He waited. He was so good at waiting, I wanted to cry.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
I wanted him to read me. I wanted him to take the decision from my hands because I lived in decisions until they cut grooves in me. But maybe that was the point. Maybe speaking the want was the first part of the letting go.
“I want your mouth,” I said, cheeks burning, thighs trembling. “On me.”
“Here?” he asked, voice rough silk, and pressed a kiss over cotton that had gone damp with how badly I wanted. The contact ripped a sound from me I’d never made before.
“Yes,” I said, and the yes was a broken thing, unpretty and true.
He hooked his thumbs in the fabric and paused again. When I nodded, he drew them down and away, baring me like he had all the time in the world. He didn’t look away. He looked and looked, and I felt seen and taken apart and put together by sight alone.
Then he leaned in and gave me what I’d asked for.
The first hot slide of his tongue made my hands claw helplessly at the quilt. He groaned, low and pleased, the sound vibrating against me, and the shock of it arched me off the bed. He anchored my hips with his forearms, not pinning—holding. “There,” he said into me, like praise, like promise, and licked again, slower.
I forgot every plan I’d ever had.
He was patience and precision, the same man who had shown me how to brace a drill and let the tool do the work now showing me how to be the work, how to be undone. He found my clit—the slick, tender place he’d mapped with his thumb last night in my imagination—and worshiped it, teasing the edges, circling, testing pressure like a craftsman learning a material. When I gasped and tried to chase more, he pulled back, themessage clear, and when I stilled for him, he rewarded me with a deeper stroke that made my vision go white.
He slid two fingers into me with a care that made me shake, curling just so until pleasure lit down my body like a struck match. He didn’t rush. He watched my face. He learned my tells. He changed tempo when my breath changed, and every adjustment saidpay attention, I am.
“You’re … God,” I choked, not sure if I was praying or cursing or both. My thighs trembled against his shoulders. “I—Gideon?—”
“Hazel.” He lifted his head just enough for breath, mouth shiny, beard damp, eyes blown wide. “Let go.”
“I don’t—” I do control. I do lists. I do not?—
“Let go,” he said again, and pressed his tongue just where I needed while his fingers stroked slow and sure, and my body chose for me.
It took me fast, hard, like the night before had only been a rehearsal. I came with a cry I couldn’t swallow, pleasure pouring through me in heavy, relentless waves. He didn’t stop. He held me through it, mouth and hand easing only when the tremors gentled, when I tugged his hair without meaning to.
He kissed my thigh, the gentlest apology. He breathed against my skin like prayer.
I lay there blinking at the stained ceiling, wide open in every sense, floored by the simple, devastating fact that if I died tomorrow, at least I had learned this: surrender can be a choice, and sometimes it saves you.
He rose, slow, wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist, the motion unexpectedly intimate. He crowded my knees apart again with his hips, not to invade but to ask the next question. He looked wrecked in the best way—flushed, pupils huge, control hanging by a frayed thread.
“You okay?” he asked. The words were gravel. The care was a balm.
“Yes,” I said, then again, steadier: “Yes.”
“Do you want me inside you?”
Heat flamed anew, an aftershock turning to a need. “Yes.”
He stood, eyes locked on mine, and stripped. The sound of his zipper was louder than it should’ve been, a dark punctuation in the quiet. His pants hit the floor, followed by the soft thud of his belt. Then there was nothing between us but heat and breath.
He came back to me without hesitation, bare skin against bare skin, the weight and warmth of him pressing me into the mattress. The shock of it stole my breath, and the realization that there was nothing separating us—no barrier, no pause, no pretense—made my pulse trip hard and wild. It was want and danger and truth tangled together, and I didn’t want an inch of distance between us.
He came over me on his forearms, big enough to block the world, careful enough not to crush a thing. He kissed me slow again, letting me taste myself on his tongue, which should have embarrassed me and didn’t. He rocked once against me, just the length of him sliding along my slickness, and we both groaned, a matched sound, helpless.
“Tell me if this is too much,” he said. “Tell me if you want more.”
“More,” I breathed, already.
He pressed in, a slow, deliberate stretch that made my mouth open on a silent O. He was big—thick and unyielding in a way that made my breath catch, the kind of size you had to take inch by inch until your body learned how to handle it.
