My breath caught. “I’ll tell you.”
He took me into his mouth and took his time, slowly licking the underside as he moved his mouth forward and back.
I bit back the sound that began escaping my throat.
Farrow stopped. He pulled off and sat back on his heels, mouth wet, with hair falling forward across his forehead.
“No,” he said. “Not tonight.”
I looked at him.
“Tonight you make the sounds.”
He pushed his hair back with his free hand. He wouldn't start again until I followed his request.
“Okay,” I said.
He went back down. His lips and tongue worked me with the same slow patience, and this time I let the sound escape. It was rougher than I’d expected. I reached for the back of his head and held on, fingers tangled in his hair.
Farrow worked me to the edge slowly. Every time I lifted my hips, he pushed back and held me down, keeping the wrapped leg still. I had nowhere to go, and he knew it. He kept sucking, slow and steady, looking up at my face every few breaths to read me.
When I came, it was into his mouth. I wasn’t quiet. He didn’t pull off until I was done.
Then he slid up the bed, careful of the leg, and lay down against my left side with his head on my good shoulder. He placed a hand on my chest, settling flat over my heart.
I wrapped an arm around him and kissed the top of his head.
Farrow breathed against my collarbone.
“I worried I was going to lose you.”
“You didn’t.”
His breathing evened out against me, and his hand remained in place on my chest.
I closed my eyes and went to sleep with him on me.
***
The seven o’clock ferry was running on time. That was the first thing Cabot told me when he picked us up at six-twenty in a navy blue rental Camry that smelled like overly-aggressive air freshener.
“On time means on time,” he said. “Not Vineyard on time. Actual seven.”
“Good morning to you too, Stanley.”
“Good morning. Get in.”
He held the passenger door. Farrow stood at my left elbow without crowding. I lowered myself in stages—bad leg first, hand on the doorframe, hand on the dash, weight onto the good leg, pivot, and sit. Farrow handed me the crutches once I was down.
He got in the back. Cabot put my duffel and Farrow’s in the trunk.
“Coffee in the cup holders,” Cabot said as he pulled out. “Yours is the one with one sugar. Farrow’s is black. You can hand it back to him.”
“You remembered.”
“I’m a society reporter. We remember coffee orders. It’s eighty percent of the job.”
The streets of Edgartown were still dark. A single delivery van idled outside a bakery on Main with its hazards on. The white clapboard houses showed yellow rectangles of kitchen light in the upper windows. A man in a parka was scraping frost off a station wagon at the curb.