Her laugh is breathless. I lower her back onto the mattress and cover her body with mine, and the full length of contact---her skin warm against every place we're touching, her legs parting to fit me between them---pulls a sound out of me I didn't plan to make.
She arches up. Her mouth finds my jaw, my throat, the hinge of my shoulder. Her hands slide down my stomach and work my belt open with the same focused efficiency she used on my shirt, and then her fingers wrap around me and my forehead drops to her shoulder.
"Okay," I say. "Okay."
She makes a sound that might be a laugh. Her grip tightens, strokes once, slow and deliberate, and the sound I make is not something I'd call dignified.
"Tucker." My name in her mouth, fractured at the edges.
I pull back just enough to look at her. Then I lower my head and draw her breast into my mouth, my tongue tracing the soft weight of it, and her hand goes still and her back bows off the mattress and the sound she makes is the most honest thing I've ever heard.
"Tell me what you want," I say against her skin.
"You." Her hips roll up against mine, deliberate, devastating. "All of you."
The rest of our clothes come off in pieces. There's a moment---her hands guiding mine, her breath going ragged, the two of us finally without anything between us---where the urgency tips over into something slower. I kiss the soft curve of her ribs. The inside of her wrist, where her pulse hammers against my lips like punctuation. I slide my hand between her thighs and learn exactly what undoes her, and I don't stop until she's shaking.
"Tucker." Different this time. Less fractured, more certain. A word she means to say.
"Yeah."
"Now."
When I push inside her, the sound she makes stops my heart. She's warm and close around me and her legs wrap my hips and pull me deeper, and for a long moment neither of us moves. We just breathe. Her eyes are open, fixed on mine in the dark, and the look in them strips away every defense I have left.
I take my time anyway. Because she's been running from this for five days and I want her to feel every second of choosing to stop. She moves with me, and I answer every shift of her hips, every press of her hands urging me harder, closer, more. The sounds she makes are honest in a way that rewrites everything I thought I knew about being untouchable.
When she comes apart, she says my name like it means something.
When I follow her over, I think: whatever happens after tonight, this woman has rewritten something permanent in me.
Afterward, we lie tangled in sheets that smell like salt and us. Her head rests on my chest, her fingers tracing idle patterns on my ribs. The room is dark except for the blue glow of the alarm clock.
"Tucker?"
"Yeah?"
"I haven't felt like this in a long time."
"Like what?"
"Like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be."
My arm tightens around her. The warmth of her skin, the weight of her against me, the steady rhythm of her breathing---it's the opposite of the silence I've been running from. It's full. It's alive. It's the thing I didn't know I was looking for because I didn't know it existed.
"Kassidy?"
"Hmm?"
"The kid in the back row. The one who cried at your story."
"What about him?"
"You did it again. Made someone feel something with words you arranged."
She laughs softly, and the sound vibrates against my chest. "You're not a kid in the back row."
"No. But you made me feel something. And I wasn't sure I still could."
