“Take me to bed, Zach.”
He surges up off the couch so fast I have to grab his shouldersto keep from falling. My legs lock around his waist and the laptop slides off the cushion and hits the floor but neither of us flinch.
He drops me on the bed and I pull him down with me. Clothes come off fast, my fingers yanking his shirt over his head, his hands fumbling with the clasp of my bra with fingers that shake against my skin. He’s usually so precise. So controlled. I love watching that fall apart.
His boxers hit the floor and I have to press my thighs together at the sight of him, thick and hard and already leaking at the tip. I’ve seen him naked dozens of times and it still makes my mouth water.
“Now,” I whisper against his mouth. “Stop thinking.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. Almost a smile. “I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
He pushes in slowly and my eyes flutter shut because this part never gets old—the stretch of him, the way my body has to open up to take him, the way he exhales against my neck like he’s been holding his breath for years and finally remembers how to let go.
This is what he needs. Not game film. Not a mental catalog of every mistake he’s ever made. He needs my nails dragging down his back hard enough to leave marks, my voice in his ear telling him yes, harder, right there. He needs to lose himself in me, in something that feels good instead of crushing.
He speeds up and I arch into him, chasing the friction. He shifts his angle and hits that spot deep inside and I cry out, too loud for his paper-thin walls.
“Neighbors,” he mutters against my neck and brings up his hand to cover my mouth, but there’s a smile in his voice now, a hint of the Zach I fell for underneath all the anxiety and self-destruction.
I lick his palm and he jerks his hand back, startled, and I usethe moment to shove at his shoulder and roll us. He stares up at me, eyes wide and dark and hungry, and I start to move.
“Mackie—” A warning.
“I can take it.”
His grip tightens on my hips, pulling me down while he drives up. The sound I make is deafening, but I don’t give a shit about his neighbors. He does it again, harder, and I brace my hands on his chest because this isn’t about me right now. This is him getting out of his own head, burning off everything he’s been swallowing since that third period.
His hand catches both my wrists and pins them flat against his chest. I try to grind down and his grip tightens and he says “not yet” in a voice I don’t recognize—low and certain and coming from somewhere deeper than the anxious boy who calculates save percentages in his sleep. I am technically on top of him. I am technically in charge. And I have never felt less in control of anything in my life and I don’t want it back.
He sits up without warning, one arm banding around my waist, his face in my neck, teeth scraping my shoulder, hips snapping up at a rhythm that’s punishing and relentless. I’m making sounds I’d be embarrassed about if I had any higher brain function left. I don’t. He’s fucked it right out of me.
“Take it,” I whisper into his ear when he starts to shake. “Whatever you need. Take it.”
He flips me onto my back so fast the room spins and pins my hands above my head and this time he isn’t careful about it. His fingers press into the insides of my wrists where my pulse is slamming and I test the grip and he holds tighter and something hot spreads through my chest that I want more of before I even know what it is. “Look at me,” he says, and I couldn’t look anywhere else if I tried. He’s checking—I can see it. But underneath the checking there’s something else, something that knows exactly what his hands on my wrists are doing to me and isn’t sorry about it.
I arch up and kiss him, open-mouthed, letting our tongues tangle together, and that’s the last permission he needs.
He drives into me and I wrap my legs around him and he hits a spot that makes my vision blur, again and again until it crashes through me and I’m gone. He lets go of my wrists and fucks me through it, hard and desperate, and I’m still shaking when he slams in deep and goes rigid above me. The sound he makes against my neck is broken and raw, and I hold onto his shoulders and feel him shake apart.
He stays there for a long time, his full weight on me, face buried in my neck, breathing like he just skated a double shift. I run my fingers through his hair and wait. His shoulders drop first, then his jaw unclenches against my skin and his mouth goes soft against my collarbone and I feel the tension drain out of him in slow increments, like his body is surrendering one muscle group at a time.
We lie there breathing hard. My hair is stuck to my neck with sweat, his arm pinned under me at a weird angle, and my wrists are red from his grip. I don’t want to move. I don’t think I can.
He pulls out carefully, walks to the bathroom and grabs a towel. Then he’s back, his hand gentle between my legs now, pulling me against him—my head on his shoulder, his arm around my back, our legs tangled at the ankle, like there’s a lock he needs me slotted into before he can shut his brain off. He smells like sweat and sex and my soap he keep stealing, and I finally feel the last knot in his body come undone.
“Better?” I ask.
He sighs against my hair. “Yeah. Better.”
His bedroom isdark and quiet and I’m lying on his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow down. He’s not asleep but he’sgetting there, his fingers tracing the same absent shape over and over on my shoulder blade. The first time he did it I thought it was the letter S, then the number 8, before finally realizing after a few weeks of the same pattern he was tracing an infinity symbol.
“I should watch more film,” he murmurs into my hair, but there’s nothing behind it. He’s already losing the fight against sleep.
“You should sleep.”
“Game 6 is in less than 36 hours.”
