He tilts his head slightly, gaze steady, welcoming but uncompromising. As if he expected the answer but refuses to let me hide behind its simplicity.
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that, baby,” he drawls. “I don’t want any more ambiguity between us.”
There is no reprimand in his tone, only intention—a gentle push to urge me past the last barricade.
“I keep coming back because of you.” I draw a breath. “Because I want to be with you.”
His reaction is unmistakably pleased. A slow smile spreads across his face, genuine to the point of tenderness. There’s no triumph in it, only release, like he’s finally exhaling after holding his breath for days.
“All I want to be with you,” he says. “I’ve been yours from the moment I saw you.”
I find myself smiling back.
“And now,” I whisper, allowing myself to get lost in his aquamarine depths, “what I want most is for you to kiss me.”
The words settle between us as both a request and a declaration:I am choosing this. I am choosing you.
He lets out a low, rich chuckle, the sound setting off a spark of heat down my spine. He shakes his head once.
“If you want that…” His voice dips, threaded with intent. “You’ll have to take it yourself.”
The message is clear: No more waiting for him to make the first move. No more testing his restraint or hiding behind my own. If I truly want him, I have to claim him.
So I do.
Closing the distance between us, my fingers curl into the front of his shirt, pulling him down as I rise onto my toes and press myself along the length of his body. His arms band around my waist instinctively, drawing me closer, as he lowers his head to meet me halfway, mouth capturing mine with a force that steals the air from my lungs.
We’ve kissed more times than I can count—against walls, in hallways, in the dark corners of places where we pretended we weren’t already lost in each other—but this feels different.
The transformation sweeps through me, so total it feels tectonic, like the cosmos has quietly rearranged its constellations and etched a new one beneath my skin. The Olivia I’ve been—the one who hedged, who hesitated, who pretended she could reason her way out of this—dissolves. In her place stands the woman who has always wanted him, who finally recognizes the truth as something woven into her very atoms.
The kiss deepens, his mouth moving against mine with a fervor that pulls at something primal in me. It feels as though he’s trying to draw the very air from my lungs into his, as if the exchange is necessary for both of us to stay upright.
And in the space between breaths, I wonder how I ever doubted this—doubted him, doubted us. How I ever convinced myself I should want something safer, something smaller, something that didn’t set my entire sense of self alight. In this moment, I can’t imagine any other life, any other man, any other version of love that could demand or deserve this much of me.
Because this isn’t simple chemistry. It feels like a rare, once-in-a-lifetime eclipse—something astronomical in its precision, written into the beginning of the world with the inevitability of two paths destined to collide. An alignment so improbable it almost feels divine in its execution.
The kiss seems to last outside of time, stretching on until my lungs ache. Eventually we break apart for air, chests heaving.Our foreheads come together in the aftermath, still held fast in each other’s arms.
“Fuck,” I breathe, the confession ripped straight out of me. “I want you. I want you so badly, Nate.”
His expression is wrecked. “Show me.” His voice is a low scrape against my mouth. “Show me how much you want me, baby. I need to see it.”
There is no command in his request, only an opening—a door he’s holding wide open, and I move toward it without hesitation.
I know exactly what I need to do.
The knowledge arrives with a calm that feels newly forged, as if a thousand scattered pieces inside me have aligned all at once. This is the paradox I never knew I was capable of holding: autonomy in the form of surrender.
The way giving into him makes me more mine, not less.
I take a single step back, feeling the shift inside myself settle like a decision etched into bone. Then I sink to my knees before him.
The hardwood is cool beneath me, a quiet counterpoint to the heat coursing through my body, but the moment I lift my gaze, everything else disappears. Nathaniel looks down at me with that deceptively serene expression he wears when he’s the most undone. But his eyes burn blue-hot, fixed on me with a ferocity that makes my pulse leap.
From down here, he feels impossibly tall, all breadth and strength and controlled power. His frame blocks the ambient glow from the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him, making him appear almost larger than life—shoulders carved into shadow, chest rising and falling with a restrained intensity I can feel in my own lungs. He has always seemed like more than a man to me; kneeling like this, I understand why. There’s something mythic in the way he stands, as though whoever sculpted himdid so with impossible patience, chiseling devotion and desire into the lines of his body.
I raise my hands to the waistband of his slacks, my fingers brushing the fabric lightly before curling with intent.
