Higher and higher and higher, until it was becoming harder to hold myself back.
Before I could release all over him, he grunted into my mouth, “I love you.” And then he suddenly stilled.
Pleasure rushed through me, and I cried out in ecstasy again.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
CHARLIE
The next morning. I fluttered my eyes open. Athena laid her head on my shoulder, her body curled into mine. I breathed in her strawberry shampoo and listened to her soft and slow breathing against my chest.
Gently, I rubbed my fingers against her hip. She stirred against the crook of my arm, then opened her eyes. The sun flooded into the room and hit her blue irises, making them a sea of color.
“Good morning,” she murmured, squinting.
“Morning.”
She looked down at my lips. “Was last night real?”
I chuckled. “Yes.”
“Do you take any of it back?” she asked. “It’s okay if you?—”
Before she could finish that sentence, I pressed my lips to hers. “No.”
A soft smile stretched across her lips, one that made me all giddy on the inside. She giggled and tucked some hair behind her ear. Then she pressed her lips to mine again. “I don’t take it back either.”
After shuffling back so I leaned against the headboard, I massaged her shoulder in circles. “Why did you suddenly get so insecure about the way you walked?” I asked, unsure if I should bring this up now.
Chances were that if she had brought it up then, she was still thinking about it, still thinking that I would choose someone else over her because some asshole had said something to her about the way she moved.
Athie pulled the blankets up to her chin and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Derek said something to you, didn’t he?” I asked, trying to stay calm.
She tensed and gulped. “Yes, but I’m sure he didn’t mean?—”
“I love how you see the good in people,” I said. “But some people aren’t good.”
Her bottom lip quivered, but I grasped her face before she had a chance to cry.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“There’s no reason to apologize. Just don’t listen to a word that comes out of his mouth.”
“I know, but … I had been feeling really insecure over Nadia and all the other girls that you’d been with,” she said, dropping her gaze. “I look nothing like them, and he caught me at a bad time.”
I didn’t want to tell her this—because I honestly didn’t want to get into the whole porn thing—but there was a reason that I didn’t do it with any girls who looked like Athena. Athena was special to me, and I wasn’t going to try to replace her with another woman.
“You don’t have to worry about Nadia or any of the other girls. Because there are none.”
“But you still have to?—”
“No, I don’t have to do anything,” I said. “No more porn, unless you’re the girl with me.”
She swallowed, her eyes growing wide. “Do you mean it?”
