Course it will. Most things do.
We reach the house and go inside, warmth cocooning us, the scent of toasted walnuts and spice mixing with the pinewood and vanilla.
The hallway is a little chaotic, so is the living room, and it’s a world away from the clinically tidy home I shuffled into a year ago. Sab’s messy, I’ve come to realise. Because that excess energy?
It’s all mine.
Outside, it’s getting dark already. Sab flicks on the cracked old lantern I brought from my house, and the tree lights. In the house, at least. With Esme at Tam’s, there’s no need to drain the national grid with the comet-bright display in the garden. No need to shatter the cosy glow that welcomes us home.
He kisses my cheek and slips upstairs to wash the workday from his skin. Days that have become less about fitting kitchens and more about the bespoke crafting he’s so good at. Blows my mind that I’ve only just found out he built the pergolas at Hollymist Hall.
Blows my mind that I don’t follow him upstairs too, but I’m distracted by an email on my phone. Legal stuff for the house sale. I’m chin-deep in brain-melting documents when Sab comes downstairs again.
I wave the phone. “Contracts exchange on Friday. It’s not too late to change your mind, you know.”
About me living here.
With him.
With Esme.
He flicks my ear. Kisses my cheek.Bitesme there, and I swear to feck I go weak at the knees. “I’m not changing my mind,” he breathes against my already heated skin. “Je ne t’abandonnerai pas. Jamais.”
My phone slips from my fingers, and I don’t even try to save it. I let it fall to the thick rug on the floor, knowing it has as soft a place to land as I do.
He’s not wearing much. Just the same pyjama trousers he wore last Christmas, hanging low on his hips, his chest more defined now we work out together most nights we’re both home.
Somehow, though, I still end up naked first. Because I love how he strips me. How he lays me down on the rug and pins me down with his weight. Howheloves doing it.
It’s everything I never knew I wanted. That I needed.
And yet…though I know he needed it too, tonight feels different. There’s a pause behind every kiss, every touch. A rumination I’m not privy to yet as Sab slips a hand between us, his rough palms gripping us both.
He’s so good at this it’s hard to remember that before me, he’d never touched any cock but his own. That he’d been scared of something that comes so naturally to him now. It’s hard to remember anything but sweet pressure, and the slow slide of his hot skin against mine.
But…
Again, he slows down, as if this is the first time we’ve ever done this, not the fifth time this week alone.
I force my eyes open. Drink in the sight of him in the low light coming off the Christmas tree. “Something on your mind?”
Sab bites his lip, a sure sign he’s thinking way too hard when he deserves to enjoy this as much as I am.
I give him a moment. Then I move, tipping him over before he can react, reversing our position to one we’ve rarely found ourselves in for the last year.
Sab swallows, and it’s then that I see it. That nervous want in his eyes—the same want he carried when I met him. The same want we nurtured together before my chickenshit heart bolted.
BeforeIbolted.
A glitch. I know that. A regular fuckup by a regular human. But this time of year has a way of pulling ghosts from the grave, and it’s too easy to dwell on the wasted days, weeks, and months we could’ve been doingthis: staring at each other under the dancing glow of a thousand fairy lights, while I dissect the slow waves ofsomethingcoming off him.
Something he needs from me.
I lean in and steal a kiss, my hand sliding along his jaw, testing, without words, if the instinct unfurling in my gut is on point.
Sab’s breath hitches against my mouth. He arches from the floor so subtly I almost miss it, lost in the flicker of his gaze before it fixes on mine again, and Iseeit. That want. Burning like a wildfire under his skin.
And Christ, I want it too.
