She tilts her hips, and I adjust, learning the rhythm fast because I pay attention when the lesson matters. Her fingers slip under my tee, travel up, down, lower, tracing a line that makes my breath stutter and then even out at a new speed. When her thumb runs over my nipple piercing, a shudder of pleasure tickles through me.
She smiles like she knows she has me.
Good. She does.
“More?” I ask.
“Yes.”
The blanket makes us criminals. My hand learns her, pressure and pause, the places where less is more, and the places where more is the only answer. She puts her palm on my jaw like she’s steadying me and then drops it to my chest and then lower, under my tee, fingernails skimming skin. I breathe thick. The movie bleeds sound that doesn’t belong to us. We build our own.
She twists, straddles my thigh under the throw, slow and certain, a test I pass by not rushing the tempo. Heat climbs. I set a hand at the small of her back and keep the other where she wants it, fingers-deep inside of her wet pussy. She rides my fingers like an equestrian.
I mouth her name against her throat, just air, no mark, and she swears into my shoulder like she didn’t mean to. Her hand slides down, confident now, past my waistband, a check, a question, a statement.
“Yes,” I say before she can ask. She cups me through denim, and I see stars I can’t name. I laugh once, ugly and happy, and then swallow it because my brothers might wake up and want in on this.
Tonight, I don’t want to share. I want to be selfish with Lou.
“Tell me,” she says.
“What?”
“What works,” she says, plain. “We’re not guessing.”
“Pressure. Steady. Don’t get cute.”
She grins. “Rude.”
“You know me.”
She does exactly that, steady, fingers ringing me. I return the favor, circles and lines, rhythm easy, two people who have done this before and decided to do it again. Her head tips back. I kiss the line of her jaw so she doesn’t have to hide the sound, and she makes it, small and sure. It lights me up from the inside out.
The blanket makes a world where there’s no rumor mill. Just heat and breath and trust I didn’t have to hustle for. I keep my palm steady and my mouth gentle, and she climbs into my arms. When she comes, it’s quiet and inevitable, a low yes against my neck, fingers tight in my shirt and then soft. I stay with her until she stops shaking.
She moves her hand again, fingers fitting me like she was made for this. I shut my eyes and let her kill me slow, hips listening to her hand, not my ego. It takes a minute. It’s supposed to. When it hits, I bite her shoulder through the cotton so I don’t wake the suite, and she laughs into my mouth like she likes me when I’m human.
We both breathe and count the seconds back to earth. I kiss the corner of her mouth, and she kisses mine, quick, like a promise with an escape clause. She adjusts the blanket so we’re decent if a door opens, practical even now.
We stay there under the blanket, wrecked and clean. She kisses me once, exactly on the mouth. “You’re getting good at stillness.”
“You make it easier.”
On screen, the credits crawl. The room is blue and gray and ours. The world still exists. We let it. She slides her hand back into mine and laces our fingers like it’s nothing. It feels like everything.
“I wanted to post a manifesto,” I say into her hair. “All caps. Burn the fake rules. Us four and a middle finger.”
“You could. But manifestos are for terrorists, and you don’t want to be on the no-fly list.”
I laugh. Can’t help it. She zigs when I zag, so I never really know what’s about to come out of her mouth. I like that about her. “Good point.”
I don’t recognize the feeling in my chest at first. It isn’t rage. It isn’t boredom. It isn’t the urge to feed a headline.
It’s quiet and warm and absolutely not what the brand deck says I am. I decide not to fight it. I let myself want this without rehearsing how it ends, without checking angles for cameras, without trying to get ahead of the next disaster by making one first.
“We’ll be okay,” she says, like she can read my weather.
The words itch. But I need to hear them. “Say it again.”
