Everything registered. The way her breath changed when my mouth found the spot below her ear. The way her fingers curled against my skin when my thumb traced the line of her hip.
The small sounds she made when my mouth moved down her throat, involuntary and honest, sounds she probably didn’t know she was making. Each one landed somewhere in my chest and stayed there.
I took my time with her. My mouth on the hollow of her collarbone, then lower. I closed my lips around her nipple, and her back arched off the bed, her fingers tightening in myhair. I stayed until her breathing went ragged, then kissed my way down her stomach, her hip bone, the inside of her thigh. She opened her legs for me before I got there.
She was already wet when my mouth found her, and the sound she made when I closed my lips around her clit sent a jolt straight through me. I worked her slow, my tongue figuring out what made her thighs shake, what made her say my name like she’d forgotten every other word she knew.
Her hips rocked against my mouth, and I held her there, both hands on her thighs, and didn’t stop until she came apart with a cry that made my cock so hard it hurt.
I stayed with her through it. Felt the tremors run through her body, felt her hand find my hair and grip, felt her breathing come back in ragged stages. I pressed my mouth to her inner thigh and waited, because I wanted her to have all of it before I took anything for myself.
I moved back up her body, and I reached for the nightstand. She took the condom from my hand and rolled it down my cock, her fingers steady and sure, and the feel of her hands nearly ended things before they started.
She guided me in, and the feel of her, hot and tight and still pulsing from my mouth, drove the air out of my lungs.
I held still. Not because I wanted to. Because if I moved, I was going to lose it, and I wasn’t ready for this to be over. She was looking up at me, her lips swollen, her hair spread across the pillow, and I needed a second to absorb the fact that I was here, inside this woman, and she was looking at me like I was the only thing that existed.
I’d spent my adult life treating sex the way I treated everything else: efficiently. Brief encounters that began and ended in the same night with women whose faces I couldn’t remember a week later.
Release. Nothing more.
This was nothing like that. This was Kayla’s eyes onmine and her body wrapped around me and the terrifying realization that I never wanted to be anywhere else.
I started to move. Slow, deep strokes that made her gasp and made my arms shake with the effort of holding back. She felt incredible. Every time I pushed into her, her body gripped me tighter, and every sound she made stripped away another layer of whatever I’d spent thirty-four years building between myself and the rest of the world.
I braced over her and watched her face. Her eyes were half closed, her lips parted, and when I shifted the angle and hit something deeper, her whole body arched and she said my name in a voice I’d never heard from her before. Wrecked. Desperate. I wanted to hear it again. I wanted to hear it every day for the rest of my life.
“Right there,” she breathed. “God, Ben, right there.”
I gave her what she asked for. Same angle, same depth, and she raked her nails down my back and I stopped thinking entirely. Her name came out of me rough and low against her neck. Sounds I didn’t recognize as mine. I’d kept everything locked down for so long, and here in this bed with her legs around me and her voice in my ear, there was nothing left to lock.
She pulled me closer. Her heels dug into my lower back and I drove deeper, and we both made sounds that would have been embarrassing in any other context, but here they were just the truth of what was happening between us.
My hand slid between us. My thumb found her clit and she bucked against me, her breath fracturing into short, sharp gasps. I wanted to feel her come while I was inside her.
I wanted to be the reason she fell apart.
She broke first. Her body clenched around me so tight my vision went white at the edges, and the sound she made against my neck was raw and broken and the most honestthing I’d ever heard. She dug her fingers into my back hard enough to leave marks I’d find tomorrow.
I followed her over. Three more strokes and I buried myself deep and let go, and the release tore through me from some place I didn’t know I had.
Not an explosion. A surrender. Something I’d been carrying for a very long time, finally set down.
Her breathing slowed against my neck. My hand rested on the curve of her hip. The room was quiet. The house was quiet. The whole world had narrowed to the warmth of her body and the sound of us breathing together in the dark.
We lay there, together, still.
Chapter 27
Ben
I woke up in Kayla’s bed for the first time with daylight in the room.
We’d slept here before, tangled together in the dark after, her breathing evening out against my chest while Jolly snored at the foot of the mattress. But I’d always come by after William went to bed and left before morning.
Slipped out while the sky was still gray, crossed the yard to my place, kept the line between her life and mine clean enough that a six-year-old wouldn’t have questions over breakfast.
This morning, I hadn’t left. William was still at Trish’s, would be all weekend, and while I never minded having the kiddo around, I was excited about having a full weekend just the two of us.
