The hand at the back of her neck comes to her other hip. Another question, followed by another quick answer, another quick, silent insistence thatYes, you can touch me anywhere you want to.His hands are big enough that when he spreads them across her belly, his fingers can intertwine. He uses this woven grip to keep her in place, speaking now into the apple of her cheek.
“I would’ve said you were stunning. That I always thought you were beautiful, but in that dress—it hurt to look at you. It hurt to look away.”
Oh.This man and his beautiful, honeyed words. Grace doesn’t know whether to smile, or laugh, or cry at this, and so instead she simply accepts it, letting it wash over her skin alongside the spring water.
“I like it,” she eventually murmurs, words slurred with desire, “when you look at me.”
Another deep, reverberating rumble. “You do?”
“I didn’t know it at first,” Grace admits. “Didn’t know—what this was, what the feeling was when I felt your eyes on me in a crowded room.”
He strokes up her torso, teasingly soft. “But you know now,” he says. “What it is.”
“I think I do,” Grace exhales, scraping the recesses of her brain for logic and sense. “But it isn’t just one thing.” She swallows hard. “It’s attraction…but also curiosity, and maybe some terror. All swirling together.”
Crew’s hips barely, almost imperceptibly rock into her. Grace’s eyelids flutter as he grunts with the movement, the newfound friction. “You want to know what it is for me?”
Grace nods. She can’t think of anything she wants more at this moment.
He rocks into her again, but this time, he’s less delicate about it. Any trepidation he felt about pressing his hard length into the crevice of her bottom is long gone. Grace arches into him as he says, “It’s want.” He exhales hot and thick onto her skin. “It’s need.”
A distant, muffled alarm bell sounds in her head when his fingertips graze just beneath the elastic waistband of her underwear, and some ancient instinct arises, telling her that if they keep going like this, Crew is going to make her come. He’s going to give her the first orgasm of her life, and she’ll never come back from that. The thought of being wrecked to oblivion has her next words stuttering out of her mouth like a protective reflex.
“Is this—is this a bad idea?”
The cadence of his hips slows and she immediately wants it back—the pressure of his body moving into hers. His fingers stop their downward trajectory into her underwear. She hates herself for making him stop.
“You tell me,” he says breathily, and his grip on her hip softens, becoming less urgent and more soothing. Grace knows in her bones that if she asked him to let her go, to walk away from this and never speak of it again, he would. Without hesitation. He would respect any boundary she constructed.
And it’s that reassurance that makes her brave. Makes her want him all the more.
“It doesn’t feel like a bad idea,” she says honestly, and then, because she thinks she may actually die if he doesn’t keep touching her, she presses her hand against his and guides them both into her underwear. He cups her gently, his fingers barely sinking into the folds of her, and groans.
He begins to explore, grazing her clit with intention and precision. When a thick fingertip presses lightly into her, he grunts, a whisperedfuckfalling from his lips and onto her cheek. His mouth is open, hot breath spilling out in huffs against her skin. “You’re so wet,” he says, a hint of wonder in his tone.
Grace moans. “I am,” she affirms, her hand sliding up his forearm and leaving him to his own devices. “It feels so good—you touching me.”
“I—” Crew attempts, but swallows his words roughly. He plays with her clit with his thumb while he dips just the tip of his finger in and out of her, slowly and purposefully.
Grace’s breathing picks up as she clenches around it, as though her body is trying to pull him within, to bring him even closer.
“I want to make you come,” he says after a particularly hard squeeze. “Can I do that for you?”
“Please,” she cries. A pleading, desperate imitation of a word. “Please, Crew.”
He sinks his finger all the way into her, and the tight, invasive,fullfeeling that follows makes her eyes roll back. “Shit,” Crew grunts. “You’re so fucking tight.”
As he begins to fuck her with his finger in earnest now, Grace surrenders entirely to his control, letting him keep her body upright like a needy, overheated rag doll. She is right up against it now—that cliff’s edge of euphoria.
“Let go, Grace,” Crew tells her, somehow knowing she’s toeing the precipice, hesitating before she jumps. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”
She obeys. She couldn’t stop herself even if she tried, and what follows is a flurry of sensation so intense her knees buckle under the weight of it. Grace cries out, and Crew clamps a hand over her mouth at the growing volume, the unhindered vocalization of a bliss so pure and relentless that it may actually kill her. Her heart pounds against her ribs as pleasure rushes through her entire body, syrupy thick and heavier than anything she’s ever known. A pinpoint is placed in her life, in her soul, at the moment it crests—a marker that indicates who she was before this, and the person she will be after.
“Good,” Crew sighs as he holds her up, as he fucks her through the wave with his thick, deft finger and plays with her clit all the while, sending aftershocks of crippling ecstasy through her.
She trembles in his grasp, a vibrating mess. An exposed, raw nerve.
“Fuck,” he shudders. “You’re perfect.”
