The Co-op

Chapter Forty

CHAPTER FORTY

DEACON

“Would you stop petting it, Deacon?”

“What?” I say innocently, swinging the tie to her silk robe like a lasso. “It’s so smooth and slippery. I want one.”

“It does look good on you, I suppose,” she says, taking an overly large bite of her cereal.

I look at her sitting on a dining chair, feet propped up in my lap. She’s wearing one of my Santa Sea shirts—this one dotted in sand dollars—left completely unbuttoned, the mass of her hair swaying behind her. We woke up sometime in the night, starving , and shuffled our way out here, each grabbing something to throw on as we went.

“Not as good as that looks on you,” I tell her before I take my own bite. I stare down at my Cheerios and try to calm, immediately dying to dip my hand under that shirt and slip it off her. Cheerios. Milk. Cereal. Spoon. She’s gonna get tired of you if you keep at it like this.

“Silk feeling a little too good, mon coeur ?” she asks, bending over to set her bowl on the table beside me. I try to adjust the robe but just end up sliding it along my now-stiffening cock— she knows I can’t think straight when she slips into French—and shit, I think I might be blushing —

“Fuck—” I hiss when she glides her foot along me, spoon clattering to the ground. She slides onto her knees and looks up at me from between my thighs, clutches the silk around my cock and pumps. I can’t think of any words beyond single syllables, captivated by the sight of her. But then she parts the robe and Jesus Christ I knock over my bowl and the rest of the milk off the table when she takes me in her mouth.

Milk and cereal splatter across the subfloor, and we don’t bother to clean it up until morning.

And it’s as we finish cleaning up that mess together, side by side, that I muster up the courage to speak my piece on the house.

“I think we should finish what we can here, and sell,” I say, planting a kiss on the base of her palm.

She stares into me, and it’s as if I can feel what she’s feeling for a moment. Like she wants to look directly inside my mind and know that I mean it as much as I do.

“Okay,” she tells me. “Let’s do it.”

What a gift it is to trust someone, I realize. To know that through every up and down, every unexpected break, they want the same thing as you in the end. Just to be together.