Page 10 of Booked Up with the Mountain Man Firefighter

Soon she’s moving faster, bouncing harder, her full tits jiggling with every rise and fall. Her skin is flushed pink and glowing in the low light. Then she reaches up and cups her own breasts, rolling and pinching her nipples between her fingers as she watches me watching her. The sight is so fucking filthy and beautiful I have to grit my teeth, fighting the urge to thrust up and come right then.

“Jesus Christ, Ellie,” I groan, my voice rough. “Look at you playing with those pretty tits while you fuck me. You’re gonna make me lose it. Slow down, baby.”

But she doesn’t slow down. Her hips roll and slam down with increasing urgency, her moans turning into high, breathy cries that echo softly between the shelves.

“Mack…” she whimpers, the sound growing higher, needier. “Mack—oh God⁠—”

Her rhythm turns frantic, her pussy clenching around me in hot, fluttering pulses. I can feel her getting close, and it’s taking everything I have not to explode.

“Come on, baby,” I rasp, voice strained as I fight to hold back. “Let me feel you come. Come all over my cock like a good girl.”

She shatters with a sharp, broken cry—“Mack!”—her whole body shaking as she clenches hard around me, pulsing and fluttering. Her hips stutter and grind as the orgasm rips through her, her moans turning into helpless, sobbing whimpers of pleasure.

The feeling of her coming so hard on my cock is too much. With a deep, guttural groan of her name, I finally let go. I thrust up into her, spilling deep inside her in hot, thick pulses, hips jerking as pleasure whites out everything else.

We stay locked together, panting, her forehead pressed to mine. Slowly, she collapses forward, her head resting on my shoulder, my arm wrapping around her back. The shop is dark and quiet around us, the courtyard empty beyond the window.

“You’re still here,” she says after a long silence.

“I’m still here.”

Her head is on my shoulder. My arm is around her. At some point we slid sideways, and now we’re lying on the floor between the poetry shelf and the literary fiction shelf, tangled together in the dark.

5

ELLIE

Iwake up, and the first thing I think about is what I said to him.

Not the rest of it. Not the floor, not the shelves, not the way his hands felt or the sound of my name in his mouth. That’s there too, underneath everything—a hum I can’t shut off. But what keeps surfacing is the moment before all of it. The four sentences. The quiet, precise thing I said that made his grin disappear and left something honest in its place.

You’re not the exhale. You’re the person who noticed someone needed one.

I told him who he was. I looked past every joke and every deflection and said out loud what was underneath, and he stared at me like nobody had ever done that before.

And I meant it. Every word. That’s the problem.

I stand in my bathroom and brush my teeth, looking at the face in the mirror to try to find the person who said those things. The person who sat on the floor of her own bookstore and came alive in a way she didn’t know she could. The person Mack Dunne looked at like she was the most interesting thing in the room.

She’s not here this morning. The person in the mirror is the one I recognize. Brown hair, brown eyes, nothing that stops traffic. The quiet Byrne sister. The one who doesn’t take up space.

I rinse my mouth and set the toothbrush down, and the word hits where it always does.

Restful.

Connor said it junior year. We’d been dating for three months, and I asked him what he liked about me. He smiled and said, “You’re restful, Ellie. Being with you is like coming home to a quiet house.”

He meant it as a compliment. I heard a door close.

We lasted two more months after that. He didn’t break up with me dramatically. He just started spending more time with a girl in his econ study group who laughed louder and talked faster and took up space in rooms. I couldn’t even blame him.

You don’t leave a quiet house. You just stop coming home.

Mack is the opposite of a quiet house. Mack is noise and light and energy. He fills every room he walks into, and I empty them. Last night was an exception. Last night was the bookstore after hours with the lights off and the world locked out—and in that space, in the dark, I was enough.

But the dark doesn’t last. When the morning comes and the lights go on, he’ll see what Connor saw. What Margot and Tess see. What I’ve always known.

I’m not the person who changes someone’s life in four sentences on the floor of a bookstore. I’m the person who shelves books and writes little cards and watches through the window. Last night I forgot that. I can’t afford to forget it again.