Inside me.
Around me.
A feeling so intimate it almost hurt.
He didn’t move.
Didn’t let go.
Just stayed there, his breath ragged against my shoulder, his voice hoarse on my skin. “Jesus, Emma…”
And I held him, feeling every slow, shivering aftershock echo through us both, knowing without a doubt, he hadn’t just come undone.
We both had.
For a long moment, we just breathed.
His weight settled over me, chest rising and falling against mine in a rhythm that hadn’t quite steadied. Above us, the fairy lights blurred at the edges of my vision, the night breeze lifting loose curls from my face. Everything else—Margaret, Falkirk, the week from hell—felt impossibly distant.
He stirred, just enough to brush his lips against my temple. “You okay?”
I nodded, the motion a small drag against the pillow. “Yeah,” I whispered. “Are you?”
A gentle huff of laughter rumbled through his chest. “Ask me again in ten minutes when I remember how to use my legs.”
The projector screen flickered at the edge of my vision, credits rolling in a lazy scroll as he pulled me onto his chest, reaching blindly for the throw blanket and tugging it over both of us. His heart still pounded beneath my cheek.
I snorted. “Who knew Damien Holt was a ‘Netflix and chill’ kind of guy.”
Then his head tipped toward me, scandalized. “Excuse you.” Affronted in that precisely-him way. “If anything, it was Netflix andmake love.”
I turned so I could see his face, chin resting on his chest. “Oh?” I let the words linger, light and poking. “So we ‘made love,’ did we? Is that what we’re calling it?”
He swallowed. For a second, something unguarded flickered across his features—open and unguarded—before he dropped his attention to the blankets, adjusting the edge of it around my back as his fingers traced idle patterns along my shoulder.
“I’m saying,” he corrected quietly, “it wasn’t casual. That’s all.”
My heart did something traitorous in my chest. “I know.”
He looked back at me then, like he was checking for landmines—waiting to see if I’d run, if I’d laugh, if I’d put walls back up between us. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not with the warmth of him wrapped around me and the steady beat of his heart under my ear.
He tightened his arm around me, pulling me in until I was tucked fully against his chest, his chin resting on top of my head. The night air was cooler out here, but under the blankets—with his body seeping into mine, the city a dull glow beyond the glass—it felt like its own little world.
“I like this,” I murmured, surprising myself.
“What?” he asked, voice already thickening with exhaustion.
“Being out here.” I paused, then gave him the more dangerous truth. “Being with you. Like this.”
His hand stilled on my arm. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Me, too.”
The projector timed out, the screen going dark and leaving only the string of fairy lights above us, casting everything in gold. His breathing evened out, settling into an even, unhurried rhythm that pulled at my own like a tide.
I stared up at the sky I couldn’t quite see, at the glow reflecting off glass and steel, and tried to catalogue all the things that had shifted tonight.
My body felt pleasantly wrecked, my muscles loose and heavy, nerves still humming with aftershocks. But beneath that—beneath the satiation and the exhaustion—something new had settled in.
Trust.
