Her nails leave marks in my forearm. I feel the vibration of need building in her before I hear it. Her body speaks a language more honest than words. The flutter of eyelids, the catch in her breathing, the way she moves against my hand because she’s drowning and I’m air.
My fingers curl deeper inside her, finding the spot that makes her spine arch like a drawn bow.
Her gasp vibrates against my collarbone. The slick heat around my fingers drowns out the distant street noise, the tick of the wall clock, everything but the catch in her breath. Her hips rise to meet each movement, a desperate pace against my palm.
Something changes in the tension of her body. A tightening, a quickening. I adjust my wrist, pressing upward. The wall scrapes against my knuckles as she presses back against it, head thrown back, exposing the vulnerable line of her throat.
“That’s it, Willow.” The words ghost across her damp skin as I finger fuck her harder. “Let go for me.”
Her eyes find mine. Then they flutter closed as her body goes taut as piano wire. The pulse beneath my thumb skips, races. A sound tears from her throat, half my name, half surrender. I feel each wave as it crashes through her, each tremor that follows.
I don’t stop until her thighs begin to shake, until sweat gleams along her hairline. Only then do I withdraw my hand and pull her against me, capturing her broken exhales with my mouth.
She melts against me, but the hunger hasn’t subsided. I press her back against the wall, harder this time. My fingers fumble with my jeans, metal button cool against overheated skin as they drop to the floor. The way she watches my hands, lower lip caught between her teeth, then pushes her pants down until she’s more than half-naked for me.
“I’m gonna fuck you now,” I breathe against her mouth. “And I’m not going slow.”
She’s already nodding, fingers splayed across my chest, thighs parting. Her breath catches when I press forward, the slickness of her earlier release guiding me.
One thrust and the office dissolves into fragments. The space between us vanishes. Her heat surrounds me completely, muscles tensing and releasing around me in waves that match the intensity of her breathing.
“Fucking hell, Gabe,” she grunts. “That feels so fucking good.”
I withdraw almost completely before driving forward again. Her head knocks back against the wall, exposing the mark I left earlier, darkening now against pale skin.
She rises to meet each movement. Sweat pools at the base of my spine, drips from my temple onto her collarbone. Her lips part, forming words without sound.
“Look at you,” I manage.
The muscles in my thighs burn. The pressure builds at the base of my spine, coiling tighter with each thrust.
Her body telegraphs the approaching edge. Eyelids fluttering, breath shortening, inner muscles clenching around me in a pattern as familiar now as my own heartbeat. I capture her mouth, swallowing the sounds she makes.
“Again?” The question vibrates against her lips.
Her answer comes in the arch of her spine, the stutter of her hips against mine. “Yes…”
The single syllable breaks as she contracts around me, trembling from sternum to knee. The sight of her undoing shatters my control. Release tears through me, as fast as lightning splitting a tree, sudden and devastating.
We collapse against the wall, her pulse visible at her throat, matching the hammer of my own heart. Sweat cools on our skin.
I press my lips to her forehead, tasting salt, breathing in the scent of her shampoo beneath the musk of sex. My fingers tremble against her spine. When she shifts to look up at me, her eyes hold something I’ve never seen before.
Her, in a way that she doesn’t normally let herself be seen.
TWENTY-FIVE
Willow
That was insane.
That’s the first coherent thought I have as I try to remember how breathing works.
I know I’ve been crazier in this house, but that… it seemed to come out of nowhere.
I stare at the ceiling in Gabe’s office, my pulse still refusing to settle, my body vibrating in a way that feels equal parts terrifying and addictive. My shirt is somewhere on the floor. My hair is definitely ruined. My entire life is some strange fever dream of a mess now.
Gabe is beside me. He looks like that after something intense, like he’s filing it away, analyzing it, trying to understand it instead of just feeling it.