She Wore His Watch Waiting for His Knock

Liam’s watch sits on my nightstand like a confession he never meant to leave behind. Heavy. Still faintly warm from the private weather of his skin. The leather has gone dark in one small oval, a stain of heat and salt exactly the width of his wrist, years of him pressed into the hide until the hide gave up and kept him. I have no right to it. I cannot stop wanting it. I cannot look away from it. I have tried. The face is a dark, expensive quiet. The band is the shape of his restraint, the whole life that never stays the night reduced to something I can hold in both hands.

I pick it up. The metal is cool. The leather is not. I press the glass to the hollow of my throat and time my breathing to the tick until my own pulse tries to learn his. In. Tick. Out. Tick. I catalog the weight of it against my windpipe, the faint animal smell of the hide, the way that small dark oval seems to remember him even in this room he does not sleep in. Want curdles. It thickens, slow and shameless, until it is no longer wanting at all. It is a plan.

I will not return it. I will make him come here and take it off me.

I buckle it around my own wrist before I get into bed. The band is too large. It slides down my forearm like a claim I have not earned, leather whispering over skin that has never been anyone’s. I sleep with the metal over my pulse anyway, refusing to take it off even when it pinches, even when the tick becomes the only sound in the dark. I wake to grey light coming through the blinds and the watch still counting against my wrist, patient, as if it knows he will have to cross the hall to stop it.

His knock comes before the light has finished turning gold: measured, unhurried, a man who expects the world to open because it usually does. I answer it wearing his watch and a slip of silk and nothing beneath either. The silk clings where I am already warm. He is dressed for a life that does not include my bed, collar crisp, coffee still on his breath. I am dressed for the opposite. His eyes go to my wrist first. Of course they do. I watch him see it, watch the composure hold, watch it cost him.

That’s mine, he says.

I know. I slept in it. I lift my wrist between us, not an offering, a provocation, the band sliding loose, the steel riding the frantic beat he cannot pretend not to see. It pinched, I tell him. All night. I liked that. I touch the hollow of my throat where I pressed the face last night and I say, I put it here, and I let it count me down, and every time it ticked I decided it was your mouth. His throat works once, a swallow he does not want me to notice. I notice. I keep talking. I want him to make me stop.

He holds out his hand. Palm up. Patient. A man who has never had to take what is already his.

I do not unbuckle it.

Victoria. Stop talking.

I step into his space instead. Close enough that the watch almost brushes his shirt. Close enough to smell the rest of him, the clean heat I have breathed from across the hall for months, soap and skin and the pressed cotton of a man who irons his mornings flat. What is the punishment, I ask, for keeping what is his? My hands have gone cold with the asking. There is a tremor in my knees I did not authorize. I am a virgin the way a locked room is a virgin: not untouched by wanting, only unopened, and I have been starving for the sound of his control breaking on me.

He reaches for the clasp.

I trap his fingers before they can free it. I drag them to my mouth. Salt. Heat. The faint bitterness of his coffee on his knuckles. I do not kiss so much as take, my tongue finding the ridge of each joint, the fine hairs at the back of his hand, the callus where a pen lives, learning him at a pace that makes his breath go audible. Then down. Down the column of my throat, over the place where I pressed his watch last night, until his fingertips rest against the frantic proof of me.

His hand closes. Not kindness. His palm is rougher than his shirts suggest, dry and hot, and it spreads over my throat with a pressure that is not about breath at all, not yet, only about distance, about erasing the last polite inch between us. My pulse hammers up into his grip like something trying to get out. He tightens by a degree, and the air I am pulling goes thin and precious, and I hear myself make a sound I have never made, and my whole body leans into his hand instead of away from it. That is the second he understands what I am.

Is this what you came to the door for, he asks, so low it barely counts as a question.

It is not enough. That is my answer, and I give it with both palms flat against his chest.

He lets himself be moved. The door swings wide behind him and stays gaping on the empty hall, and I do not care who passes. I walk him backward one step, two, his heels catching on the edge of my rug, his eyes on my wrist the whole way as if the watch is the thing steering him and not my hands. Six steps. Seven. The room has never felt this long. The backs of his knees hit the mattress and he sits, hard, the frame complaining, and for one breath he is at eye level with the silk clinging to my hips and he does not look away.

I push his shoulder. He goes down on his elbows and then, when I do not stop pushing, he hauls himself up the bed on his heels, shoes dragging across my sheets, until he is stretched long against the pillows with his feet finally on the mattress. Mine. All of him inside the geography of my bed for the first time.

I go to his belt. The buckle is cold and it fights me, the leather tongue stiff, and the sound it makes when it finally gives, that small metal click, goes straight down my spine. I pull the belt free of its loops in one long draw and let it fall to the floor. His shirt next. The buttons are smaller than my fingers believe. I fail at the second one twice, the cotton damp where his chest has heated it, and when I finally get it open I lay my palm flat over his sternum just to feel the hammer under the bone. He is not calm. He has never been calm. He only dresses like it.

I work his shoes off one at a time, heel first, and drop them over the side. Socks. Then the trousers, the zip loud in the quiet, the waistband catching until he lifts his hips for me, a small surrender he covers by fisting a hand in my sheets. I drag wool and cotton down his thighs together and off his feet and let them lie where they land. I do not look. I keep my eyes on his face while I do it, on the throat that keeps working, on the hand that will not unclench from my bedding, and I feel him only as heat coming off the shadow between us, a weight in the air, a pressure I have not yet measured and am saving.

