I pull the shirt over her head. She lies back on the pillows, my pillows, in my bed, and the sight of her bare skin against my sheets is something I'm going to carry for the rest of my life. She's pale in the low light. The shadows find her collarbones, the valley between her breasts, the slight curve of her stomach. Her hair fans across the pillow in dark lines.
I take my time. This is different. This is not the farmhouse where the want was angry, and the sex was a collision. This is not the cabin where she needed to reclaim herself. This is not the shower where the urgency made us rough. This is my room and my bed and the woman I love lying in it with her eyes open and her body offered and all the time in the world.
My mouth open against her pulse, feeling it jump under my lips. I kiss down. The line of her collarbone. The space between her breasts, where I can feel her heart beating. I take her left one in my mouth and she sighs, a long exhale that she's been holding since I walked through the door. I circle her nipple with my tongue, slow, feeling it harden, her fingers tighten in my hair. I switch to the other side. Same pace. Same attention. She arches into me and the sound she makes is quiet, barely there, the kind of sound a woman makes when she's being touched exactly the way she wants and doesn't need to perform anything louder.
I kiss down her ribs. Her stomach, where the muscles flutter. The jut of her hip bone. The soft skin of her inner thigh, where her legs open for me without hesitation. I settle between her thighs and press my mouth to her pussy, flat tongue, long stroke, and her hips lift off the bed and her hand grips the sheet.
"Claudio." Whispered. Almost lost.
I taste her slow. Long, deliberate strokes of my tongue through her folds, circling her clit, sliding lower. She's wet. Not from urgency. From wanting. The slow, steady arousal of a woman who's been waiting in my bed and thinking about me and letting her body build. I slide two fingers into her and curl them forward, and the sound she makes is deeper now, a moan that vibrates through her whole body.
Working her with my mouth and my fingers, patient, building her toward something that doesn't need to be chased because it's already there, already growing, already inevitable. Her thighs press against my ears. Her hand finds my hair and holds without pulling. Her breathing goes from counted to uncountedto ragged, and I feel the moment she stops thinking and starts feeling, the shift from Charlotte to the woman underneath, the one who gasps and grips and says my name like she's losing her fucking mind.
She comes quietly. A long, rolling wave that pulses around my fingers and against my tongue, her back arching off my sheets, her mouth open, her eyes closed. I work her through it, gentler now, easing her down, pressing soft kisses to her thigh, her hip, the curve of her stomach.
I crawl back up her body. She reaches for me. Her hand wraps around my cock, still hard, straining, and she strokes me once with a grip that makes my vision blur.
"Inside me," she says. "Now."
I line myself up. The tip of my cock presses against her entrance, slick and hot, and I push in slowly. No barrier. Just skin. Just us. The feeling is so intense my arms shake. She's tight and wet and warm, and every inch is a confession, a declaration, a promise my body is making that my mouth hasn't caught up to yet.
I bottom out. Hold still. Her legs wrap around my waist. Her arms loop around my neck. Our foreheads press together. We breathe each other's air.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi."
"I’m in your bed."
"Our bed."
Her eyes widen. One fraction. Then she smiles. Not the sharp smile or the sardonic smile. The real one. The one that belongs to the woman she’s always been. Soft and sweet, hard and tactical. Both Charlotte and Emma.
"Our bed," she repeats.
I move. Slow. Long strokes that pull almost all the way out and push all the way back in, and every thrust is deliberate, every angle chosen, every pace maintained because this is not about the finish. This is about the middle. This is about the sustained, excruciating pleasure of being inside a woman you love in a bed you're going to share and feeling every nerve and every heartbeat and every breath she takes.
Her hips meet mine. Not rushing. Matching. We find a rhythm that's ours, slow and deep, and the bed doesn't creak because it's a military-issue frame bolted to the floor, which is the least romantic detail in the history of sex and makes me want to buy a new bed tomorrow just so it can creak for her.
"You feel so good," she whispers. "Every time. Better every time."
"That's because you're letting me in." I press deeper. She gasps. "Not just here." I thrust again, slow. "Everywhere."
Her fingers rake up my back. Not clawing. Tracing. Following the lines of my shoulders, my spine, the muscles that tense and release with each stroke. She's mapping me the way she maps everything. Committing me to memory.
I reach between us. Find her clit. The lightest pressure. Circles that match the pace of my hips, slow and steady and relentless. She moans against my mouth, and her hips roll to meet the pressure, and I feel her tightening around me, the slow build, the gradual climb.
"Eyes on me, principessa.”
She opens her eyes. Blue. Clear. Wet at the edges. Not from sadness. From the overwhelming fullness of being seen and held and fucked and loved all at once.
"I love you," I say. Inside her. Looking at her. In our bed. "I love you, Charlotte. I love Emma. I love every version of you that has ever existed and every version that's coming."
"Claudio." Her voice breaks. "If you make me cry during sex I swear to God—"
"Then come before you cry. Or while you cry, as long as you come for me."
She laughs. The laugh turns into a moan. The moan turns into my name. And the orgasm takes her in a long, shuddering wave that I feel in every inch of my cock, her body gripping me, herlegs pulling me deeper, her face buried in my neck as she comes apart in my arms.
