“I can’t help it.”
“Yes, you can.” He brings his mouth back to mine, slow and certain, one hand sliding into my hair and the other pressing warm and flat against my ribs, grounding me. “I’ve got you. Stop thinking and feel me.”
Something releases. Some last tightly held thing in the center of my chest that has been clenched since the day I rolled my eyes at fifty thousand people chanting his name and got myself into this entire extraordinary disaster.
I stop thinking.
Never in my life have I felt the things my body does with Reece.
There’s no other honest way to say it. I’ve told myself the difference is accumulation, weeks of tension, the specific electricity of wanting something you’ve told yourself you can’t have, but lying underneath him with his hands moving over meas if he has memorized every frequency, I understand it isn’t accumulation. It’s him. The specific, unrepeatable fact of him.
He knows where I need him before I know myself. Knows when to be gentle and when gentle is the wrong word entirely. Knows the precise point at which I stop being Ava-who-manages-everything and become something simpler and more true, a body that wants, feels, and responds without apology.
When he moves into me, I exhale his name.
He stills. His forehead drops to my temple. “Okay?”
“More than okay.” My hands find his back, pull him closer. “Don’t stop.”
He doesn’t stop.
The rhythm he sets is deliberate, deep, impossibly precise, and this is the word my brain keeps returning to—precise—because it’s what he is at everything, and in this context, it undoes me completely. Every movement is calculated not for his satisfaction but for mine. Every shift of his hips finds the angle that draws a sound from me, noting it, returning to it, building something I feel in my spine, behind my eyes, and in the soles of my feet.
“Reece…”
“I know.” Low against my ear. “I’ve got you.”
His hand moves between us, and I gasp, my back arching off the mattress. He takes the changed angle and uses it, hitting something so precisely right that my entire body locks up for a suspended half second before it starts to unravel.
“There,” he murmurs, and does it again, and again. The repetition of it is devastating, the way he catalogs me the same way he cataloged my coffee order, my food preference, and every small thing I mentioned once and assumed he’d forgotten. He doesn’t forget. He finds what works, and he returns to it with absolute reliability, each thrust finding that exact point insideme until I stop being capable of tracking anything outside this room, this bed, this man.
“I can’t.” My fingers dig into his shoulders. “Reece, I—”
“Come on.” His voice is rough, unwinding at the edges. “Let go.”
I let go.
The climax tears through me like something I didn’t consent to, enormous and rolling, starting at the center of me and radiating outward in waves until I feel it in my jaw, my fingertips, and the backs of my knees. I cry out, and Reece keeps moving, keeps finding that spot, each thrust extending it beyond the point I thought possible, drawing out the pleasure in long, unspooling waves that crest and crest again before they begin to soften.
I’ve never come like this in my life.
I didn’t know it was possible to come like this.
I’m still trembling when I feel him shudder, a full-body surrender, his hips driving deep, his arms gathering me to his chest as though he needs the contact the same way I do. The sound he makes is rough, private, and I press my lips to his shoulder and hold on through it. The feeling of his climax moving through him, the tension, the release, and the shaking exhale at the end does something to my chest that has nothing to do with the physical.
He is completely undone.
For a man who controls everything, his image, his performance, the precise velocity and placement of every pitch he throws, he is entirely, gloriously undone, and I did that.
I feel it like a revelation.
He rolls to his side, pulling me with him, and I go, folding into him the way I do now without thinking, my head finding the exact angle between his chest and shoulder as though it was made for it. His arms wrap around me, not loosely, not casually,but with intention, as if he’s checked I’m still here and decided to keep me close.
My entire body is warm and replete in a way I have no previous reference for. His hand moves through my hair. The string lights cast everything in an amber glow. His heartbeat under my ear is still elevated, still coming down, and I match my breathing to it without deciding to.
“Ava.” My name in his voice, low, wrecked in the best possible way.
“Yeah.”
