“There... Finn, right there, don't...”
“I've got you.” He shifts his angle a half-degree, deliberate as everything, and hits it again, and again, until I'm writhing. “Right there?”
“Yes...”
“Louder.”
It builds fast. Too fast, again, everything's too fast tonight. My skin's too tight and too hot and every pass of him winds the coil higher, and my own voice reaches me from somewhere, breathless, wrecked, begging now, actually begging, please and more and his name, saying things with no plan in them at all.
And then I feel it.
At the base of him, where our bodies meet, a swelling. A pressure that catches at me on every stroke now, bigger each time, and my body knows what it is before my brain catches up and the want that rips through me is so total, so loud, that my hips slam up to chase it before I've decided anything.
His knot. That's his knot, swelling at the base of his cock, catching at my rim on every stroke now, bigger each time, and every cell I own is screaming for it.
My body clenches around him, greedy, trying to pull it in, slick easing the way like my biology has already voted.
“Finn... please, I need...” It comes out broken. Begging. I don't even know what I'm asking for, except I do, I absolutely do, and I can't ask for it, because there's a drawer in my nightstand and a plan in that drawer and a rule older than both of us about what a knot means.
“I know.” Through his teeth, every word costing him. “Fuck. I know. I feel you.”
I feel it too. What he wants. What we both want. To let it push in and seat and lock us together, the way my whole body is screaming for.
And he holds it back.
Not the swell, he can't stop that, it's building whether either of us wants it or not. What he holds back is the last of it. He keeps himself right there, catching and tugging at my rim without ever letting it seat, without letting it push past and lock, some titanic effort that shudders through him, his breath tearing, his forearm shaking by my head.
He gives me the drag of it, the stretch, the catch, everything right up to the edge of what my body's begging for. Everything except that. The denial aches so sweet and hollow that it tips me over all on its own.
I come apart around him with a sound like a sob, clamping down so hard his rhythm stutters, and he follows me down.
Two strokes, three, and then he buries himself as deep as he can go without the knot and spills into me, hot and endless, coming with a sound I will be hearing for the rest of my life, low and broken and my name in the middle of it, his mouth landing open on the side of my throat.
Right there. Right where it would go.
His teeth rest against my skin. Not biting. Just resting, pressed to my pulse, his whole body locked around the instinct the way you hold a door against weather, and we stay like that, shaking, both of us, while the wave rolls through and past.
Then he turns his head, slow, and presses a kiss to the exact spot instead.
Soft. Deliberate. A signature on a line he didn't cross.
I stare at my dark ceiling and hold onto him and do not cry. The single largest achievement of my adult life.
He comes backfrom my bathroom with a washcloth and a glass of water, because he's Finn, and somewhere in the last hour I stopped being surprised by him and started being ruined instead.
He cleans me up with a care that should be clinical and isn't, and then he hands me the glass and watches me drink it, sitting on the edge of my bed, huge and rumpled and unhurried, like there's nowhere else a Monday could possibly end.
“You're watering me,” I say, into the glass.
“Somebody has to.”
“I had a system before you. I want that noted. A functioning life, start to finish.”
“Mm.” He takes the empty glass and sets it on the nightstand, right next to the drawer I am not thinking about, and then he looks at me in the dark for a long moment. “Move over.”
“You're staying?”
It comes out before I can dress it up. Naked. Hopeful. Three weeks of careful, gone.
