And I gave it. All of it. Every stroke carried the thing I couldn't articulate. Every thrust was a promise I wasn't ready to make with words. My body had been more honest than my mouth from the beginning—it had reached for her in elevators, at dinner tables, in crowded rooms—and now it was telling her the whole truth while my brain scrambled to keep up.
I love you.
The realization hit me with the force of a wall coming down. Not a gentle epiphany. Not a slow dawning. Structural, catastrophic, total. It rearranged the architecture of my interior in a single stroke.
I love you and I have no idea what to do about it.
"Harder." Her voice cut through the spiral. "Please?—"
I gave her harder. Drove into her with an urgency that was as much emotional as physical. Her legs tightened on my shoulders. Her moans came faster, higher, each one stripping another layer of composure from a man who was running out of layers.
Her breasts jiggled with each impact and the visual—God, the visual. Willow Monroe, naked and arching beneath me, hair spread across my pillow, body moving in a rhythm I set and she perfected. Every detail sharpand vivid and seared into my brain with the permanence of a tattoo.
"I'm close," she managed. "Don't stop, I'm so close?—"
I reached between us. Found her clit. Pressed circles while I drove into her, and she detonated for the second time—this one louder, more raw, her back lifting off the mattress as the orgasm ripped through her.
The sound she made—my name, shattered into fragments—pushed me past the edge I'd been clinging to.
Everything went white.
Not a visual. A sensation. Every nerve fired at once, a full-system overload that started at the base of my spine and tore upward through my body. I drove into her, deep, held there, and came with a force that emptied me of everything—every defense, every wall, every carefully maintained distance I'd constructed between myself and the world.
A sound tore from my throat. Not a word. Not a groan. A surrender.
Forty years of holding it all together, and this woman had dismantled me in a Saturday-morning bed while the sun rose over a city that kept spinning without us.
We lay there. Tangled in sheets and each other. My face was in her neck. Her fingers were drawing absent patterns on my spine.
Her heartbeat drummed against my lips—rapid, decelerating, returning to normal. Mine was still a disaster.
"Best alarm clock ever," she murmured.
I laughed against her skin. It came out shaky. I hoped she didn't notice.
She noticed.
"Hey." Her hand stilled on my back. "You okay?"
"Perfect." I pressed a kiss to her collarbone. Composed my face before lifting my head. "Why?"
"You made that sound."
"I made several sounds. You'll have to be more specific."
"At the end. It sounded like..." She studied me with those impossibly beautiful hazel eyes. "Never mind. It was hot. I'm not complaining."
She let it go. Moved on. Smiled that lazy, sun-drunk smile and stretched beneath me with the self-satisfied grace of a woman who'd been thoroughly taken care of and knew it.
"I'm starving," she announced. "You destroyed me and now I need food. Those are the rules."
"Whose rules?"
"Mine. Orgasms of that quality require carbs and something sweet.”
"I'll make a note for future reference."
"You do that." She kissed the corner of my mouth. Rolled out of bed. Grabbed my t-shirt from the floor and pulled it on—an act of casual possession that sent a bolt of want through me all over again.
