Chapter 563 | Time’s Up

Chapter 563: 563 | Time’s Up

The next ninety minutes were an education in what happened when Diane Fitzgerald decided she wanted something and had the time to take it.

She rode me first, slow, her hands braced on my chest and her hips rolling in circles that hit angles I didn’t know existed. The Luster field made her skin glow in the evening light filtering through the curtains, made her look like something out of a dream, except dreams didn’t squeeze you like she did or make sounds like that when you hit the right spot.

I came inside her the first time while she was on top, her walls clenching around me as she worked herself through her own orgasm, head thrown back and pink hair spilling down her shoulders. She didn’t stop moving even after I finished. Just slowed down, ground against me with my come already leaking out around me, and told me in that voice that I wasn’t done yet.

I wasn’t.

The second round happened with her on her back, legs wrapped around my waist, ankles locked behind me. She’d told me I could do something now, and I took that permission and ran with it. I fucked her deep and steady while she gasped my name and clawed lines down my back that healed before she could finish making them. When I came again she pulled me down and kissed me through it, swallowing the sounds I made against her mouth.

The third time was from behind.

Diane bent over the edge of her expensive bed with her face pressed into silk sheets and her ass in the air, and I gripped her hips hard enough to bruise while I drove into her. She was so wet by then that every thrust made obscene sounds, slick and loud in the quiet room, and she pushed back to meet me with a desperation she’d never let anyone else see.

"Harder," she said into the pillow.

I gave her harder.

"More."

I gave her more.

She came twice before I did, her whole body shaking, her voice breaking on sounds that weren’t words anymore. When I finally finished inside her for the third time she collapsed forward onto the bed and stayed there, breathing hard, trembling.

I pulled out slow. Watched the aftermath spill out of her onto the sheets she was definitely going to have to burn.

"You ruined me," she said. Her voice was wrecked. "I’m forty-something years old and you ruined me in my own bedroom."

"You said you wanted to make up for lost time."

"I did. I do." She rolled onto her back, looked up at me, and her smile was lazy and satisfied and still hungry underneath all of it. "The spirit is willing. The flesh is catching up."

I lay down next to her. The ceiling had that texture I’d stared at a hundred times over the years, the same one I’d counted when I was fourteen and couldn’t sleep, when I was sixteen and the System first appeared, when I was seventeen and realized the woman who’d raised me was looking at me differently.

Different ceiling now. Same room. Everything else had changed.

"Thank you," Diane said quietly.

"For what?"

"Coming back." She turned her head to look at me. The Luster had faded to something softer, less blinding, just the warm glow of a woman who’d been thoroughly fucked and wasn’t hiding it. "For not dying. For being here when I wake up tomorrow."

"I wasn’t planning on dying."

"No one ever plans it, sugar. That’s why it’s so frightening." She reached over and touched my chest, right over my heart, the same spot Sloane kept checking. "I called Reina, the night you were in surgery. The number doesn’t work anymore, hasn’t for nine years, but I called it anyway. Told her voicemail that her son was going to be fine because I wasn’t going to let him be anything else."

Something in my chest did something complicated. I let it.

"What did she say?"

"The voicemail is full. Has been since the funeral. I just needed to hear her voice one more time while I waited to find out if I was going to lose you too." Diane’s fingers curled against my skin. "I don’t pray. Never have. But that night I came close."

I didn’t have words for that. I kissed her instead, soft, and she made a small sound against my mouth that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with nine years of history neither of us could fully articulate.

When we broke apart she was smiling again, the complicated grief tucked away somewhere safer.

"Sloane’s going to be insufferable," she said.

"She’s always insufferable."

"Yes, but now she’s going to be insufferable with a timer that I’ve exceeded by approximately forty-three minutes."

As if summoned by the mention of her name, three sharp knocks hit the door.

"Time’s up." Sloane’s voice came through the wood, slightly muffled but unmistakably irritated. "You said two hours. It’s been two hours and forty-three minutes. I’ve been very patient."

Diane sighed. "Darling, patience is not barging in after—"

"I haven’t barged. I knocked. Barging would be me using my key." A pause. "I have a key. You gave it to me when I was twelve because you were worried about fire safety. I could barge if I wanted to."

"The key was for emergencies."

"This is an emergency. My boyfriend is in there and I can hear that you finished at least twice and I’ve been sitting on the couch for forty-three minutes smelling Thai food and losing my mind."

I looked at Diane. Diane looked at me. We both looked at the door.

"She’s not wrong," I said.

"She’s never wrong. That’s her worst quality." Diane raised her voice. "Give us two minutes to be decent."

"I don’t want you to be decent. I want to come in."

"Sloane."

"Mom."

The standoff lasted approximately four more seconds before Diane reached over to the nightstand, found her phone, and tapped something. A soft click came from the door.

Sloane entered like a storm front.

She’d changed since dinner, traded the casual clothes for sleep shorts and a tank top that left very little to the imagination, her pink hair loose around her shoulders instead of in its usual ponytail. Her blue eyes swept the room once, cataloging the state of the sheets, the state of me, the state of her mother, and drew what were probably accurate conclusions from all of it.

"You’re disgusting," she said, but there wasn’t any heat in it.

"Hello to you too, sweetheart."