My mouth came down on hers and swallowed the sound before it slipped past her lips.
One hand locked behind her head, her hair caught between my fingers. The other pressed flat against her lower back, and she came forward into it until the last of the space closed, and I felt the warmth of her through every layer between us. Her breath broke against my mouth.
My rationale was simple intervention. A hard, physical shock to cut through the spiral before it took her somewhere beyond my ability to follow. It was a tactical decision, the kind you make when the alternative is worse. That was the story I told myself in the fraction of a second I had.
Then something changed.
She came back to herself, all at once. Her hands released their grip on my shirt; one slid up to fist in my hair and pulled me down harder, the other pressed against my cheek with a deliberateness that had nothing to do with panic. Certain. Claiming.
Everything else silenced.
There was only her mouth under mine, and the sound she made when I slowed and took it deeper—low and involuntary—and the way her hips shifted, no decision behind it, her body simply done waiting on the rest of her to catch up.
My hand in her hair tightened. She gasped into my mouth and pulled me closer in the same breath, the contradiction of it—the sharp intake followed immediately by more. I pressed my hand against her lower back, and she arched into it, and the sound that followed was quiet and broken and went straight through every layer of discipline I’d spent years building.
I pulled back.
My forehead dropped to hers, and we stayed there for a moment, mouths close, breathing the same air, her fingers still knotted in my hair and her other hand pressed against my chest. I could feel her pulse, rapid and unsteady, and she could almost certainly feel mine hammering in turn.
I slid my hand beneath the hem of her shirt, slow and deliberate. My fingers spread across the bare skin of her lower back. She drew a sharp breath and pressed closer. I could feel everything—the shape of her, the warmth of her.
“Finn.” My name on her lips, against my lips, broken into two syllables that carried about four different things at once—plea, demand, permission, question—none of them requiring an answer in words.
I kissed her again instead. Slower this time. My thumb traced upward along her side, and the sound she made passed straight through me. Her nails dug into my hair. Her hips rocked forward with an involuntary honesty that blurred my vision, and I pressed my mouth to the corner of hers, then along her jaw, then down to the hollow of her throat where her pulse hammered fast and visible beneath the skin.
Her head dropped back. I kissed the full length of her exposed neck and felt her hips drive forward once, hard, against me.
I lifted my head and looked at her.
Her eyes had gone dark with arousal, her lips parted, her breathing still erratic—each breath stopping somewhere short of complete. She looked undone. And her hand was still curved around the back of my neck, still pulling, the pressure quiet and steady.
“Don’t stop.” Both words barely made a sound. And underneath them—underneath the rawness and the trembling that had nothing to do with fear anymore—something unguarded and open that reached into my chest and closed around something vital.
Trust. Complete and unguarded, extended across a rooftop couch at the end of everything, with death still circling thirty feet below and nothing guaranteed past the next breath. She trusted me with her body and her panic and the soft, undefended sounds she made when my hands moved against her skin.
I pressed my forehead to hers and stayed there for a moment with my eyes closed.
Then I kissed her once more—slow and deliberate—and the last of the careful distance I’d been maintaining simply evaporated.
Below us, the dead still circled the base of the building, patient and endless. Above us the sky had deepened to the flat gray of late afternoon, the light going out of it slowly, the city underneath it dark and silent and altered beyond anything either of us had the framework to address yet.
And here, on an old couch on a rooftop at the end of what the world had been, I held on to something I had no right to want.
Eleven
Desire & Secrets -Libby
Istill trembled when Finn’s mouth met mine, but fear was no longer involved. This time, it was all about him.
The moment our lips reconnected, my hands instinctively slid to the back of his shirt. His stubble grazed my cheek, and I leaned into it, a low, unguarded moan escaping me. My nails pressed through the fabric on his back, and I pulled until there was no remaining distance between us, until I could feel the separate beats of his heart, until my next breath came as an afterthought.
His thigh pressed harder between my legs, and I rocked against it, my hips moving with a will of their own, chasing friction through layers of fabric, unconcerned with what that honesty revealed. Heat flooded my abdomen, low and insistent, and I made a sound against his mouth that I’d have been embarrassed by under any other sky.
His hand slid under my shirt. Rough palms, calloused fingers spread wide across my back, moving upward with deliberateintent. I arched into his touch, and his other hand found the hem of my shirt and pulled upward—impatient, hungry.
I lifted my arms and helped him.
I wanted his hands on bare skin, his mouth on my throat, and his body against mine—an immediate feeling that was entirely mine, one that would crowd out everything else until the dead things circling below were just noise. I also understood what he would find. Both things were true at once. I lifted my arms anyway, and the fabric came away, and the cool night air landed across bare skin—
