Her fingers found the hem of my shirt and pulled. I raised my arms and let her take it because refusing her anything right now would have required a kind of strength I no longer possessed.
The shirt hit the floor. Her palms landed flat against my chest. The same chest she'd pressed her ear to every night, the heartbeat she'd used as a metronome to time her breathing, and the contact of her bare hands on my bare skin sent a jolt through me that I felt in my teeth. She spread her fingers wide, mapping the terrain she'd only ever touched through cotton, and when her nails scraped lightly across my pectoral, I made a sound that would have embarrassed me if I'd had the capacity for embarrassment, which I didn't, because every higher function had been rerouted to the singular aim of not losing my mind.
"Off," she said, tugging at my belt. The command in her voice, quiet, certain, brooking no argument, did something to me that I wasn't prepared for. This was Molly giving orders. Molly deciding. Molly reaching for what she wanted with both hands and no apology.
I unbuckled the belt. Unbuttoned the jeans. Shoved them down with a gracelessness that would have horrified the part of my brain that valued precision and control, except that part of my brain had gone dark approximately thirty seconds ago and showed no signs of rebooting. My boots were already off. I'd kicked them aside at some point, I couldn't remember when, and the jeans joined them, and then it was just my boxers and her skin and the rapidly diminishing distance between the two.
She reached for the waistband, and I caught her wrist. Not to stop her—never to stop her—but because something practical had fought its way through the fog of want and demanded attention.
"Nightstand," I managed. "Top drawer."
She blinked. Then understanding registered, and something flickered across her face, not embarrassment but something warmer.
I reached past her and yanked the drawer open, my fingers closed around the foil packet, and I tore it open with my teeth while she pushed my boxers down. The sensation of her knuckles brushing against me through the fabric nearly buckled my knees.
I rolled the condom on with hands that were not steady. Not even close. The man who could field-strip a weapon blindfolded in under thirty seconds fumbled with latex like a teenager in a parked car, and I didn't care, because Molly was watching me with those dark, blown eyes and her bottom lip caught between her teeth and her chest rising and falling in quick, shallow breaths that matched mine.
Then I lifted her.
My hands found her waist, she was still so small, still light enough that the lifting required almost no effort, and her legs wrapped around me instinctively, ankles locking at the small of my back. The contact of her body against mine, nothing between us now, was so overwhelming that I had to stop. Had to stand there with her wrapped around me and my face buried in her neck and justbreathefor a second, because if I didn't, this was going to be over before it started, and she deserved better than that. She deserved everything.
I turned and put a knee on the bed, lowering us both onto the mattress with a controlled descent that used every ounce of strength I had. Her back met the sheets, and her hair fanned out in damp, dark waves and her hands were everywhere. My shoulders, my arms, my back, her nails dragging lines down my spine that I'd wear tomorrow like medals. She arched up against me, and the friction drew a groan from somewhere so deep it felt geological.
"Molly." I braced myself above her on one forearm, my other hand sliding down her side, learning the geography of curves that were new. The softness at her hip, the dip of her waist, the way her skin pebbled under my palm as it traveled lower. "If anything—at any point—if you need me to stop—"
"Xavier." She grabbed my face with both hands and pulled me down to her mouth and kissed me in a way that eliminated the need for the rest of that sentence. Her tongue slid against mine and her hips rolled up, and I lost the ability to form conditional clauses.
My hand found the inside of her thigh, and she gasped into my mouth. A sharp, bright sound that went through me like voltage. I traced upward, slow despite the desperation, because I needed to know she was ready, needed to feel it rather than assume it, and when my fingers found her, she was—
She whimpered. The sound broke against my lips, and I swallowed it, pressing my forehead against hers, breathing her air, my hand moving with a patience that cost me everything because her body was responding with an urgency that matched the storm inside my own chest.
I shifted, settling between her thighs, and the press of my body against hers drew a sound from both of us. Mine a low, ragged thing that vibrated through my chest into hers, hers a breathless gasp that ended on something close to a sob. Not pain. Not grief. The sound of a dam breaking, of everything held back finally rushing forward.
I entered her slowly.
Her back arched off the mattress. Her mouth opened on a silent cry, and her hands flew to my forearms, gripping, not clinging, there was a difference, and I felt it in my bones. Her eyes found mine and held. Brown. Luminous. Clear.
Clear.
That word. The word I'd made her promise. The word I'd held up as the condition, the threshold, the proof I needed. And there it was, staring back at me from three inches away, undeniable as gravity.
I moved. Slowly at first in long deliberate strokes that let her feel everything, that gave her body time to adjust and her mind time to stay present and here and with me instead of anywhere else. Her legs tightened around my waist. Her heels dug into the small of my back, pulling me deeper, and the sound she made when I bottomed out rewired something fundamental in my brain. Some circuit that had been running on discipline and denial for seven weeks simply shorted out, and what replaced it was pure, unmediated sensation.
"More." The word left her mouth like something torn free. Not a request. A demand. She was fierce and present and flushed, and her nails were carving crescent moons into my forearms.She wanted more, and I was going to give it to her until neither of us could remember what restraint felt like.
I gave her more.
My hips snapped forward, and she cried out, startled, her head pressing back into the pillow and her throat exposed and vulnerable, and I dropped my mouth to it, tasting salt and lavender and the hammering pulse beneath her skin. I set a rhythm that was beyond my conscious control, driven by this desperate, beautiful destruction of the space between two people who'd been circling each other for weeks, like stars finally collapsing into a single orbit.
Her hands moved to my back. Pulled me down against her, chest to chest, so close that I could feel her heartbeat against my sternum, fast and wild and perfectly synced with mine.
The same rhythm we'd been sharing for eight weeks, except now there was no blanket between us, no shirt, no barrier.
I shifted the angle. Hitched her hip higher, changed the geometry by a fraction, and the effect was immediate. She gasped, sharp and shattered, and her internal muscles clenched around me so hard my vision whited out at the edges. I did it again. Found the angle that made her gasp and held it, driving into it with a focus that was the closest thing to military precision I could manage when my higher brain functions had been reduced to three words on a loop: her, more, yes.
"Right there—" She couldn't finish. Her voice broke into fragments, syllables scattered across the sheets like the colored pencil shavings we'd swept off the coffee table, and I gathered every fragment and stored them in the same vault where I kept her heartbeat count and the sound of her laugh and the way she used to call me Daddy.
Her body was tightening. I could feel it building in the way her breathing shortened to sharp, staccato bursts, the way her thighs trembled against my hips, the way her fingers stopped movingon my back and just dug in, anchoring herself against something that was about to sweep her away. I knew her body. I'd spent seven weeks learning it through blankets and cotton and the careful, clinical distance of a caretaker. Now I was learning it without any distance at all, and the education was staggering.
