His mouth tastes like maple and something that’s only him. I open for him; he deepens it, patient turning hungry, slow burning hot. I slide my fingers into his hair and he makes a low sound that lives somewhere I’m not lending out to anyone. We kiss until my lips feel a little swollen and the room feels warmer and the snow outside turns to a blur.
We come up for air and I stay close, nose brushing his. “Tell me something else.”
His thumb strokes the line of my throat like he can read a pulse instead of a book. “I didn’t sleep much last night,” he admits.
“Did I snore?”
“You breathed.” A ghost of a smile. “And my idiot heart kept saying,don’t sleep through this.”
I melt like butter on his pancakes.
“Your turn,” he says. “Tell me something true.”
I hesitate—then I let it out. Quiet. Clean. “When you told me you didn’t think you deserved me, I fell a little in love with you.”
His throat works. His fingers tighten at my waist, like the gravity just shifted and he needs an anchor. “Greta?—”
“You didn’t say it to make me feel something. You said it because it was true for you. And I like the man who tells the truth even when it makes him feel small.” I tip my head, searching his face. “I like the man who says he’s going to protect me and thendoes. I like the man who sleeps on the floor and pretends it’s comfortable. I like the man who?—”
He cuts me off with a kiss, but it’s not because he doesn’t want to hear it. It’s because he does and he can’t in that exact second without unraveling.
He stands with me in his arms—show-off—and my legs wrap around him like they were waiting for instruction. He carries me to the bed and lowers me onto the covers, coming down over me with his weight braced on his forearms, careful and sure.
“Tell me to stop,” he says, the same way he did last night. Like a vow.
“I won’t,” I say, the same way I did last night. Like a promise.
We undress each other slow this time, a button at a time, a laugh at a time, a story at a time—how I chipped a tooth on a cinnamon stick when I was eight, how he broke his wrist and refused to tell anyone, how we both thought the first day we met that the other one was too much trouble.
“Still think that?” I ask, breathless as his mouth finds the curve where my neck meets my shoulder.
“Yes,” he murmurs against my skin. “But I want the trouble.”
Heat gathers, sweet and heavy. We learn each other again—what makes me gasp, what makes him grind his teeth, what pace turns our edges to liquid. He’s reverent with me, like he’s saying grace; I’m greedy with him, like I’m starving. Somewhere in the middle, soft turns to want and want to need and then there’s only us, moving, breathing, giving, taking.
“Eyes on me,” I whisper when he starts to look away like the feeling is too big.
He does. It breaks something open in both of us.
When we crest, we do it together, the world narrowing to a bright, quiet point that feels like coming home and setting the house on fire in the same breath. We collapse in a mess of limbs and laughter, and he rolls, tugging me on top so I can sprawl across his chest and listen to his heart hammer the same rhythm as mine.
Outside, the snow keeps falling. Inside, the fire ticks and I draw patterns on Nate’s sternum with one finger, and he draws circles at the base of my spine until my muscles go lax.
“You’re staying,” he says after a while, not a question.
“You asked nicely,” I tease.
“You’re staying,” he repeats, lower now, like he’s telling a secret to the ceiling. “If you want. With me. Here or in town. In my quiet. In my loud. I’ll fix the door at your place and you can keep the diner and I’ll lurk in a booth and terrify teenagers who forget to tip.”
I laugh into his chest, then press a kiss right over his heart. “Okay.”
He freezes. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” I tip my head to see his face. “I’m not running. I’m done. I want pancakes and perimeter checks and you glaring at people who ogle my legs.”
“They better not.”
“They will.”
