My fingers found his hair. He worked my jeans open without lifting his head—button, zipper, the denim pushed over my hips with a practicality that was somehow more devastating than ceremony would have been. I stepped out of them. Kicked them somewhere.
Under the weight of his eyes, I felt not exposed but chosen.
That was the difference. Nine years of invisible and he was looking at me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at.
"Your turn," I said, and reached for his shirt.
I finished the buttons. He shrugged it off. Then it was him—broad through the chest and shoulders, lean at the waist, a scar along his left ribs that was old and faded and told a story I intended to hear. His stomach tensed when I dragged my fingers across it.
He undid his own belt. The Pendleton buckle caught the light as he set it on the folding table with careful, instinctive respect. Something about that small gesture, the tenderness of it in the middle of this, hit me somewhere unguarded.
Then his hands were back on me and there was no more room for tenderness or tenderness-adjacent thoughts.
He went to his knees in front of me.
I made a sound that was half shock and half desperate agreement as cool air hit wet heat.
He hooked my leg over his shoulder and looked up at me once—the question in his eyes already answered before I could form the word—and then his mouth found me and language became genuinely unnecessary.
“Fuck, you’re soaked.”
My head fell back against the wall with a dull thud.
He was thorough. Focused. No teasing. No gentle licks. He devoured.
Tongue fucking into me, then dragging up to suck my clit hard enough that my vision whited out. Applying precision and patience to exactly the things that made my hips roll forward and my fingers tighten in his hair and my voice come out unguarded and honest.
“Grant—”
“Say it again. My name. Just like that.”
“Grant.” It came out broken.
The sounds—wet, filthy, obscene—filled the small room. I slapped a hand over my mouth, but he reached up, caught my wrist, and pinned it to the wall above my head.
“Don’t,” he rasped against my pussy. “I want to hear every fucking sound you make for me.”
I came like that—fast, violent, legs shaking so hard I would have fallen if he hadn’t been holding me up. He didn’t stop. He licked me through it, slower now, like he was savoring the way I pulsed.
When the aftershocks finally eased, he rose, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand like a man who’d just finished a meal. He kissed me again and I tasted myself on him and felt the next wave building before the first had finished.
He freed himself—thick, heavy, the head already glistening—and stroked once, eyes never leaving my face. “You still with me?”
I nodded, throat too tight for words.
He lifted me like I weighed nothing, back against the wall, my legs wrapped around his hips. The blunt head of his cock nudged my entrance. He paused there, breathing hard against my neck.
“Last chance, Lou.” His voice was gravel and smoke. “Once I’m inside you, you’re mine. Understand?”
The possessiveness in the words should have terrified me. Instead it lit something feral in my chest. I dug my nails into his shoulders and rolled my hips, taking just the tip.
“Then take what’s yours.”
He slammed home in one brutal thrust.
I felt every increment, the stretch and heat and the fullness of a body making space for another, and my mouth opened against his shoulder and what came out was his name and something else entirely.
He held still.
