“Bedroom.”
“End of the hall. If you hit the bathroom you've gone too far, the place is four rooms, I don't know why I'm giving you a tour.”
“Josie.” His forehead drops to mine. In the dark his eyes are all pupil. “Stop talking.”
“Make me,” I say, and he does.
He walks me backward down my own hallway like a man who's memorized it, mouth on mine every step, and we hit the bedroom doorframe once, my fault, and the bed second, his.
My room is small and my bed isn't and I have exactly one second to be grateful past-Josie splurged on the good quilt before he lays me down on it and follows me and every thought I own goes quiet at once.
Nobody's ever managed that. A lifetime of a brain like a browser with forty tabs open, and Finn Morrow puts his weight over me and it all just closes.
He kisses my jaw. My throat. Finds the scent spot below my ear where my pulse is going like a rabbit and stays there until my hips lift off the bed on their own, asking for something I refuse to say out loud.
“Shirt,” I say instead.
“Mine or yours.”
“Yes.”
Both. His comes off over his head in that one-armed way that should be illegal, and mine takes longer because his hands slide up under it first, slow, palms flat and rough and huge against my ribs, and by the time the shirt actually leaves my body I'm shaking and he's noticed.
He notices everything. I knew that. I knew that about him and I still wasn't ready to be what he aims it at, undivided.
“Cold?” he asks, knowing full well.
“Shut up.”
“You're shaking.”
“I'm aware. It's your fault. Take responsibility.”
He takes responsibility.
He takes it slow, mouth moving down my sternum while his hands go to the waistband of my shorts. He looks up at me, a question in it, one thumb hooked in the elastic, and I lift my hips off the bed to answer before he can even ask.
He draws them down my legs along with everything underneath, unhurried, dragging his knuckles back up the inside of my thighs on the return like he's mapping me, and then the last of my clothes hits the floor and I'm bare in front of Finn Morrow and he pulls back and looks at me for so long I start to squirm.
“Say something,” I whisper.
“No.”
“Finn.”
“There isn't a word.” He says it flat, final, fact-of-the-world, the way he says four-word things that rearrange me. Then he lowers his head and stops using words entirely.
His mouth lands on the inside of my knee. Travels up. Unhurried, thorough, like the man reorganizes garages, and by the time he settles between my thighs I'm fisting the sheets and past caring about anything.
He looks at me from down there, at how slick I am, how swollen, how far past ready, and something in his face goes dark and reverent at once.
“Been thinking about this,” he says, to my skin. “Since April.”
Then his mouth is on me and the first long pass of his tongue through my slick pulls a sound out of me I have never made in my life.
He does it again. Slower. Spreads me open with his thumbs and takes his time about it, licking into me like the flavor of me is the entire point.
When he closes his lips around my clit andsucks,my hips come off the bed. His forearm pins them right back down.
