In college, he’d been the guy who showed up 40 minutes early to an exam room and spent the wait time making sure his pencils were all the same length. Once, he’d spent a month with his arm in a cast because he broke his hand punching a wall when he got a B+. He needed life to make sense, to be predictable and contained. Sex had always been something in his life where he wanted a partner who would agree to rules or guidelines or checklists. That wasn’t hard to find if you wanted to be in a sub/dom relationship, but in a more casual one, it wasn’t as straight forward. But Jen had no problem doing just that.
Maybe that’s why he hadn’t had sex in so long. Maybe that’s why, when Jen looked at him, he felt both terrified and liberated. Like she was both the bomb and the defuser, and he had no choice but to hand her the detonator. He’d spent the last few years of his life numbing out, running on autopilot, refusing to let himself feel anything too deeply.
He didn’t need or want a relationship. The only feelings he allowed himself were the baseline ones: frustration, impatience, and the low-grade irritation of being alive. Now, with Jen, every sense was dialed up to max. She overwhelmed him, not just physically but emotionally. It was like being given a new brain, one that only ran on sensation. He’d never met anyone who had the ability to disarm him so completely.
She was everything he wanted, and it scared him shitless. He kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for herto realize he wasn’t worth this kind of devotion, that he was broken in ways no one could fix. That he was a walking cautionary tale. But she didn’t. She just let him want, let him take. And he wanted to take. He wanted to ruin her for anyone else, to make her so addicted to his touch she’d never want another.
The only thing keeping him under control was sheer exhaustion. The only reason this night wasn’t already over was because he hadn’t slept at all in the last week. The combination of insomnia and adrenaline made him slightly delirious. If he’d rested, he probably would have blown his load the second he walked in and saw her standing in his shirt. He definitely would have when he saw her perfect body, or when he’d had his shaft sliding between her tits, or when she took him in her mouth.
He watched her now, sprawled across his bed in the aftershock of her orgasm, lips parted as she caught her breath. He wanted to take a Polaroid, to freeze this moment forever. He wanted to tell her she was beautiful, but the words felt too small, too ordinary. Instead, he settled for memorizing every detail, the way her lashes clumped together, the rise and fall of her chest. The scent of her. The taste. The dangerous, insatiable urge to have her over and over.
He’d once thought of himself as sexless, broken, and incapable of feeling anything. Now he felt too much, so much it made him reckless. The kind of recklessness that led to mistakes, to heartbreak, to loss. But looking at Jen, he found he didn’t care. For the first time in years, he wanted to risk it.
He wondered if she’d ever been with someone who wanted her as badly as he did. From what she’d told him, he doubted it. He could see it in the way she melted under his touch, the way she responded to every command, theway her body opened up to him like a secret. It made him want to slow down, to savor every second, to make it last.
The way she looked up at him now shot straight to his heart and his balls. Those wide, impossibly blue eyes, glassier than before, pupils eclipsed with the aftershock of pleasure, lips parted, body ragdoll-pliant. The effect was narcotic. He had known, academically, that he wanted her, but this—her gaze, the way she waited for his next move, trusting and needy—stunned him.
He felt a pang in his chest that was more than just lust, something tangled and sharp. The kind of urgent, inconvenient ache that had gotten him into trouble his whole life.
Fuck.What was wrong with him?
He tried to reset and focus on the task at hand. “Do you ever come from penetration?” The question was blunt, but he needed to know, he wanted to give her that, if he could.
She blinked, startled. “What?”
“Do you ever climax just from someone being inside you, or do you need outside stimulation?” He didn’t let her look away. He wanted honesty.
Her cheeks bloomed with color. He could see it was a question she’d never answered out loud, maybe never even thought about like this. So much bullshit, he thought. People acted as if wanting to know your partner’s body was something to be coy about, rather than acknowledging it was the whole point. He waited.
She found her voice. “I only did once. I think it was a fluke. I was pregnant. Doggy style. I don’t know if it would ever happen again.” She sounded almost apologetic.
He grinned, unable to help himself. “A fluke?”
She shrugged, her hair a messy halo on the pillow. “Not a fluke, but I read somewhere that it’s easier to have an orgasm when you’re pregnant because of all the extrablood flow down there. Maybe it was a science thing. A one-off.”
He shook his head, bemused, and reached out to trace her hipbone with his thumb. “I don’t think it was a fluke. And honestly? Blood flows when you’re turned on too.” He saw the shiver that ran through her, the way her thighs flexed the tiniest bit in answer to his touch. “Maybe you’ve been with the wrong men.”
He wanted to show her what it could be like.
So he started slow, patient, and methodical, even though his own need was a livewire running up his spine. He began at her right ankle, pressing a lingering kiss over the delicate bones, then moved to the left, savoring the symmetrical ritual of it. He worked his way up—right inner calf, then left, then right knee, left knee—each time watching her muscles twitch, her breath catch, her skin pebbling beneath his lips. By the time he reached her thighs, he felt her pulse in the air between them.
He brushed his lips over the juncture of her thighs, hovering just above her heat, letting her feel his breath, but not touching—yet. Instead, he mouthed his way up her belly, tracing the faintest line, then her sternum, the underside of her breasts, and the arch of her collarbone. He lavished time on her nipples, flicking and sucking until she writhed. Then he bit gently at her shoulder, kissed up her throat, across her jaw, and finally, finally, to her lips.
She met him, hungry but pliant, as if she’d never been kissed like this in her life.
He hovered over her, arms bracing on either side of her head. His shaft was hard enough to hurt, nuzzling against her soaked folds, and when he shifted his hips, he felt her hips answer in kind, her body aligning to his without conscious thought. Her eyes—fuck, those eyes—were blown wide, irises almost eclipsed by black, her bodyflushed and humming and open. There was no artifice in her, no performance. Just need.
He brushed a strand of sweat-damp hair from her forehead and pressed a soft kiss there, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “Maybe,” he said, his voice low and rough, “you just haven’t been with a man who looks for signs to see if you’re turned on.”
“You think you’re the man for the job?” she blurted, tone flippant but eyes wide and vulnerable as a child’s.
Deacon looked down at her, holding her gaze for a long, steady moment, his expression somewhere between a wolf and a priest at an altar. He could sense the flicker of nerves in her, whether about the fit or the act itself, and part of him wanted to reassure her with words; the other part—the darker, hungry part—wanted to reassure her with action. “I know I am,” he said, his voice low and resolute.
He braced himself with one hand on the mattress, the other guiding him to her entrance, and as the tip of his cock grazed her heat, she let out a sound halfway between a gasp and a whimper, grabbing onto his biceps as she anchored herself to him.
His eyes met hers. He needed to be sure she wanted this before. “Yes.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
