He looks up at me from the floor with both hands curled around my hips, and his face carries none of the armor he wears in every other room of this house. No performance. Just Lev.
“Don’t come here in the middle of the night and ask me to survive this without touching you,” he pleads against my stomach, and his mouth presses there first—just below my navel, not quite a kiss, more like a vow made quietly against skin. We both know what he’s thinking about when he does it.
Then he moves lower.
He takes his time, working me open with his tongue and two fingers. When I fist my hand in his hair and tug, he groans against my clit, and the vibration moves all the way through my body. He curls his fingers forward and finds the spot that makes my hips buck hard off his hand, and I have to grab his shoulder to stay upright.
“Lev,” I practically sob into the air.
“I’ve got you,” he says against me. “I’ve got you.”
He doesn’t rush. He builds me slowly, pulling back every time I get close, and every time I try to grind against his mouth, he eases off and holds my hips in place until I stop fighting him, and then he starts again from the beginning. By the third time, I can’t stay quiet. He adds a third finger and works them deep while his tongue does something merciless to my clit, and I come with my fist in his hair and my heels dug into the floor, clenching through every wave while he stays with me until the last one passes.
He rises, strips the rest of his clothes, and lays me back across the mattress. I reach for him before he can second-guess a single thing.
“I need to feel you,” I tell him.
He wraps one hand around my thigh, holds it open, and pushes inside me in one slow, full stroke. This time, we both go quiet. His forehead drops to mine, and he holds there without moving, just breathing, and I feel every inch of him and every terrible week between us and something underneath all of it that I’ve got no name for.
His cock fills me completely, and I feel him everywhere. His fingers dig into my hips with bruising force, and I want every one of them. I want proof of tonight on my body when he walks into that compound, because if he goes, I need something of his to stay behind.
Then he thrusts forward, hard enough to jerk me upward.
“You’re mine, and I should have said it long before tonight.”
He presses his mouth to my temple as he strokes again, deeper. “I know what I did. I’m not asking you to forgive it.” He pulls back and drives in hard enough that I have to grab his shoulder, and my nails score into his skin. “You were never a mission. Not for one single day.”
Those words land somewhere I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to wall off. I pull him down by the back of his neck and kiss him hard enough to hurt, and he makes a sound that belongs to a man who’s decided to lose entirely and found some peace in it.
He rolls my hips to a different angle, and a gasp tears out of me. The rhythm he sets doesn’t give ground, and I stop pretending I want him to ease up. He pulls back to the tip and drives forward, and I feel all of it, every stroke landing exactly where it needs to. My body locks around him each time he pushes in, and the low sound he makes every time that happens is the most satisfying thing I’ve heard in weeks.
“This child is mine to protect.” His mouth drags over my skin. “I’m coming back to you both. That’s not negotiable.”
I look at him. The man who hid the worst truth I’ve ever received. The man who wrote a letter tonight because he wasn’t certain he’d make it back to say the words himself. He’s watching my face with those pale eyes that have always seen too much, and I can’t look away from him. I don’t want to.
“I know,” I confess, and I mean it.
He thrusts harder and slides his thumb down to my clit, and the layered pressure builds so fast it catches me off guard. I come before I can brace for it, with his name in my mouth, my heelslocked behind his hips, and my body clenching around him in waves.
He follows within seconds with his palm flat on the headboard and his hips driving once, twice, and the sound he makes is quiet and devastated and nothing I’ll ever be able to unhear.
Afterward, he doesn’t move right away.
His mouth finds my shoulder, then my collarbone, and finally, the underside of my jaw. He’s not asking for anything. Not performing anything. Just staying, the way he always stays, and I let him.
I stare at the ceiling and try to find the version of myself that walked through that door certain and resolved. She seems to have gone somewhere without telling me.
“You have to come back,” I whisper into the darkness.
He lifts his head.
“That’s not negotiable,” I add, and throw his words back at him with everything behind them.
His face goes through something I’ve got no single word for. He takes my hand and brings it to his ribs—to the scar I stitched closed the night he came through my ER doors—and presses my palm flat against it.
“Understood,” he says against my skin.
I keep my palm there, feeling his heartbeat beneath it, and realize that somewhere between the night I saved his life and right now, coming home started meaning me.
