“Again. Louder.”
“I’m yours, Quest.”
He groaned and picked up the pace, pushing deeper, harder, and I cried out and didn’t cover my mouth because there was nobody to hear us for forty acres in every direction and I was done being quiet. Done performing control, done holding back the sounds my body wanted to make, done being the woman who kept everything locked behind her teeth. I let my legs fall open wider and my hands slide from his shoulders to his back and I pulled him into me and let him have every sound and every shiver and every part of me that I’d been protecting since I was old enough to know that protecting yourself was the only option.
“That’s my girl,” he said, and his voice was low and thick and coming apart at the edges. “Let me hear you. Give me all of it. Every sound, every moan. That belongs to me now.”
He shifted his angle and hit deeper and I gasped and my nails raked down his back hard enough to leave marks. He hissed at the sting and didn’t slow down. If anything he went harder, his hands gripping my hips and tilting them up so he could reach places inside me that nobody had ever reached before.
“Right there?” he asked, reading my face.
“Right there. Don’t you dare move.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” He kept that angle and kept that pace and talked me through it the whole time, his mouth against my ear, his voice steady even when his body wasn’t. “You’re so beautiful like this. You know that? With your walls down and your legs open and all that tough shit gone. This is who you are underneath all of it and I’m the only one who gets to see it. The only one, Mehar. You hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody else gets this. Nobody else gets these sounds. Nobody else gets to be inside you and feel you come apart. This is mine. You’re mine.”
“I’m yours. I’m yours, I’m yours, I’m yours.” I was chanting it now because the orgasm was building fast and my brain had reduced itself to those two words and his name and the sound of our bodies meeting and the wet heat between us that was making every stroke slicker and deeper and more intense than the last.
“I almost lost you,” he said, and his rhythm faltered for half a second, emotion crashing into the physical. “I almost fucking lost you, Mehar. And I swear to God, nobody is ever taking you from me again. Nobody.”
“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
He buried his face in my neck and drove into me with everything he had and I shattered. The orgasm hit me so hard my whole body locked up and I screamed his name into the ceiling and my legs clamped around his waist and I felt myself pulsing around him, tight and rhythmic, and he groaned against my throat like the feeling of me coming on him was the thing that finally broke him open completely.
“Mehar, fuck, I’m about to…”
“Give it to me. All of it.”
He came inside me with a sound I’d never heard from him before, deep and guttural and raw, his whole body shuddering, his arms locked around me so tight I could feel his heartbeat slamming against my chest. He stayed buried deep while the aftershocks rolled through both of us and neither of us moved for a long time.
When he finally pulled out I felt the loss of him immediately and it made my chest ache, which was dramatic and ridiculous but I didn’t care because I had earned the right to be dramatic tonight.
He rolled onto his back and pulled me against his chest and I lay there listening to his heartbeat slow down and feeling his fingers trace patterns on my shoulder blade.
”Quest.”
“Hmm.”
“Do you want kids?”
His fingers stopped moving on my shoulder for a second. Then they started again.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
“You got a vasectomy though.”
“I did.”
“Can you reverse it?”
“Yeah. I’ll do that.”
I lifted my head and looked at him. He was staring at the ceiling with an expression that was somewhere between peaceful and pained, like the answer had cost him something to give but he’d given it anyway because I asked.
“You’d really do that?” I pressed my hand flat against his lower stomach, just below his navel, where the scar would be. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t move my hand. Just let me touch the evidence of a decision he’d made fourteen years ago because a woman lied to him and a baby died and he swore he’d never risk that kind of loss again. And here he was telling me he’d undo it. For me.
