“Tell me if anything’s wrong,” he says. “At any point.”
“Okay,” I whisper, somewhere between shy and starving.
“Good girl,” he says, and a napping cat uncurls in my chest at the words. He doesn’t leap on the turn of my breath. He notices it, tucks it away, and continues.
The way he undresses me is deliberation made tactile. Not rough. Not slow to torment. Just exact. He skims my cardigan off like it’s a page. He slides my dress down my hips with a care that makes me feel expensive. When I reach for his buttons, he catches my wrists—not to stop me, but to anchor my hands while he looks at me.
“You’re lovely,” he says, and it lands different than Sean’s “Beautiful.” Both true. This one…grows roots.
“Don’t say that if you don’t mean it,” I say before I can help it, the old splinter of my father’s disappearing act working itself under my skin.
His gaze doesn’t flick or dim. “I don’t say what I don’t mean.”
“Okay.” It comes out small and enormous.
He lets my wrists go. I finish the buttons with clumsier fingers than I want and laugh at myself. He presses a kiss to my temple, and I hearit’s finein the smack of his lips on my skin.
His palm covers my sternum, warm and broad. “Breathe,” he says. I do, and the breath goes further than before, like his hand gave my lungs permission.
His mouth on mine changes without warning; the gentle line turns hungry, a dark pour over bright ice. He holds the back of my neck and tilts my head just so and the kiss goes electric. I make a sound I’ve never heard from myself. He answers with a low note that vibrates against my teeth. The calm is not a mask. It’s a gate. And he just opened it.
“Tell me,” he murmurs between kisses, “how you like to be touched.”
The command melts my knees despite the fact that I’m horizontal. I don’t know how to answer it, my throat sticky with embarrassment, so he places his palms on my thighs and says, “Show me then.” I show him, and his hands listen. When I gasp at one particular pass of his thumb, he marks it like a waypoint and returns to it with unhurried certainty until thought turns into temperature.
His pupils are blown wide, hunger in them, but he’s not lost to it. He’s completely present, steady and grounded, watching me like I’m the only thing that exists.
He moves with purpose, like he knows exactly what he’s doing—because he does. His fingers and mouth work in perfect rhythm, every touch deliberate. He’s not chasing his own high; he’s focused entirely on mine, coaxing me upward, reading every gasp, every twitch of my hips, and adjusting until he finds the exact pressure that makes me bite back a cry. Then he keeps me there, feeding it back to me over and over until I can’t think about anything but the heat he’s building.
When my hips jerk and I start to climb faster than I meant to, he smiles against my throat, warm and proud, his lips brushing my pulse. “That’s it,” he murmurs, almost reverent. “Stay with me. I’ll give you more.”
And he does, sliding his hand lower, curling his fingers deep inside me, his thumb finding that perfect spot with unerring precision. My back arches, a broken sound catching in my throat, and his other hand comes up to hold me steady.
“Declan,” I gasp, and his arm wraps around my waist, holding me to him while my body shudders through it, his gaze still locked to mine, like he’s not letting go until he’s certain I’ve taken every last ounce of what he gave me.
After, the quiet isn’t empty. It hums. He doesn’t roll away. He breathes like a man who has run and arrived. One palm moves in slow arcs on my back, a tide smoothing sand. He kisses my forehead in a way that would be condescending from anyone else and isn’t from him. It says: present. It says: I’m still here.
“I’m not looking for anything,” I say again, because I need to hear it in this air too.
He nods against me. “All right.”
I want to ask him if he’s disappointed, but I know it isn’t fair to, so I slip my dress back over my shoulders, and he doesn’t ask me to stay. He also doesn’t pretend not to want me to. He stands, smooths the back of my dress like a man who has never once let a woman leave with her hem caught in her underwear, and presses a kiss to the hinge of my jaw that feels like punctuation, not a cliff-hanger.
At the door, he rests his palm flat on the frame next to my head, not caging, just…there. “I’ll walk you.”
“I can make it,” I say, though I don’t know if I’m saying I can navigate the ship or my own choices. He waits. “Okay,” I relent, and his hand comes away from the frame.
We step into the corridor, and I think of Cheyenne’s face, and Dylan’s drumroll, and Sean’s easy grin, and the way Declan said breathe and I did. I don’t know what story I’m in. I do know this: I am not the girl who waits at the edge of the dance floor for theright song anymore. I put my name down. I took the mic. I let a man anchor me and I didn’t drown.
Halfway back to my room, a couple staggers around the corner, laughing, off-balance. Declan shifts without thinking, putting himself between them and me. It’s a small thing. It’s the whole thing.
At my door, he looks at me like he’ll remember the exact shade of my lipstick on his mouth in the morning. “Sleep well, Willow.”
“Sleep well, Declan,” I echo, using my best Irish accent.
He waits until I key in, until the lock clicks. He waits until I’m inside and the door shuts. Only then does the quiet of the hall swallow his footfalls.
Sean didn’t walk me back.The thought is sharp, intrusive, but Declan’s footsteps fading down the corridor soften it.