He takes the silk from me in one hard pull. Over my head, gone, and there is nothing on me but his watch, the leather locked around my wrist, the only thing in the room that still pretends to belong to him.

I climb over him. One knee, then the other, the insides of my thighs already ruined for anything but this, his body a long unyielding line beneath me, his open shirt spread against my pillows like something shed. I do not settle. I hover, knees planted in the sheets, and let myself lower only until the first press of him finds my cunt, so blunt and wet that my breath fractures in my throat. He is already hard enough to hurt. The head of his cock sits slick against my entrance, a living heat I have never taken, and I am shaking with the knowledge of it. The watch on my wrist ticks against my racing pulse, leather darkened where his skin used to live, metal kissing the thin vein. I refuse to rush.

I sink a fraction. Just enough. The stretch is a burning ring, unused muscle forced to open around him, and my thighs quiver with the effort of holding myself there instead of dropping. He fills the first inch of me and my whole inner life narrows to that single, obscene pressure.

Stay, he says, voice scraped raw. Sit on it.

I do not. I lift until he almost slips free, a thin wet sound between us, and the look on his face is worth every untried nerve in my body. His hands slam to my hips. The correction is immediate, harsh, fingers digging into the soft give of my flesh hard enough to bruise. I catalog it the way I cataloged his abandoned watch: heat, the crescent of his nails, the way my cunt clenches around the bare head of him for one starved second before he yanks me down.

I take him anyway, on my terms, my thighs fighting his grip for every inch of the descent. The stretch is luxurious and obscene, a slow, shaking slide that peels me open. He is thick, thicker than my imagination ever managed, and I feel myself go glossy around him, a slick welcome my body did not ask my mind about. He fills me until I cannot think around the shape of him. My inner walls flutter, clutching, learning. Sweat slides between my breasts. I can smell the leather of his watch on my own skin, his pulse transplanted to mine, and I roll my hips in a shallow grind that keeps the deepest part of him just out of reach.

He snarls. He thrusts up. I lift again, disobedient, hovering so that only the fat head of him stays inside me, a teasing stretch I refuse to surrender. Victoria. My name is a warning. I ignore it. I rock just shy of the depth he wants, using the drag of him, the wet friction, the way my clit catches on the base of his cock when I tilt forward. Every nerve is a catalog: the burn, the slick, the tick of the watch, the muscle leaping in his jaw.

His palm cracks against the outside of my thigh. The slap blooms hot. I moan for it, greedy, and lift higher instead of sitting down the way he ordered. That is the point. I want the correction. I want his composure to fray against my disobedience until his hands become the only language left.

They do. He grips my thighs hard enough to leave prints and hauls me down, burying himself to the root in one brutal correction that knocks the air from my lungs. I am so full I can feel him behind my navel, a thick, living pressure. Tears prick. I am still a virgin in the way it hurts, in the way my body has to learn the length of him, but I am also the brat who stole his watch and made him come to my bed to take it back.

I start to move. Slow. Obsessive. I rise until he is almost gone and sink with a shaking roll that lets me feel every ridge, every pulse of blood in him. When he tries to set the rhythm from below I hover, thighs locked, denying him the thrust. Another slap, this one to my ass, sharp enough to make me clench around his cock. He groans like I have wounded him. I do it again, lifting off, grinding the head of him against my stretched rim, watching his control crack in real time.

Stay seated, he growls. Take all of it.

I take half. I take three-quarters. I circle my hips in a luxurious drag that paints him with my wetness and never quite gives him the hilt. His fingers bruise my waist. I catalog the sound of his breath going ragged, the sheen of sweat on his chest, the way his cock twitches inside me when I squeeze. The watch ticks. I timed my breathing to it last night; now I time the roll of my cunt to it, slow and cruel and worshipful, every lift a provocation, every sink a gift I can snatch back.

He swells. I feel it, a thickening that makes the stretch edge toward too much. His hips jerk, seeking the last frantic friction, and that is when I give him what he ordered and none of what he needs. I sink all the way, one shaking drop that seats him to the root, and then I lock my thighs and hold him there, still, denying the movement he is desperate for. My hands brace on his chest. I do not bounce. I do not let him fuck up into me. I keep him buried and grind only my clit against his body in tiny, selfish circles, using him, using the fullness, using the way he throbs without being allowed to finish.

Don’t, he says, and it is almost a plea, almost an order. I disobey that too.

I come first. Greedy. Shaking. The orgasm rips through the unused places he has opened, a long, clenching wave that milks him while I refuse to let him follow. I watch his face through it: the clenched jaw, the dark, furious hunger, the brat’s victory written in the way he pulses, unfinished, trapped inside the tight flutter of my cunt. His watch is still on my wrist. I will not let him have either of us yet.

I fold down onto his chest when it is over, still impaled, still trembling. He is iron-hard inside me, twitching with every aftershock I give him and do not take. His hands stay on my hips, pinning me in place now that I am spent, as if stillness is the only correction left. I can hear his heartbeat under my ear, too fast. The leather band slides down my forearm between us. He does not unbuckle it. He does not speak. He just breathes, unfinished, and holds me there until the shaking stops.