"Yes." I can barely form the word.
"From me."
"Yes." The pressure of his thumb tightens fractionally and my legs threaten to give. "Logan —"
He pulls his fingers free and I make a broken sound, my hips seeking contact he's just removed. But then his hands are on my hips and he turns me, pressing me gently face-forward toward the glass, and the cold of it against my breasts pulls a sharp inhale out of me before his body covers mine from behind — his chest against my back, his cock nudging at my entrance, his mouth against my wet hair.
"Eyes open," he says.
There's a mirror on the wall opposite. Our reflection in the steam — me pressed against the glass, him behind me, both naked, both flushed with heat. I keep my eyes open. I watch his face in the mirror as he pushes inside me.
The sound that comes out of me is embarrassingly loud. He's deep immediately, filling me completely, and I feel every inch of the stretch after the forest and the waiting and I want more, need more, my hips pressing back against him before he's even begun to move.
He starts slowly.
This is the thing I know in my body before I know it anywhere else — this is different from the forest. The forest had the chase in it, the fear, the dark, a man finally letting go after weeks of holding himself in check. This is nothing like that. His hands on my hips are not taking. They're asking, measuring, finding the angle that makes me gasp and then staying there, his cock moving inside me with long, deliberate strokes that drag over every nerve I have and leave me clinging to the glass.
I watch his face in the mirror the whole time.
His expression is open in a way I've never seen — no armor, no control for control's sake. He watches where we're joined, watches my face, watches my hands white-knuckled against thetile, and there's something in his eyes that lands in the center of my chest before I can stop it.
"What do you do with the notebooks?" he asks. "When they're full."
The question catches me completely off-guard — the specificity of it, that he's been watching closely enough to wonder, asked now while he's buried inside me and I can barely form a sentence. My breath stutters. "Throw them away."
His hips slow fractionally. "Why?"
I hold his gaze in the mirror through the next long stroke, feel it move through me, and say the true thing: "Because keeping them would mean the moments mattered."
The silence that follows has weight. He moves inside me and his expression shifts — something arriving, something he didn't expect to feel — and he bends forward, his forehead dropping toward the back of my head. Almost touching. Not quite.
"They matter," he says. Quiet. Almost careful, like the words surprised him too.
They land somewhere central. Somewhere I've been keeping very quiet for five years.
"Yeah." A breath. The next stroke drives the feeling all the way through me. "Maybe they do."
He pulls me back from the glass then — a slow rearrangement, turning me to face him, lifting my leg to wrap around his hip, changing the angle so he's deeper and we are fully facing each other in the steam with nowhere to hide. My back finds the glass again but my face is to his now, no mirror between us, just this. His forehead drops to mine and we breathe the same air and he keeps moving inside me, slow and deep and unbearably present.
"Look at me," he says.
I am. I don't look away.
The orgasm builds from somewhere deep and moves through me slowly — nothing like the sharp bright terror of the forest, nothing like being edged to the point of fracture and finally allowed to break. It gathers low and spreads through me in expanding rings, my whole body warming with it, my hands gripping his arms and my breath coming in short, urgent increments against his mouth.
"Logan —" My voice breaks on his name.
His hand moves between us, thumb finding my clit, and I shatter.
It moves through me in long waves, one after another, my pussy clenching around his cock as he keeps moving through all of it — riding it out, drawing it longer, his forehead pressed to mine and his eyes open and on my face, watching every second. Being watched like this, seen like this, it crests over into something that stings my eyes and I don't stop it.
He follows. The shudder moves through his whole body, his hands gripping my hips hard as he drives deep and stills, a sound pulled out of him that is nothing like control. Low and wrecked and completely, entirely real. He drops his head to my shoulder and shakes, and I hold him.
Afterward we stand with the water running over us, his forehead on my shoulder, both breathing hard. His arms come around me and mine go around him and neither of us moves. We hold each other in the cooling steam, and the reluctance to separate is mutual — I feel it in how he doesn't release me, in how his hands keep pressing flat against my back as if checking I'm still real.
Eventually the water cools.
He reaches back and turns it off without letting go of me, which requires a certain amount of coordination, and then he places me on my feet and we stand in the quiet air, dripping.
