“Fuck, I love you.”
He presses his face to my stomach when he says it, so his words are muffled and tickly against my skin. But I almost levitate off the bed anyway.
“Say it again.” I bury my fingers in his hair.
He lifts his head and looks up at me, laughter and affection and happiness and, yes, love shining on his face. “Charlotte Jane,” he says. “I love you. It’s not too soon. We do know each other. I fucking love you.”
Then he’s a blur of motion, crawling backward off the bed and falling to his knees, literally ripping my panties off with a mumbled “I’ll replace them,” then pulling me to the edge of the mattress and slinging one of my legs over his shoulder so he can drag his tongue through my pussy.
I jolt and cry his name at that first wet stroke, and it knocks the rest of my fears loose.
“What if we’re not okay together?”
He barely pauses. “We’re more than okay together.” As if to prove it, he gives a languid suck to my clit that makes me buck against him.
“But,” I say on a gasp. “Don’t you ever get so mad that you float above your body to watch yourself acting like the worst possible version of you?”
This time he does hesitate, the tips of two of his fingers teasing my entrance.
“I’m familiar with the concept,” he says in a strained voice. “Mostly when I’m around you.”
This makes me tense up, and he must feel it in my body because he settles back onto his heels as if we’re not both naked. “Talk to me, honey.”
I sit up to search his eyes for similar fears, but all I see is calm steadiness.
“I love you,” I say. “But what if we keep saying and doing terrible things to each other? Like we just can’t help it? Maybe all we know how to do is fight.”
He rests his cheek on my thigh and strokes his hands down the backs of my legs. “What if I told you that fighting with you gets me off?” He leans his head down and gives me a gentle bite where I gave him a much less gentle one earlier tonight. “You’re so hot when you’re mad. And smart. I didn’t know that fighting with a smart woman could be so much fun.”
“You might be underestimating how much I hated you for lots of the past decade,” I say softly.
I try to roll away from him, but he pushes me back onto the mattress, and he’s quiet for a beat before he kisses the spot he bit moments ago.
“I used to make decisions to spite the CJ in my head,” he says, moving his mouth to a different section of my thigh, giving it another gentle bite. “Like, if I improve the division’s ROI or save a client from a catastrophic investment, that’ll show CJ.”
He kisses the bitten spot, and my lower body clenches at the sensation.
“Succeeding out of spite?” My question comes out thick and languid. “I approve.”
“Of course you do.” Another spot on my thigh. Another bite. Another kiss. “Then it sort of became me talking to a version of you in my head that I wanted to make proud of me. But every time we saw each other, you weren’t the CJ in my head. Or worse, you actually were, but you weren’t mine. So I took it out on you, the real you.”
“This isn’t actually helping ease my fears, Wy.”
“Shh,” he says, giving my clit the lightest pinch. My back arches at the pleasurable shock, but he’s already moving on to my other, as-yet unbitten and unkissed thigh. “Funny thing is, I also used that audit to help me make decisions over the years. Your audit.” Bite. Kiss. A quick stroke of my clit. “You’ve always been her. The woman making me better, the woman I wanted to make proud. It’s always been you.”
Bite. Kiss. I’m close to tears now from his mouth, his words.
“We fought,” he says, “because it was the only way to be in each other’s lives. And how much worse would it have been not to have had each other at all?”
Bite. Kiss.
“Worse,” I say on a shaky breath. “I never want to be without you again.”
His hands land on the apex of my thighs, his thumbs parting my flesh.
“You won’t have to be.” His eyes drift to the hidden parts of me he’s just revealed, and a look of such dark hunger crosses his face that I feel the first flutterings of my orgasm. “And if we need to call each other filthy, nasty names from time to time, I’m extremely fucking down for that.”
“Yes. Okay,” I whisper as he lowers his mouth to my clit and sucks. “Try to make me come, you smug asshole. You absolute dick. I dare you. I—oh fuck, baby!”
