"I mean it, Ella. This isn't… there's no momentum that can't be stopped. I've got great brakes."
"Did you just compare yourself to a car?" She laughs. The nervousness eases. This is how we work — the joke opens the door, the real thing walks through it.
"Should I take this off?" she asks, touching her T-shirt.
My throat dries. "If you want to."
"I've never—nobody's seen me. Without a shirt."
"Ella, you don't have to?—"
She pulls it over her head.
She's not wearing a bra. She’s just there, an adult Ella Rujkowski, bare from the waist up, sitting on my bed in the morning light, and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
Her breasts are full and heavy, soft, with dark nipples that are already peaked from the cool air or nervousness or desire or all three. Her stomach is round and soft, and there's a scatter of freckles across her chest that I didn't know existed and now constitute my entire reason for living.
She crosses her arms.
I reach forward and gently pull them apart. "Don't."
"I'm—it's a lot. I know I'm?—"
"Ella." My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "You are so fucking gorgeous. I need you to hear me. Any man who is ever lucky enough to see you like this better worship the opportunity, or I will personally wring his neck."
The words land between us, and I hear what I just said — the possessiveness, the violence of it. But that’s what we’re doing here, preparing her for a datable guy.
"Can I touch you?" I ask.
"Yes."
I climb onto the bed beside her and start where I started last time — her jaw, her neck, her collarbone. Known territory. She exhales, and I feel her settle. But this time, when my fingers reach the edge where the fabric stopped me before, there's no fabric. Just skin. Warm, soft, impossibly smooth skin that gives under my fingertips as I trace down from her collarbone to the swell of her breast.
I cup her in my palm, and her breath catches so hard I feel it in my own lungs. She's looking down, watching my hand on her, and her lips are parted, and her eyes are wide, and I realize she's never had anyone's hands here. Not like this. Not with intention and desire and the kind of reverence that makes my own hands shake.
"Okay?" I murmur.
"Don't stop."
I brush my thumb across her nipple. She gasps and grabs my forearm, fingers digging in. The sound she makes is small and sharp and goes straight to my groin like an electric current.
"Bernard—"
"I'm here."
"I want to see you too."
Fair is fair. I pull my T-shirt over my head and drop it on the floor. She stares at my chest with an expression I'd describe as clinical if her pupils weren't blown black.
"I've seen shirtless men," she says, like she's trying to maintain professional distance. "In hockey arenas and a medical context."
"How's this context?"
"Different." Her hand comes up and flattens against my sternum. "Very different."
"Your turn. Touch wherever."
She explores me the way she did before — methodical, curious, thorough. Fingers tracing muscle groups she can name, mapping my scars, testing what makes me react. But bare skin-to-bare skin changes everything. When she drags her nails down my ribs, I shudder. When she traces the line of hair below my navel, I stop breathing.
