I can feel his heart slamming under my right hand.
Feel the shudder that runs through him when I drag my nails down his ribs. Feel the way his entire body goes taut, every muscle rigid, when my fingers find his belt buckle.
“Bex.” Warning. Or begging. I can’t tell the difference anymore.
I undo the buckle. The button. The zipper.
My hand finds him through the cotton underneath and he makes a sound that is not a word—a guttural, raw, primal sound that vibrates through his chest and into my palms and settles between my hips like a fist of heat.
He’s hard. Thick. Straining against the fabric.
When I wrap my fingers around him, he drops his forehead to the wall beside my head and says my name into my hair like it’s the only word he remembers.
He doesn’t let me keep the advantage.
His hands go to my jeans—fast, urgent, the button and the zipper and then he’s pushing them down my hips with both hands, the denim catching on my thighs because my thighs are thick and strong and nothing comes off them easily.
He goes to his knees to pull them the rest of the way, and the sight of him on his knees in front of me, his hands on my calves,his face level with my stomach—it does something to me that I feel in the marrow of my bones.
He presses his mouth to my hip, just below the bone.
An open-mouthed kiss on the soft skin there that makes my hand fly to his hair and grip.
His lips drag across my stomach—slow, devastating, a counterpoint to the urgency of everything that came before.
He’s tasting me. Learning me.
The texture of my skin, the curve of my belly, the line where hip becomes thigh.
His breath is hot against me and I’m shaking, actually shaking, my thighs trembling under his hands.
He stands.
Lifts me.
Just—lifts, hands under my thighs, picking me up off the ground like I weigh nothing, and I am not a woman who weighs nothing. But he does it like it’s easy, like my body is a thing his body was designed to carry.
My legs wrap around his waist by instinct and the contact—the heat of him pressed against the center of me, separated by two thin layers of cotton—pulls a moan from my throat that fills the tack room.
He pins me against the wall.
Holds me there with his hips.
One hand braced on the wall beside my head, one gripping my thigh, and he’s looking at me with an expression I’ve never seen on anyone’s face before—hunger and anguish and want so raw it looks like it hurts.
“I need you.” His voice is destroyed. Gravel and glass. “I need you right now. If you tell me to stop I will, but it might kill me.”
I take his face in both hands.
His jaw is rough with stubble under my palms.
His eyes are wild and dark and terrified.
“Then don’t stop.”
The last barriers come off in a tangle of hands and desperation.
He reaches between us and I lift my hips and then he’s there—right there—and when he pushes into me the sound we make is one sound, shared, the same broken exhale torn from two bodies that have been empty for too long.
