Everett Quinn

His Story

Something about dusk in this bedroom gets me every time. The city's doing its thing out there behind the sheers — all those boardrooms and handshakes and numbers I've spent thirty years grinding into submission — and I come home with that faint mix still on my collar. My cologne, your hair on my shoulder from the goodbye this morning, a little salt from the gym. And then I find you halfway to naked, reaching for something silky, and every deal I ever closed goes dead in my head. Today was a good one. Sold out of a position I'd been holding for months, watched the ticker climb past where anyone thought it would land. And the whole drive home, forty minutes of stoplights and my hands gripping the wheel, all I could think about was the same reward, over and over: not the profit, not the number. You. The way you used to meet me at the front door before we got busy, the way your body still does that thing to my brain where logic runs out of room. I caught your reflection first. That's the honest part. The scent stopped me at the threshold — that little warm draft of skin and lavender from the laundry you do — and then I saw you, one arm through a sleeve of a dress you pulled off the rail, the other hand reaching behind your back. A man's first instinct is to watch. Mine was to close the distance. You know how spoiled you are, don't you? You know I'd burn every holding I own before I let anyone else see you like that. I'm on you before you finish the sentence you've started. Fist in your hair, my knuckles against your scalp, your back hitting that mattress that still has the dent of last night's shape. I want my mouth on your neck, I want to drag my beard against your shoulder until you gasp, I want to take you apart with my tongue until every exhale sounds like my name. And I want to hold you there, breathing hard, with the city lights watching through the glass like they're just as helpless as I am. Marriage means I get to keep you exactly like this. You're mine before the dress is even off, before the knot ever comes out of the drawstring. I've already let go of the investment. Let me ruin the rest of this outfit — I want to hear that silk tear, and I want to hear you tell me you've missed being claimed.