His mouth finds my scar, lips tracing the line from eyebrow to forehead, mapping where I began.
Everything is slow tonight. Unhurried. Deliberate.
Each piece of clothing is removed like he's unwrapping something he wants to remember.
No adrenaline. No anger. No desperation.
Just want. Clean, clear, unafraid.
When he enters me, it's with his eyes on mine and my name on his lips, and I feel it everywhere—not just physically, but in the hollow places I've been carrying since before I met him.
The empty-apartment places. The no-one's-coming-home places. He fills them.
Not with sex, with presence.
With the steady, deliberate attention of a man who treats everything he touches like it matters.
I move with him.
Hands in his hair, legs around him, pulling him closer because there's no such thing as close enough.
He takes his time.
Every touch saying thank you, and I'm sorry, and you're mine, and I'm yours, all at once without a single word.
His mouth finds my neck. My collarbone.
The bruise that's almost gone. He presses his lips to it like he can erase what put it there.
I arch into him and he groans against my skin, low and rough and mine.
That sound. I want that sound for the rest of my life.
"Don't stop," I whisper.
"Never," he says against my mouth. "I'm never stopping."
He reaches between us, finds the place that makes me come undone, and works it with the same deliberate patience he brings to everything—slow, consistent, reading my body the way he reads rooms.
And I come apart slowly—a wave, not a crash.
Something that rolls through me in warm, endless pulses and leaves me trembling in his arms.
He follows with his forehead pressed against mine, my name on his lips.
After. His chest under my cheek, the coin on the nightstand where it always is.
"Move in," he says.
"What?"
"Give up the apartment. Officially. The girls already think you live here. Sadie Jo's been leaving space in the bathroom cabinet."
"She has?"
"Reorganized it last week.. Moved all my things to the bottom shelf."
My eyes burn. "She gave me the top shelf?"
