“I wasn’t—I didn’t plan?—”
“Asher.” I put my hand on his face. “Get the condom.”
He laughed—a real laugh, startled out of him—and reached for the drawer and I watched him tear the wrapper and roll it on and the sight of his hands doing that one efficient thing made my stomach clench in a way that had nothing to do with efficiency.
He came back to me. Braced on his forearms, his face above mine. Dark eyes, dilated, the CEO gone, the control gone, just Asher—the barefoot version, the deck version, the version who made terrible eggs because it felt more real. He brushed his mouth across mine, barely there.
“Hi,” I whispered. Because we were here. Because it was enormous and I needed it to also be small.
“Hi.” His voice came out unsteady.
He pushed inside me slowly and my eyes flew open and I bit my lip hard enough to taste copper. Not from pain. From the sheer overwhelming fact of him, the fullness, the way mybody opened and tightened around him at the same time like it couldn’t decide between pulling him closer and trying to survive the intensity.
He stopped moving. “OK?”
“Don’t stop.”
He moved. Slow at first—deliberate, patient, like he had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it. I matched his rhythm with my hips, and when I shifted the angle, something hit exactly right and I gasped and dug my nails into his back and he groaned against my throat.
“There,” I said. “Right there. Don’t you dare move.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Rough. Barely a voice anymore.
He kept the angle. Kept the rhythm. His mouth found mine and the kiss was messy and graceless and perfect, nothing like the careful first kiss on the deck, everything like two people who’d stopped performing. I hooked my ankles behind his back and pulled him deeper and he made a sound into my mouth that I felt in my spine.
Everything narrowed. There was just sensation—the slide of his skin, the heat building low in my belly, the tension coiling tighter with every stroke. His hand slid between us and his thumb found exactly the right spot and I broke from the kiss and buried my face in his neck because the sound I was about to make was not something I wanted to be responsible for.
“Look at me.” His voice, barely there.
I pulled back. Opened my eyes.
He was watching me with an expression I’d never seen on another human face—wrecked and intent and so present it hurt. Like I was the only thing in the room. The only thing in the world.
“I’m here,” he said.
I shattered. There’s no other word for it. Everything I’d been holding gave way at once and I arched into him and cried out,actually cried out, and I could feel him feel it, feel me coming apart around him, and he drove into me once more, twice, and then his whole body seized and he groaned my name into my hair like it was the last word he knew.
We lay there. Breathing hard. His weight half on me, half beside me, his face pressed into my neck. My legs were still tangled with his. I couldn’t have moved if the house caught fire.
After a while he shifted, disposed of the condom, and pulled me against his chest without a word. His heartbeat was slowing under my ear. His hand traced a line down my spine, up, down, a rhythm that might have been unconscious or might have been as deliberate as everything else he did. The room smelled like cedar and sweat and the clean cold air leaking through a window someone had left cracked.
I could get used to this.
The thought moved through me and for the first time I didn’t shove it into the box where I kept the things I couldn’t afford to feel. I held it up to the mountain light. Turned it over. Let it stay.
That was either the bravest or the stupidest thing I’d done since climbing into his car in Roatan.
I wokeup to mountain light and an empty bed.
Not empty—recently vacated. The sheets on his side were still warm. I could hear water running somewhere down the hall, and the smell of coffee was already drifting up the stairs, which meant he’d been up long enough to start the French press and I’d slept through it. I never slept through things. I was a light sleeper by training and paranoia, and the fact that I’d been unconscious in a man’s bed while he moved around the housesaid something about how safe I felt here, and I wasn’t ready to examine.
His face in sleep—I’d seen it, briefly, when I’d woken at some nameless hour in the dark. The jaw unclenched. The line between his eyebrows gone. Younger and less defensive, like a draft of a person before all the revisions.
I got to the landing and remembered Shane. Decided the coffee was worth it anyway.
I pulled on his shirt from the floor—the gray Henley—and went downstairs in that and his socks and found him at the stove, making eggs. Again. With the same concentrated expression. With the same results.
He looked up. His eyes tracked from the Henley to the socks then up to my face, and something happened in his expression that wasn’t a smile but lived in the same neighborhood.
