She reached, found it, tore the packet. I rolled it on with hands that shook for the second time in my life with this woman. The tremor meant the same thing now that it had meant then: I wanted this so much it was dismantling me.
I positioned myself between her thighs. She wrapped her legs around my hips. Our eyes met.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"Come home, Callum."
I pushed inside her.
The sound she made—a low, shuddering exhale that carried my name in it—cracked open the last locked room inside me. I buried myself deep and held still, forehead pressed to hers, letting us both adjust to the fullness, the closeness, the intimacy of being inside the person you love in the building you built for her.
Then I moved.
Not the frantic pace of our earlier nights. Deeper. Slower. Each thrust deliberate—a conversation in the only language I'd ever been fluent in, where every movement said the things I'd choked on in parking lots and swallowed during dinners and scrawled on drafting paper when my voice failed.
I love you.I thrust into her and she gasped.I'm sorry. I pulled back, pushed deeper, and she moaned.I'm here.Her nails scored my shoulders.I'm staying.
She met me stroke for stroke. Her hips rose to match mine, her hands pulling me closer, deeper, her mouth finding my neck, my jaw, the spot below my ear.
"Harder," she breathed. "I need?—"
I gave her harder. Snapped my hips forward and she cried out, back arching off the jacket, her body clenching around me in a way that nearly finished me.
"Touch yourself," I rasped. "I want to watch."
Her hand slid between us. Her fingers found her clit and she worked herself while I fucked her, and the sight of it—Willow Monroe, undone and uninhibited on the floor of her future coffee shop, chasing her own pleasure while I moved inside her—was the most beautiful thing I'd ever witnessed. More beautiful than any building. More important than any blueprint.
Her breathing changed. Faster, shallower, her body tightening around me.
"Callum—I'm?—"
"I know. Let go."
She came with a sound that filled the empty room—my name, fractured and gorgeous, echoing off the brick and the tin and the bare floors. Her body pulsed around me and I followed her over, burying myself deep and shuddering through an orgasm that felt less like a release and more like a total tear-down—every wall, every excuse, every carefully constructed barrier I'd ever maintained collapsing into rubble and dust.
We lay on the floor afterward. My jacket beneath her. The hardwood cold under my knees. Her legs still wrapped around me, neither of us willing to separate.
I adjusted to keep from crushing her. She pulled me back.
"Stay," she said. "Don't move yet."
I stayed.
The afternoon sun had shifted. The rectangles of light on the hardwood were longer now, stretching toward the wall where the community board would hang. Dust motes drifted in the golden air. The building held us the way a good building should—solid, patient, unconcerned with the mess on its floors.
"I have conditions," Willow said.
"Of course you do."
"Three."
"I'm listening."
She held up a finger. "You show up. Not perfectly. Not without screwing up. But you show up. Every day. Even the days you want to run."
"Done."
