The second orgasm rolls through me different than the first. Deeper. Fuller. Like something cracking open that's been locked for eight years. My body clenches around him and he follows me over, his groan buried in the curve of my neck.
And then I'm crying.
I can't stop it, can't control it. Tears slide down my temples into my hair and I'm shaking with something that isn't sadness, exactly, but isn't joy either. It's release. It's grief for all the years I lost. It's terror at how much I just let myself feel.
Cole doesn't pull out. Doesn't ask why. Doesn't try to fix it or explain it away. He just wraps his arms around me and holds me together while I fall apart, his thumbs finding my face to wipe away tears without comment.
"I've got you," he murmurs against my hair. "I'm right here."
His weight settles more fully over me, not crushing, just present. Solid. Real.
He stayed. He's staying.
The tears slow eventually. My breathing evens out. His cock softens inside me but he still doesn't move, just holds me like I'm something precious instead of something broken.
"That was..." I don't know how to finish the sentence.What word exists for eight years of nothing breaking open in a single night?
"Yeah."
His chest rises and falls beneath my cheek. Steady. Real.
I could stay. He's warm. Solid. I felt safe. I felt—
No, I should move.My limbs feel like they're made of warm honey, loose and heavy, but I should move because staying means something different than sex. Staying means intimacy beyond the physical, and I don't know if I'm ready for that.
That's the line. I can give him my body, like I gave him my body years ago in a different life. But sleeping next to him is different territory. That's a different kind of naked.
I can fuck him. I can't wake up next to him. Not yet.
"I should check on Chesca."
His arms loosen immediately, releasing me without protest, without making me explain why I need to leave when every part of my body wants to stay.
I pull away from his warmth and the chill hits immediately. My clothes are scattered across the floor and I find them in the dark, shorts inside out, tank top somewhere near the door. It doesn't matter. No one's going to see me in the hallway.
The bedroom door opens silently under my hand.
"Angelina."
I look back. He's propped up on one elbow, watching me with an expression I can't read in the dim light.
"I'll see you in the morning."
"I know where you live," I say, and we both huff a laugh at the dark humor of it, the stalker joke that shouldn't be funny but is.
The hallway stretches quiet and dark in front of me. Chesca's door is cracked exactly how I left it, nightlight casting its soft purple glow across her sleeping face. One arm thrown over Aaron Bear. Chest rising and falling in the steady rhythm of dreamless sleep.
Safe. Untouched by any of this.
I stand in her doorway counting her breaths the way I've done since the night she was born.
Uno, due, tre, quattro...
Forty-seven breaths before I make myself walk away.
My own bed feels arctic after his body heat. I slide between cold sheets and stare at the ceiling, trying not to notice the soreness between my thighs or the way my whole body still hums with aftershocks. Evidence of choices made and his smell clinging to my skin.
I chose him tonight. Chose to lead him down that hallway. Chose to call him back when he would have left. Chose to leave when he would have let me stay.
