When I settled between her thighs, she tried to rush again—hands on my hips, legs wrapping around me, trying to drag me where she wanted me. I pinned her hips to the mattress with both hands and held her still.
"Look at me."
Her eyes opened. Green and glazed and desperate.
"I want you looking at me when I'm inside you. Not the ceiling. Not the wall. Me. Understand?"
She nodded, her lip caught between her teeth.
I pushed into her slow. Inch by inch. Watching her face the whole time—the way her mouth fell open, the way her eyes went wide then heavy-lidded, the way her body arched to take me deeper like she couldn't get close enough.
“God," she breathed, eyes fluttering. "Jack?—"
She felt like heaven. Like finding something you once lost and never thought you’d see again. It took everything in me not to lose myself completely in her.
"Eyes on me, beautiful."
She held my gaze. And I held hers. And when I started to move—slow at first, building, finding the angle that made her breath stutter and her fingers claw the sheets—the connection between us was so raw, so exposed, that it felt like the most intimate thing I'd ever experienced.
This wasn't like Wild Creek. That had been two strangers reaching for escape. This was Maggie letting me past every wall she'd built, and me being careful enough—reverent enough—to deserve it.
I set the pace. Drove her higher with each stroke, controlled and relentless. When she started to shake, I pressed my forehead to hers.
"I've got you. Just let go."
She broke.
Not gently. Not quietly. She broke like a dam giving way—her whole body seizing around me, her cry muffled against my shoulder, her nails leaving marks I'd wear for days. I held her through it, kept moving, kept my eyes on hers when they opened again, hazy and stunned and so unguarded it nearly wrecked me.
Then I let myself follow, and it hit me with the force of something I'd been holding back for a lot longer than six days.
Afterward, I stayed braced above her, our breath mingling, the cool night air raising goosebumps on skin that was still flushed and damp.
She looked up at me with an expression I'd never seen on her face—soft, cracked open, every defense stripped away.
"You okay?" I asked.
She laughed—watery, half-wrecked, completely real. "I don't know. I think you just broke me."
The corner of my mouth curved with a smirk. Proud and smug. “Good.”
"That wasn't a compliment."
“Yeah, it was."
She smiled. The real one, the one without defenses. The one I'd been chasing since the night she'd walked out of that motel room and taken something with her I didn't know I'd given.
"Stay," she murmured, her hand coming up to rest against my jaw. "Just for a while."
"As long as you want.” Maybe even forever if she asked.
She was asleep in minutes. Body finally loose, face finally soft.
That wasn't nothing.
That was everything.
I left before dawn.
