With Willow, I was loud and greedy and desperate in ways that should've alarmed a man my age. I wanted everything. Wanted to taste every inch of her, hear every sound, feel every tremor. Wanted to crawl inside the moments where she came apart beneath me and live there.
It wasn't just desire—though, God, the desire was a living, breathing thing inside me. It was the need to prove, without a single spoken word, that she mattered. That her mind, body and soul mattered. That the pleasure I wrung from her was my answer to a question I couldn't ask out loud.
Stay.
Stay and I'll spend every morning showing you what I can't say.
I kissed down her throat. Found the hollow at the base, pressed my open mouth there, felt her pulse jump. She tilted her head back, giving me access, trusting me with the vulnerable length of her neck, and the trust cracked open a place in me I didn't know how to name.
Her t-shirt—mine, technically, an old gray thing from MIT that looked infinitely better on her—rode up as she stretched beneath me. My hand found the bare skin of her stomach. Flat, warm, rising and falling with quickening breaths.
"Callum." My name in her mouth, thick with want. The sweetest sound I'd ever heard.
I dragged the shirt up. She lifted her arms, let me pull it over her head. Tossed it. Gone. And then she lay beneath me in nothing but a pair of pale blue cotton underwear, the early gray light catching the planes and curves of her body.
Beautiful. The word felt insufficient but I'd never been a poet. She was beautiful the way a building was beautiful when every line served a purpose and nothing was wasted—all function and form, elegant without trying.
I kissed her collarbone. The swell of her breast. Took her nipple into my mouth and her back bowed off the mattress with a gasp that went straight to my cock.
I took my time. Circled with my tongue, drew herdeeper, applied pressure until her fingers were digging into my shoulders and her hips were doing an involuntary roll that drove me insane.
Switched to the other breast. Same treatment. Same devotion. Her skin was flushed now, a pink that spread across her chest, up her neck. She was panting. I could feel the vibration of held-back sounds against my mouth.
"Don't hold back," I said against her skin. "Let me hear you."
She let go. A moan—uncensored, raw, pulled from somewhere primal. It poured into my bloodstream and ignited every nerve.
I kissed lower. Down the center of her torso. The soft plane of her stomach. The dip of her navel. Each kiss deliberate, each one a sentence in a conversation I was conducting without words.
Here.A kiss to her hip bone.This is what you do to me.
Here.My mouth at the edge of her underwear, breath hot through the cotton.This is how bad I want you.
Here.Fingers hooking into the waistband, pulling down.This is what I can't bring myself to say.
She lifted her hips, let me strip the last barrier away. I sat back on my heels and looked at her—naked in my bed, in the predawn quiet of a Saturday morning,chest heaving, eyes dark with want, watching me with an openness that hit me in a way I wasn't prepared for.
No performance. No pretense. Just a woman laid bare.
Forme.
I pressed my mouth to the inside of her knee. She jerked.
"Ticklish," she warned.
"Noted." I kissed higher. The inside of her thigh. That impossibly soft skin where the muscle curved inward. She spread wider, an invitation I accepted with a reverence that probably would've embarrassed us both if either of us had been paying attention to anything except the current trajectory.
I settled between her thighs, my shoulders pushing her legs apart. Her hand found my hair again—not directing, not demanding, just present. A tether.
That initial taste of her obliterated rational thought.
Salt and heat and wet and Willow. I ran my tongue through her folds, root to tip, a long, flat stroke that made her entire body shudder. Her fingers tightened in my hair. Her hips rolled up, seeking more pressure, more contact, more.
I gave her more.
Found her clit with the tip of my tongue andcircled. Not fast—I was in no hurry. Let her feel the buildup. Let it accumulate in her nerve endings the way it was accumulating in mine. Every sound she made fed straight into my veins. Every twitch of her hips told me what she needed before she could form the sentence.
"Oh God—" Her thighs tensed around my head. "Right there. Don't—don't stop?—"
