and brilliant. So good. Created by God’s own hand, and there was no denying it, because nothing but a divine creator could have ever produced something so perfect. He was like that.
His hands made her feel small and strong all at once. Made her feel cared for, and made her feel like she was in the gravest of danger. She was so very aware of his strength. And so very aware of how gentle he could be. He was like that.
He made her feel like an endless world of possibility existed beyond them, between them. He made her feel like she was the only one in the world, for just a moment. Until she remembered that she shared him with the life he should have had by rights. He was like that.
And she hated that she wanted there to be something more. She really did. She hated that she needed there to be something more. Because a better woman wouldn’t. A better woman would know that it was good and right that he continued to love the wife that he lost in the way that he did. That it was a sign of his strength that he had gone to a mountain for five years and buried himself in his grief. But he had continued to build this house for her, in the place that he had promised her.
Yes, a better woman would be okay with all of that.
She would know that it meant he was good. She would know that it meant he was strong. She would know that he deserved his grief. That he deserved to carry that love, and that she deserved to have it.
Iris knew all those things. She knew them all and still felt them chafe against her, and that was what made her bad. But then...
Everyone had always had such confidence in her supreme goodness. In her ability to give and give and give. Her mother, her father, everyone had acted like it was God-given. Like she was just a caretaker. No. That wasn’t it. It never had been. She was just afraid. Afraid that if she didn’t do that, if she didn’t break herself open and pour out, over and over again, that she wouldn’t be anything. That she wouldn’t be enough.
And she was afraid of it now. With him.
She wasn’t good. She was a coward. She was selfish. She had just never been given the chance to be. And oh, now she had it. Now she felt that, coursing through her veins. So this was maybe what it meant to be thirty-one years old and faced with a declaration of love that she knew had an asterisk behind it. Because she was on her own now. And she was free.
And maybe this was the journey that she had to go on. This journey to realizing that she had never been a beacon of anything.
But she had been protecting herself, but not from the world. From the rejection of the people that she loved the most.
And now, kissing him, touching him, feeling small and mean and petty, she wanted to protect herself again.
But she shut her brain off. She shut her brain off and she gave herself this moment, because she needed it. She needed him more than she needed anything in the entire world. More than she needed to breathe.
He got on his knees and tugged her jeans down, kissing her thigh, her stomach, teasing her. He sat down on the pile of clothes that they had left there on the ground, and he brought her down over him. His jeans, spread out beneath him, offered a cushion for her knees as she straddled him, the slick heat of her coming into contact with his arousal.
And he brought her down slowly over him, and she arched her back, bringing her breasts right into contact with his mouth. His beautiful, perfect mouth. He played a symphony of pleasure there, looking at her, sucking her, making her his.
She was his. And it wasn’t fair.
He owned her. It was so deep. So real.
She was his. And he would never be hers. Not really. She would always share pieces of him with the universe. Pieces of him with people who weren’t here.
Pieces of him with a woman that he would never hold again. And he’d said that he never thought of her. He did.
But she couldn’t blame him if that was a lie.
She couldn’t blame him.
Was it a lie?
He has never lied.
No. He hadn’t. And she