She stroked him, and his hand caught her wrist. “Not here. Come to bed.”
He reached behind her and turned the water off. Then he bent and lifted her—one arm under her knees, the other behind her back—and carried her out of the bathroom. She looped her arms around his neck. Water dripped from both of them across the carpet. He set her down on the edge of the bed and she pulled him over her as she lay back.
The sheets were cool and dry against her wet skin. His body was hot above hers, heavy in a way that should have felt constraining but didn’t. He braced himself on one forearm and kissed her throat, the hollow below her ear, the line of her collarbone. His other hand moved down her body—her breast, her ribs, the dip of her waist—learning her with an attentionthat made something tight and desperate coil at the base of her throat.
He found her nipple and her back arched off the bed. He took his time. Slow pressure, his tongue circling, his teeth grazing just enough to make her gasp. His hand slid between her thighs and his fingers found her clit again, still swollen and sensitive, and the sound she made was raw. He paused.
“Don’t stop,” she said.
He didn’t stop. His fingers moved inside her while his thumb worked her clit, and he traveled from her breast to her ribs to the flat plane of her stomach, and she was dissolving.
Three years of discipline and distance and carefully maintained walls, and he was taking them apart with his hands and the kind of focus that left no room for performance. He wasn’t trying to impress her. He was paying attention to her, and the difference between those two things was devastating.
He pulled away for a moment, and she let out a sound of protest. He smiled, then crossed to the bathroom and came back with his wallet, pulling a condom from it. The wrapper tore under his teeth. She watched him roll it on and something in her chest clenched at the sight of him: kneeling on the bed, wet hair pushed back from his face, his body lean and hard and marked with scars he hadn’t explained, his eyes on her like she was the only thing in the world that mattered.
He settled between her thighs. His hand slid under her knee, lifting her leg against his hip, and when he pushed inside her she exhaled a sound that was half relief and half something she couldn’t name.
He moved slowly. Deep, deliberate strokes that she felt in her entire body. His forehead pressed against hers. His breath was ragged against her mouth. She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him deeper and he groaned—a low, unguarded sound that went straight through her.
His hand curved around her hip, holding her exactly where he wanted her, adjusting the angle until she gasped and dug her nails into his shoulders.
“There,” she breathed. “Yes. Please, yes.”
He stayed there. Kept the angle, kept the pace, each stroke landing with a precision that was doing something to her she couldn’t think her way out of. His thumb traced the bone of her hip. His face was against her throat, and she could feel the vibration of every sound he made against her skin.
The second orgasm built slower than the first. A deep, rolling pressure that started low in her belly and spread outward, and she could feel it coming for a long time before it hit. He felt it too. She knew because his rhythm shifted—not faster, but more focused, meeting her exactly where she needed him.
When it broke, it broke hard. She buried her face against his neck and held on to him with both hands and let it take her. He followed her a few seconds later, his whole body going taut above her, his breath catching against her shoulder in a sound that was more surrender than anything else.
They stayed like that for a long time. His weight on top of her, his face in the curve of her neck, their breathing slowing together. The room was quiet. The harbor lights threw pale reflections across the ceiling.
He rolled off her eventually, dealt with the condom and came back. Pulled the covers over them both. His arm settled across her waist, heavy and certain, and he pressed his lips against her shoulder.
“Stay,” he murmured.
“Okay,” she said. The word was out before she could catch it.
His breathing evened out within minutes. His arm got heavier across her waist. His chest rose and fell against her back in the slow, deep rhythm of real sleep.
Fallon didn’t sleep.
She lay still and listened to him breathe and stared at the harbor lights and felt the specific, surgical pain of a mistake she wasn’t sorry for.
She couldn’t stay.
She waited twenty minutes. Then she lifted his arm off her waist, carefully, an inch at a time. He shifted but didn’t wake. She slid out of the bed, her feet finding the carpet without sound.
Her dress and panties were in the bathroom, still damp. She put them on anyway. Found her shoes by the doorframe. Left the robe on the bathroom floor where it had fallen. She didn’t look in the mirror. She didn’t want to see the face that was about to do this.
She walked back to the bedroom doorway.
He was on his side, one arm stretched across the space where she’d been. The sheets were tangled around his waist. The light from the harbor caught the scar on his side, the line of his jaw, the easy sprawl of a man who’d fallen asleep trusting that the woman beside him would still be there when he woke up.
She stood there for three seconds. Four. Five.
She wanted to stay. The wanting was specific and physical—an ache behind her ribs that had nothing to do with her joints or her condition or any of the hundred pains she cataloged and managed every day.
This one was new. This one was just for him.
She turned and crossed the room, quiet and precise. Her knee sent a sharp complaint on the second step and she absorbed it without breaking stride.
She didn’t look back. If she did, she might cave. Might get back in bed with a charming, sexy man who was a luxury she couldn’t afford.
The hallway was empty. The elevator was waiting. The lobby was quiet, staffed by a single concierge who glanced up and then away, professional and incurious. Outside, the air was coldagainst her damp dress and her bare arms, and she walked three blocks before she let herself feel anything at all.
Then she felt everything, and she walked faster.
