I reach between us, wrap my hand around his cock, and guide him to my entrance. No foreplay. No buildup. Not the way we usually do this, where he takes his time, where he works me up until I'm begging and half out of my mind. There's no time for that, not because I'm in a rush, but because I need him inside me now. Before the grief catches up. Before the rage cools into something manageable. Before I lose the furious energy that's keeping me upright.
I sink down onto him in one slow, devastating slide.
His head drops back, his jaw going tight as a rough exhale escapes through his teeth. My whole body seizes around him. Not in orgasm, not yet, but in recognition. The stretch, the fullness, the way he fills me like he was designed for exactly this, for exactly me, and it's too much and not enough. I want to scream. I want to cry. I do neither. I just take him. All of him. Until my hips are flush against his and there's nowhere left to go.
For one second, neither of us moves.
His hands on my thighs. My hands braced on his shoulders. His breath ragged. Mine gone entirely. The room is dark exceptfor the lamp on the nightstand throwing warm gold across his chest, his jaw, the column of his throat where his pulse beats hard and visible. My hips haven't moved. His haven't either. We are just sitting in this, in the fullness, in the place where his body ends and mine begins, and it is the most honest thing we've done in weeks, this silence, this stillness, this moment before everything breaks.
Then I move.
Slow at first. Rolling my hips in a long, deliberate grind that drags him against every nerve ending inside me, and the sound he makes, low, wrecked, barely human, goes straight to the base of my spine and lights me up. His fingers dig into my thighs as I grind harder, setting a rhythm that's more punishment than pleasure, more grief than want, except it's all of those things, actually, all at once, and my body doesn't know the difference anymore.
His mouth finds my breast again, tongue circling my nipple while his hands slide up to my waist, trying to slow me down, to set a gentler pace, because of course he does, because even in bed this man cannot stop trying to take care of me, and I...
"No." I push his chest, flatten my palm against his sternum, and ride him. Hard. Hips lifting until just the tip of him is inside me and then dropping back down with enough force to make us both gasp. Again. And again. Each time the impact reverberates through my whole body, sending shocks up my spine. The wet sound of us filling the room in a way that should embarrass me but doesn't, hasn't, won't, because there's no space left in me for embarrassment. Just this. Just the burn of him stretching me open. Just the friction of his cock dragging against my inner walls every time I rise and fall.
His head is back, throat exposed, and my mouth finds his pulse. I bite. Not gently. His hips jerk up into me and the anglechanges, hitting a spot that makes my vision blur. A moan rips out of me that I couldn't have held back if someone paid me.
This. This is what I'm losing. Not just the orgasms. Though let's be honest, the man fucks like he was put on this earth for exactly one purpose, and it wasn't running a crime syndicate. But this. The way his body answers mine. The way his breath matches my breath when we're close, the way we sync up like two instruments finding the same key after playing in different rooms.
His hands move to my ass, gripping hard, as he starts meeting my rhythm, driving up into me as I come down. Every thrust bottoms out with a grind that hits my clit and sends a shock wave through me, building something at the base of my spine, something enormous and terrifying that I am not ready for, not yet, not yet...
I slow down. Push my hips forward. Roll. Slow. Feel every inch of him drag against me, feel the ridge of his cock catch on every oversensitized spot inside me, and the slowness is almost worse than the speed because I can feel everything. Every twitch, every pulse, every micro-movement of his hips as he fights the urge to take over.
"Fuck." His voice is destroyed. A single syllable dragged out of him by force.
My hands frame his jaw. My forehead presses against his. We are breathing the same air, and I am looking into his eyes from so close that the brown dissolves into darkness, and somewhere behind the want and the heat there is something so open, so undefended, that it?—
I close my eyes. I take one breath. I come back.
And I start moving again.
Faster this time. Chasing the orgasm that's building like a wave, while the grief is building right behind it. They're going to hit me at the same time. I know it and I don't care. Histhumb finds my clit, circling in tight, precise strokes that match my rhythm, and the way he reads my body, makes heat prickle behind my eyes.
"Look at me," he whispers, demanding.
My eyes open. And there he is. Unguarded. The mask gone. All of it gone. Just Elio, underneath everything, looking at me like I am the entire world and he's watching the sun come up.
I come apart.
The orgasm tears through me with a violence that matches everything else in this room. The love and the hate and the grief and the rage, all of it cresting at once, my body clenching around his cock in waves that make him groan and drive up into me hard enough that a second peak hits before the first one finishes. Stacking, rolling, endless. I bite down on his shoulder to keep from making a sound that would bring the guards running, teeth sinking into the muscle while my body shakes and shakes and shakes.
He follows. I feel the moment his control snaps. The surge of him inside me, as his arms lock around my back so tight I can barely breathe, his face buried in my neck, his mouth open against my skin. A sound comes out of him that I have never heard before, broken.
And my brain, my stupid, stubborn, architectural-restoration brain, does what it always does when the structure fails. Catalogues the damage.
That's the last time you'll hear that sound. That's the last time his arms will lock like that. That's the last time you'll feel him inside you. This is the final survey before demolition.
I press my forehead into the curve of his neck and breathe. Citrus and wood and leather, clean and sharp. The scent I tried to reconstruct from nothing on a thin mattress in a concrete cell. The scent I will never smell this close again.
We don't move. His arms stay around me, loosening by degrees as our breathing slows. My cheek settles against his chest, ear over his still hammering heart. His fingers trace absent patterns across my shoulder, the same shoulder where the bruises from the compound have finally faded. I don't think he knows he's doing it. The tracing. It's the thing his hands do when the rest of him isn't paying attention, when the control slips and his body does what it actually wants to do, which is touch me. Just touch me.
He presses his lips to my temple before he shifts me gently off his lap and onto the sheets. "Don't move."
The bathroom door closes behind him. Water runs. And I have maybe ninety seconds.
My feet hit the floor before the faucet's fully on. The bag is the closet, right where I left it. Unzip. My fingers find the small amber bottle I took from Elena's room three days ago, the bottle I've been carrying like a grenade with the pin half-pulled. Two tablets into my palm. Zip the bag closed and slide it back.
