The thought is quiet. Not a revelation as much as a confirmation.
Her body starts to tighten. The rhythmic clench comes faster, pulling at me, and her breathing goes thin and ragged. Her nails score down my back. Her legs lock around me and I feel the exact moment she breaks. Her back arches off the mattress and the sound she makes is low and open and shattered, and her face when she comes apart is the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever witnessed. No performance. No wall. Just Ella, completely undone, completely trusting me to hold her through it.
My throat closes. My hand tightens in her hair. I thrust through the waves of her orgasm, feeling every pulse and clench grip me, and the pressure coiling at the base of my cock is a freight train I have no interest in stopping.
“Ella.” Her name. That’s all I have left. “Ella. God.”
I bury myself deep. The orgasm rips through me with a force that empties my lungs and my head and everything I’ve been carrying deep inside my heart. My face is pressed against her neck. My arms lock around her. My body is spent and shaking, and hers is still pulsing around me, her hand in my hair, her breath in my ear, her heart hammering against mine.
For a long time, neither of us moves.
Her fingers trace lazy patterns on my back. The air conditioning hums. My breathing returns in stages. I roll to the side, pulling her with me, keeping her close, keeping us connected as long as physics allows.
She nestles into my chest. The scarf has come undone and slid to the pillow beside her head, turquoise silk against white cotton. Her leg is draped over mine. Her breath is warm and even against my collarbone.
The clock is still running. I know that. Tomorrow hasn’t moved.
“Come to New York with me.”
The words leave my mouth before the plan is fully formed. She shifts against my chest and looks up at me, uncertainty in her eyes.
“Before you fly back to Sedona. A weekend. Just a couple of days.” My hand finds the curve of her hip and holds. “I’m not ready for this to be over.”
She’s quiet for a beat. I can see the practical machinery turning behind her eyes, the mental math of a woman who has responsibilities of her own waiting for her back home and who doesn’t assume someone else will cover the logistics.
“My flight connects through Miami,” she says slowly.
“I’ll change your ticket. I’ll handle the flights.”
“Alec, that’s...”
“Please.” The word comes out rougher than I intended. I’m not a man who says please. Not like this. Not with my chest open and my voice scraped raw and the woman I just made love to weighing whether to give me two more days. “Just come to New York.”
She looks at me. Then the smile starts. Small. Real. The one that begins at the corners of her mouth and takes its time reaching her eyes.
“Okay.” She presses her lips to my collarbone. “Okay. New York with you tomorrow.”
The relief that floods through me is physical. I pull her closer and press my mouth to the top of her head.
New York. My apartment. The brownstone in Brooklyn Heights that I bought after my first big deal and have kept all this time because it reminds me of where I grew up. Nothing flashy. Nothing that screams the number that sits in my accounts. She’ll see the bookshelves and the worn hardwood and the kitchen where I actually cook, and she’ll understand that I’m still the same man she met on the plane. The one who doesn’t eat sugaranymore and can’t meditate worth a damn and who runs before dawn because it’s the only time his brain shuts up.
I’ll tell her everything there. On my ground. In my real life, not the suspended reality of a Barbados resort. I’ll sit her down and tell her all of it, and the context will show her that the money didn’t change who I am. That the wall she described at dinner—the one between people who have and people who don’t—I climbed over it but I didn’t forget which side I started on.
She’ll understand. She has to. Because the alternative is something I can’t think about with her warm body pressed against mine and her heartbeat steady under my hand.
I almost say it. The three words are formed and ready, sitting behind my teeth the same way the truth has been sitting there all week.
But I can’t say I love you while I’m still carrying the lie. Saying it now would be one more beautiful thing built on something incomplete, and I’m done building on that foundation.
I’ll say it in New York. After the truth. When it means what it’s supposed to mean.
Ella’s breathing slows. Her hand goes still on my chest. She’s falling asleep against me, trusting and warm, and the honeymoon bed that started as a battle line has become the only place in the world I want to be.
I hold her. I listen to the ocean rumbling in the distance. I let myself believe that the plan is enough.
I have a plan. I have a woman I love. I have a truth I’m going to tell.
Everything I want is right here. And tomorrow, for the first time since we landed on this island, I’m not dreading what comes next.
