God, she makes me feel like a teenager again. NotObelus, not the version of myself who knows exactly how to tilt my head, how to move my hands on the mic stand to make the crowd lose their minds. Just me, awkward and stunned, still trying to fathom that she’s real. Maybe that’s what love is supposed to feel like. When the scales finally balance. When you can stop performing.
I glide my hand down the dip of her hip, trace the soft line of her waist. She sighs, arching just slightly, and I lean forward to press my lips to her shoulder. Then her spine. Then lower, slow, reverent until I reach the small cove at the center of her back. She shivers when I kiss it, the sound barely a breath.
I pull her back against me, holding her tight. We both sigh, almost in unison. The want between us is a live wire but neither of us moves to cross it. There’s a shared fear, unspoken but understood: that if we give in, the night will slip away even faster. That maybe if we wait, if we justfeelthis ache a little longer, we can stretch time itself. The words fill my head.
A kiss against flesh, my name on your breath,
My world is sleeping under London’s chest.
We bend to desire, hidden by design,
Every heartbeat asking, will you be mine?
Normally, I’d grab my phone, scribble it down, chase the melody before it fades. But not tonight. I can’t move. I won’t. I just hold her tighter, pray my memory is good enough to keep it.
I press a kiss to her into the curve of her neck and feel her start to drift, her breathing evening out. She must be exhausted, travel, the day, the flight, all of it. Guilt flickers through me for putting her body through this whirlwind, for being selfish enough to want her here just to fill my own emptiness. But I can’t regret it. Not when she’s this soft, this still, melting into me like something I might’ve dreamed into being.
Her muscles ease one by one, the tension leaving her completely. I try to stay awake, to hold her in the moment a little longer, to feel the weight of her against my chest. But eventually, the pull wins. The dark comes and as I fall, it feels like being dragged from a blooming spring back into the underworld, where the air is frigid, barren, and she’s out of reach.
Chapter 59
Stolen Communion
Rafe
Iwake to her pressed against me, her back arching, my body answering before my mind even stirs. Nature and love working in quiet accord, unbound by the filter of human self-consciousness. I don’t think she’s awake, but her body betrays her desires. Or maybe it’s just honesty, the way sleep makes everything simple. We’ve tried to deny this for so long that even indreamswe found each other again.
She’s flush against the length of me, open, balanced on the edge of a question as she leans into my body and it answers, hard and wanting. The haze between sleeping and waking dulls our willpower but heightens sensation; exhaustion makes us groggy and weighed down, but need carries us upward, second by second, reaching for each other through it.
I breathe out her name, voice choked by gravel and need. “Kasia… are you awake?”
My hands roam along the softness of her. She lets out a small whimper, that heady, involuntary sound that wrecks me as she feels me against her. I try to hold still, to be good, but it’s like swimming through quicksand. Her hips push into me again; I swallow hard.
“Mhm,” she murmurs finally, more sigh than word. “I think so. I thought I was dreaming, but you’re really here.”
She angles herself, everything about her aligned in a tease. Her movements are all suggestions, obvious in their invitation. Her hand finds me, guiding and sure, but she doesn’t move yet. My breath hitches at the contact. Then she reaches behind her and pulls me in before I can think, mouth to mine, the taste of her a dream woven from need.
The kiss is pure hunger, released. I moan into her mouth and, with that, she pushes back until there’s no space left between us, until I’m inside her. The feeling of her, wrapped around me, sparks like electricity, knocking the breath from my lungs. We both make a sound caught between a shock and recognition, as if our bodies knew long before we did that this is where we’d end up.
She rolls her hips back into me, and the sound she makes unleashes something I’ve been trying to resist for too long. Everything in me stops holding back. I match her rhythm, the small stutter of her breath guiding me. Her moans are all the confirmation I need.
When my fingers find her, working in methodical circles along every sensitive part she’s opened for me, she shivers. Her body tightens around mine, a ripple that nearly breaks my control. I adjust, hand sliding to the back of her thigh, grip firm, my fingers making imprints in the plush give of skin. I lift her leg, pull her closer,deeper.The momentum catches and builds until there’s nothing left but instinct and pulse and the sound of her gasping into the pillow, clutching and muffling her urgency like it might calm the pounding of her heart. But I can feel it against me, beating likea wild thing, untamed.
I press my mouth to her neck, trace up to her ear, and catch her lobe between my teeth. She leans into it, panting. Her nails claw into my neck, sharp and grounding, like she’s making sure I don’t falter andlose our rhythm, or fall away by even an inch. Like I might journey too far without her, if she doesn’t hold on through it.
We move, finding the same wave, the samehungerwe kept pretending didn’t exist. Every motion is a confession, the kind you make with your whole body because words would only ruin it.
She shudders, a sound caught between a cry and my name, and it drags me over the edge with her. The climax shatters through us suddenly, no warning, only release and that shared sweetness of free fall. It’s everything and for a moment, I think it’s over, breath heaving against her shoulder, until I realize she’s still caught in the motion, unwilling to let it go—to letme go. The feeling of being connected. I follow, still completely lost, helping her ride another wave of it.
My body obeys, stays hard for her, something I’ve never experienced but don’t question. It’s heightened; the sensitivity of it makes me stutter with every thrust even though the climb is only a stable sensation, not upward. Staying right in the heat of it, watching her lose control through her second climax is something I know will take up residence in my mind forever.The perfect painting of pleasure.Then it alters from my body cooling down to heating back up the longer we stay there. When she senses it, she tries to speak.
“I don't think I can—” she trips, voice caught somewhere between plea and surrender.
I lean close, whisper against her ear between the pulses of pleasure. “You can,and you will.”
The sound of her moans climbs; I feel how she tightens around me, drawing us both toward another edge again. Her hand runs along my temple, threading into my hair, gripping like she needs me to know I can’t stop now that I've started this.
We’re overheating, two engines pushed too far. But when I look at her face, eyes blown wide, that red streak across her cheeks and nose,sweat shining along her hairline, lips parted and trembling, I know I can’t stop now, even if I wanted to. My body answers her call like a command. When my pace picks up, harder and deeper, she looks at me.
