When it finally released her, she sagged against the tile, legs barely supporting her, weight water still crashing down. Lou eased her fingers free, drawing a final shudder from Camille's oversensitized body.
"Okay?" Lou's voice was gentle now, concern threading through the roughness of arousal.
"I—" Camille couldn't find words. Couldn't process what had just happened, what it meant, how completely it had rewritten her understanding of herself. "That was?—"
She kissed Lou instead of finishing the sentence. A soft kiss, tender in ways the earlier ones hadn't been. Lou responded in kind, holding Camille against her own dripping wet body with an intimacy that felt more significant than the physical act they'd just shared.
The water was cooling around them, steam beginning to thin. Reality waited outside this suspended moment—questions and complications and a world that wouldn't understand what was happening between them.
But for now, in Lou's arms, with the echo of pleasure still resonating through her body, Camille let herself simply feel.
Something fundamental had changed. She couldn't go back to who she'd been an hour ago. Didn't want to.
"Come home with me." The words escaped before she could stop them. Lou pulled back, surprise evident in her expression. "I mean—if you want. I'm not asking for—I just don't want this to end yet."
Lou studied her face for a long moment. Whatever she found there seemed to satisfy her.
"Yeah." Lou's smile was soft, unguarded. "Okay."
8
Lou waited until Camille was through the door of her apartment before following. She didn’t say anything, just leaned against the wall and watched as Camille dropped her duffel bag and fumbled off her sneakers. For a moment, all Camille could hear was the blood in her ears, a pounding that eclipsed all other noise.
When she looked up, Lou’s gaze was still on her, still that impossible mixture of lazy and electric.
“Are you sure?” Lou asked, but her tone suggested she already knew the answer.
Camille nodded, not trusting her voice.
She set her phone facedown on the table, next to a stack of unopened mail. The apartment was a single open space, kitchen flowing into living room, and at the far end, tall windows leading to her narrow, private balcony. Camille swallowed and turned to face Lou, who still hadn’t moved from the wall. It was as if Lou understood something about pressure, about how the anticipation of movement was a kind of foreplay.
They stood like that, in the middle of the apartment,suspended in the moment between lightning and thunder. Camille’s heart raged in her chest. She was afraid to speak, afraid to move, afraid to do anything but let her team captain take over her life, her body, her everything.
Finally, Lou said, “I can leave, if you want.”
But Camille didn’t want that, not even a little. Instead, she stepped forward, hands shaking, and brushed Lou’s arm. The skin-to-skin contact was electric, and she felt her body react in a way that left no room for thought.
“I want you to stay,” Camille whispered. “I want..” her voice paused, but Camille had never been afraid to ask for what she wanted and she wasn’t going to start now. “… I want you to fuck me again.”
Lou’s smile was soft, dangerous, and as she let the silence stretch, Camille’s anxiety melted into something hungry and unstoppable.
This time, when Lou reached for her, Camille didn’t freeze or flinch. She let herself fall forward, desperate for another taste.
It was as if Lou had been waiting her whole life for this exact moment of contact. The kiss was immediate, annihilating—no coyness, no gentle test of boundaries this time, just Lou’s mouth and Camille’s, colliding. Lou’s hands mapped Camille’s ribs, found the hem of her shirt, and yanked upward. Cotton and flesh separated with a sound like tearing silk, and Camille gasped into Lou’s mouth. There was nothing slow, nothing tentative; the want was old and urgent, like a heat that had always existed beneath Camille’s skin.
Her hands scrabbled at Lou’s hips, seeking leverage, but Lou was already a step ahead, pressing Camille backwards until her spine found the wall. Plaster bit into her shoulders. Lou’s mouth trailed down Camille’s jaw, across thethin, sensitive line beneath her ear, and lower, over her throat. Lou had both hands under Camille’s shirt now, and she used her body to pin Camille, all muscle and command.
Lou broke away just long enough to tug Camille’s shirt over her head—sports bra and all, —leaving her suddenly bare-chested, nipples pebbling in the apartment’s chill. There was a look in Lou’s eyes that made Camille’s stomach drop and her thighs clench: reverent, predatory, utterly unashamed.
Lou reached for the waistband of Camille’s track pants and peeled them down, hooking her thumbs under the waistband of her underwear to take both at once. The fabric stuck to Camille’s skin and rolled, catching at her knees. Camille was off-balance, teetering, more exposed than she’d ever been outside a locker room, and Lou dropped to her haunches to untangle the pants, brushing her knuckles along the backs of Camille’s calves. Camille shivered, and Lou grinned up at her, then pressed her face into the hollow where thigh met hip.
And Camille was soaking wet still. She knew she was. Her panties had been uncomfortably wet.
Camille’s knees almost gave out. The only thing that kept her upright was Lou’s grip at her waist, anchoring her to the wall. Lou lingered for a moment, face buried, inhaling the scent of her sex, and when she looked up her eyes were black with hunger.
Lou stood, stepping back just enough to yank off her own hoodie, then her t-shirt, then shuck her jeans with the efficiency of someone who’d rehearsed this a thousand times in her head. She wore nothing under the jeans, and when the fabric dropped, she was raw and naked. She didn’t bother hiding anything. Camille was hypnotized—by thepale, corded muscle of Lou’s thighs, the long scar on her hip, the bruises she’d noticed and wanted to touch.
They slammed together again, mouths searching, hands clawing for purchase. Their bodies lined up perfectly, skin against skin, the difference in their heights forcing Camille to stand on tiptoe to reach Lou’s mouth. Camille felt more turned on than she ever had been. She wrapped her legs around Lou’s hips, and Lou supported her effortlessly, grinding their pelvises together as they kissed. The rhythm was frantic, nothing like the polite and measured sex Camille had grown used to with boyfriends. This was need, stripped of pretense.
