set down the bag he'd packed—water, wine, bread, cheese, olives—and she stripped off her dress and stood in her bikini and looked at the water.

"Swim?" she asked.

"After we eat."

They ate. Drank the wine. Talked. He told her about the first property he'd built on the island—a ruin he'd bought from a fisherman's widow for almost nothing, spent two years rebuilding with local stone and local labor, slept on site in a tent through two winters because he didn't trust anyone else to get the joinery right. She told him about the hotel in Lisbon she'd consulted on last year and how the owner had wanted to put a infinity pool on the roof and she'd told him it would destroy the building's relationship with the sky and he'd listened and built a courtyard garden instead and it had won an award.

"You understand space," he said. "The way people move through it. What they need before they know they need it."

"I understand people," she said. "Space is just the language they use to tell you what they want."

He looked at her the way he'd looked at her in the chair last night—like she was a foundation he hadn't expected to find. Then he leaned over and kissed her and the kiss turned into more and his hand slid under the back of her bikini bottoms and he squeezed her ass and pulled her against him and she felt him getting hard against her thigh.

"Here?" she said against his mouth.

"Here."

He untied her bikini top and pulled it off and his mouth went to her breasts and his tongue circled her nipple and she arched into him and looked up at the cliff above them and thought: *Anyone could be up there. Anyone could look down.* And the thought didn't make her stop. It made her push his head down harder.

"Take off your shorts," she said.

He did. His cock was fully hard, curving up against his stomach, and she wrapped her hand around it and stroked him slowly while he pulled her bikini bottoms down and his fingers found her and she was wet—had been wet since the hike, since the wine, since the moment they'd arrived and she'd realized how exposed the cove actually was.

He pushed her back onto the blanket and settled between her legs and she felt the head of his cock press against her and then he was inside, deep, and she wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him closer and he started to move and the sound of it—the wet, explicit sound of his cock sliding in and out of her—was loud in the quiet cove, louder than the water, louder than the wind.

"Harder," she said.

He braced his hands on either side of her and fucked her harder. The pebbles under the blanket dug into her back and she didn't care. His hips snapped against hers and his cock drove deep and she could feel her pussy clenching around him, could feel the orgasm building, and then she heard it—the low rumble of a boat engine.

"Jason—"

"I hear it." He didn't stop. If anything, he moved faster, his jaw tight, his eyes on hers. "Do you want me to stop?"

"No."

The boat came around the headland. A fishing boat—small, blue, an old man at the wheel. He was maybe sixty meters offshore, close enough to see the cliffs, close enough to see the beach if he looked, and Jason was fucking her and she was naked and visible and she should have felt exposed and instead she felt electric, the risk of it charging through her like a current, her orgasm suddenly right there, right at the edge.

"He can see us," she said.

"I know." Jason's voice was rough, wrecked, the same voice from last night when she'd had him on his knees. "Does that make you want to come?"

"Yes."

"Then come."

She came. The orgasm hit her like a wave breaking against stone and her whole body locked up and she heard herself cry out and Jason covered her mouth with his hand—not to silence her, just to feel it, to feel the shape of her moan against his palm—and he kept fucking her through it and the boat kept moving and the old man either saw or didn't and it didn't matter because the adrenaline was still flooding her system and Jason was still inside her and still hard.

He pulled out. Flipped her over. She braced herself on her hands and knees and felt him behind her, felt his cock slide back in from this angle—deeper, different, the pressure against her front wall constant and overwhelming—and his hand came down on her ass. Hard. The sound of it echoed off the cliffs.

"Fuck—"

"Again?"

"Yes."

He spanked her again and she pushed back against him and he grabbed her hip with one hand and fucked her rough and fast and his other hand came around to her clit and he rubbed it in tight circles while his cock pounded into her and she was going to come again, she could feel it building already, and then he said "I'm going to come inside you" and she said "Do it" and he slammed into her and held there and she felt him pulsing, felt the heat of it, and she came with him—her second orgasm rolling through her in deep, slow waves that left her shaking.

They collapsed onto the blanket. The boat was gone. The cove was quiet again. The water lapped at the pebbles and the sun moved and neither of them moved at all.

"That man saw us," she said eventually.

"Probably."

"And you didn't stop."

"You told me not to." He was breathing hard, his arm draped over her back, his cock softening against her thigh. "I'm following orders now. Apparently that's what I do."

She laughed. Turned over. Looked at him—sunburned, sandy, wrecked—and felt something shift in her chest that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the way he was looking at her, which was the same way he'd looked at her this morning, which was the same way he'd looked at her in the chair, which was like she was the first building he'd ever entered that he didn't want to leave.

They swam after. Naked. The water was cold and clear and she floated on her back and he watched her from the shallows and she could see him getting hard again just from watching her body in the water and she thought: *Two more days. Two more days and then I get on a plane and this becomes a story I tell myself at night in a different country.*

She swam to him. Stood. The water came to her waist. He was waist-deep too and his cock was hard and she reached for it underwater and he closed his eyes.

"I want you in my mouth," she said.

"Here?"

"Here."

She went to her knees on the pebbled bottom and the water came to her collarbones and she took him in her mouth and the salt water was on her lips and on his skin and she sucked him slowly, her tongue running the length of him, her hand cupping his balls, and his hands came to her head and this time he didn't hold back—he held her in place and fucked her mouth and she took it, took all of it, felt him hit the back of her throat and breathed through it and looked up at his face and saw something there she'd only seen once before—last night, in the chair, when she'd broken him.

"Leigh—I'm going to—"

She didn't pull off. She swallowed around him and he came in her mouth and she took it, every pulse, and when he pulled out she wiped her lips and smiled up at him and he looked like a man whose foundations had just failed inspection.

"You're going to kill me," he said.

"Two more days," she said. "Pace yourself."

They hiked back up as the sun dropped. At the top of the ridge he stopped and turned and looked back at the cove below them—the crescent of beach, the clear water, the cliffs that had held their sound—and he said, "I want to build something there."

"A building?"

"A room. One room. Open to the sea. No windows. No doors. Just walls and a floor and the sky." He turned to her. "I want to build it for you."

She didn't say anything for a moment. The wind was coming off the water and her hair was drying in salt-stiff waves and her body ached in the specific, satisfied way it ached after an afternoon of being fucked in the sun and she looked at him and thought: *He means it. He's actually going to build something in that cove and it's going to be for me and I'm going to have to decide what to do with that.*

"Build it," she said. "And when it's done, send me a photo. And if I see it and it's right, I'll come back."

"When?"

"When the terrace is finished and the room is built and you've figured out what you want to do with a woman who made you kneel in your own bedroom."

He kissed her. Hard. The kind of kiss that tasted like salt and wine and the beginning of something neither of them had a blueprint for. And somewhere below them, the cove held the memory of what they'd done there, and the fishing boat was halfway to Turkey by now, and the old man at the wheel was either telling someone about the couple on the beach or keeping it to himself the way the island kept everything—with the patient, indifferent silence of stone that had been there long before anyone arrived and would be there long after they left.

They walked back to the villa in the dark. His hand on the back of her neck. Her hand in his pocket. Two days left and a plane ticket and a cove that needed a room and a man who'd never built anything that didn't hold, building something now that neither of them knew how to test.