Chapter 561 | Proof

Chapter 561: 561 | Proof

The back of my knees hit the mattress and Diane pushed me down onto it like she’d been waiting eleven days to do exactly that. Which, according to her, she had.

"Off," she said, tugging at my hoodie. "All of it."

"You could ask nicely."

"I could." She didn’t. She yanked the hem up and I lifted my arms so she could pull the whole thing over my head, and the second my chest was bare her hands were on it, tracing the lines the Demigod trait had been carving into me while I slept. Her fingers moved slow over my sternum, down across my abs, and her breath went uneven in a way that had nothing to do with tears anymore.

"Your body keeps changing," she murmured. "It’s genuinely unfair. I raised you. I have documentation of you as a scrawny fourteen-year-old who couldn’t do a single pull-up."

"And now?"

"Now I have opinions I shouldn’t have about the son I raised, and I’ve made my peace with all of them." She pressed her palm flat over my heart, felt it kick against her hand, and something in her face went soft and hungry at the same time. "There it is. There’s my proof."

I reached for her blouse and she caught my wrist.

"No." She guided my hand back down to the mattress. "Not yet. You’ve been in a hospital bed for eleven days. You don’t do a single thing tonight, baby. You lie there and you let mommy take care of you."

There’s a specific thing that happens in my brain when Diane uses that word in that voice, and it is not a thing I’m proud of, and it works every single time. My whole spine went to static.

She watched it happen, saw whatever crossed my face, and her mouth curved into the smile she saves for closing deals she already knows she’s won.

"There he is," she said.

She stood back and started undoing her blouse. Not fast. She never did anything fast when she wanted me watching, and she knew I was watching, and she took her time with each button the way she took her time with a sentence she wanted to land three seconds after she said it.

The cream silk slid off her shoulders and pooled on the floor, and underneath it she wore a lace set the color of dark wine, the kind of thing that cost more than most people’s rent and looked like it.

"Diane."

"Hm?"

"You wore that under a blouse for a two-hour drive."

"I was optimistic." 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

She reached back and unhooked the bra, let it fall, and stood there in nothing but the lace at her hips and the gold at her ears and a body her Aspect had been maintaining at some impossible standard for longer than I’d been alive.

The evening light through the curtains caught every curve of her, and the Luster hummed at that low continuous level that made photographs of her outperform physics, made her look in person like the best version of a memory. "And I was right to be. Look at you. You’re staring."

"I’m appreciating."

"Appreciate quietly. I’m concentrating." She hooked her thumbs into the lace and slid it down, stepped out of it, and there was nothing left between her and the light. Then she was climbing onto the bed, over me, her knees bracketing my hips, her pink hair falling forward across her face in the way that looked accidental and never was.

She kissed me again and this time I let my hands go to her waist because she hadn’t said not to touch, only not to do, and there’s a distinction there I intended to exploit for the next two hours. Her skin was warm under my palms. She rolled her hips once against me through my sweatpants and made a low sound into my mouth, and I felt more than heard her exhale when she found how hard I already was.

"Already," she murmured against my lips. "Eleven days did that too, I think. I missed this. I missed you specifically, but I missed this."

"Romantic."

"I contain multitudes, sugar." She kissed down my jaw, my throat, and lower, dragging her mouth across my collarbone and the marks Sloane had left there that hadn’t fully faded. Diane paused at those. Traced one with her tongue. "She marks you. That’s fine. I know how to share now, apparently. Growth."

Her mouth kept moving down. "But there are things she hasn’t figured out yet. Things I’ve had two months to perfect."

"You’re competing with your daughter."

"I would never." She reached the waistband of my sweatpants and looked up at me over the plane of my stomach, blue eyes bright and knowing. "I’m simply the more experienced party. There’s a difference and one day you’ll understand it."

She pulled my sweatpants down and I lifted my hips to help and then they were gone, boxers with them, and she settled between my legs with the kind of unhurried focus she brought to everything she’d decided was worth doing right. Her hand wrapped around me and I heard myself make a sound I didn’t authorize, and her smile got wider.

"Eleven days," she said again, almost to herself, and stroked me slow from base to tip. "Look at you. You held. My good boy."

That word again. She knew exactly what it did. She’d figured it out somewhere in the first week and had been weaponizing it against me ever since, and every time I told myself I’d built up a resistance and every time I was wrong.

She leaned down and pressed a kiss to the head of me, soft, the way you’d greet something you’d genuinely missed.

Then she dragged her tongue along the underside, slow, tracing the vein that ran there like she was following a line on a map she’d memorized.

And that was the thing about Diane. Sloane came at everything like a fight she intended to win, eager and loud and improving fast. Diane didn’t improve because Diane had already arrived.

Every motion of her mouth was a decision she’d made deliberately, a thing she was doing to me on purpose because she’d learned precisely what it would produce.

She took me into her mouth. No hesitation, no warm-up, just took me deep in one motion until I hit the back of her throat and she didn’t flinch. My hand found her hair on its own. She hummed, and the vibration of it rolled up my spine and lit up the base of my skull.

"Diane."

She pulled back with a wet sound, kept her hand working the base, looked up at me with her lips slick and her eyes half-lidded and completely in control of everything happening in this room including me. "Yes, baby?"

"Nothing. Keep going."

"I intend to." She dipped back down. "I have two hours and a very long list of things I’ve been thinking about while you were being reckless and nearly dying. Do you know what I thought about, sitting in that hospital, when I let myself think about anything besides the monitor?"

"I have a guess."

"I thought about this." She swallowed me down again, and this time she stayed, worked me with her throat and her tongue and the flat of her hand in a rhythm that had no gaps in it, no wasted motion, nothing but the singular application of a woman who’d decided my entire nervous system belonged to her for the next two hours. She pulled off just long enough to speak, breath hot against wet skin.

"I thought about you here. Alive. Mine. Letting me do exactly this."