Chapter 235: Sunday
"Olivia—"
"I want more." She raised her head. Her eyes were bright, hungry, insatiable. "Doggy. You promised me doggy."
"I didn’t promise—"
"You implied."
He laughed. Couldn’t help it. "You’re going to kill me."
"A good death, though. The best death."
She rolled off him. Positioned herself on her hands and knees. Looked back at him over her shoulder, and the sight of her—her back arched, her hips raised, her sex glistening and swollen and still slick with his release—made him hard again in seconds. Three times in one morning. It should have been impossible. With her, nothing was impossible.
He knelt behind her. Positioned himself at her entrance. Slid inside.
This angle was primal. Deep. He bottomed out with a single thrust, and she moaned—loud and unguarded, the sound echoing off the walls of his ordinary apartment.
He gripped her hips. Thrust. Hard. Fast. The rhythm was punishing, desperate, nothing like the slow lovemaking of the missionary position. This was something else. Something raw. Something that said I love you in the language of bodies instead of words.
Her fingers twisted in the sheets. Her back bowed. The sounds she made were incoherent—gasps and moans and fragments of his name.
"Sean—Sean—I can’t—"
"You can."
He reached around. Found her clit. Pressed down.
She screamed.
Her orgasm ripped through her, and she collapsed forward onto the mattress, her body shaking, her inner walls pulsing around him in rhythmic waves. He followed her over the edge—one last thrust, one last surge of release, one last groan of her name against her shoulder blade.
They lay tangled together in the aftermath. Sweat cooling on their skin. Hearts hammering in tandem. The afternoon light slanted through the window, golden and warm.
She turned her head. Looked at him. Her lips curved.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"That was—"
"I know."
She laughed. "We really need to find new words."
"Later." He pulled her close. "Much later."
She nestled against his chest. Her hand found his. Their fingers interlaced. The city hummed outside the window, doing its ordinary things, but nothing about this moment was ordinary. Nothing about her was ordinary.
"Sean?"
"Hm?"
"I meant it. What I said before."
"I know." He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. "I meant it too."
She tilted her head up. Her eyes were bright, shimmering, full of everything words couldn’t capture. "Then say it again."
"I love you."
She smiled. That real smile. The one that was small and involuntary and looked nothing like the one she used on stage.
"I love you too," she said.
Outside, the city continued its endless hum. Inside, in his ordinary apartment on his ordinary bed, Sean held Olivia close and let himself feel the full weight of what had just happened.
She loved him.
He loved her.
And that was everything.
—--------------------------
Sunday morning came quietly into Sean’s apartment, the specific gentle light of it, and Olivia was still here at Sean’s Apartment.
She woke up before him, which he discovered when he opened his eyes and found her sitting cross-legged on the bed looking at the whiteboard across the room with the focused attention she gave things she’d decided to understand.
"Good morning," he said.
She glanced at him. "You have fourteen names on that whiteboard."
"Yes," he said.
"And numbers next to them," she said.
"Yes."
"And some of the numbers have arrows," she said.
"Yes."
She looked at him. "I’m not going to ask."
"Okay,thanks" he said.
"But I want you to know that I’ve already memorized the layout," she said. "So eventually."
"Eventually," he agreed.
She uncrossed her legs and lay back down beside him and looked at the ceiling. He looked at the ceiling too.
"I like it here," she said quietly.
"Good," he said.
"Your actual place," she said. "I like it." She turned her head to look at him. "It smells like coffee and books and something specific I can’t name."
"What kind of something," he said.
"The kind that means someone actually lives here," she said. "Not performs living here. Actually does it."
He looked at her.
She looked back with those green eyes that had been watching him since a freshman party and had kept watching across everything that had followed.
"Stay for breakfast," he said.
She smiled."I was hoping you’d say that."
===========================
Sean made coffee and scrambled eggs. Successfully. Which he told her was a significant achievement.
She looked at him over her coffee. "You burned toast."
"Toast and eggs are different categories," he said.
"They involve the same kitchen," she said.
"The kitchen and I have reached an understanding," he said.
She pressed her lips together. "What kind of understanding."
"Eggs are achievable," he said. "Toast remains aspirational."
She laughed properly, the kind that arrived before she decided to let it, and he put the eggs on the table and sat across from her and they ate breakfast in his apartment on a Sunday morning with the city outside the window and the whiteboard on the wall and her in his jacket and everything about it was ordinary and everything about it was entirely right.
After breakfast she helped with the dishes, which she did without being asked, the same instinct he had in Makima’s kitchen, and they stood at his sink together with the same easy rhythm of people who had found each other’s rhythms without negotiating them.
At eleven she said she needed to go.
"Kwon," she said.
"On a Sunday," he said.
"He sent three messages while we were eating breakfast," she said. "I read them when you weren’t looking."
"What did they say," he said.
"The formation needs work," she said. "His words. Which means it’s actually close to right and he’s refining rather than rebuilding, which is his version of almost there." She looked at him. "I know his language now."
"He respects you enormously," said Sean.
"I know that too," she said. "It took me a while to learn how he says it."
She went to find her things and he called James.