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I lock my eyes on his and sink down slowly.
It’s too much at first, a stretch that burns, and I stop, and he doesn’t move a single muscle. He just breathes with me, his thumbs drawing slow circles over my hips, his forehead tipped against mine, while the burn slowly loosens its grip.
I rise. I try again. And again.
Little by little, the ache melts into a fullness so deep it makes my eyes go wide.
“There you go,” he murmurs against my cheek. “You’re not apologizing for anything up here. Not one thing.”
He remembers. Of course he remembers.
His eyes drift shut. He bites his lip. A sheen of sweat breaks out across his chest, and I realize he’s holding himself back with everything he has.
For me.
Something about that undoes me more than anything else tonight.
I find a rhythm, clumsy and new, and he lets me have it. Then his hands guide me into a better one, slower and deeper, until every time I move, I feel it everywhere at once, and the soft scrape of his beard against my throat makes me gasp out loud.
“You feel fucking incredible,” he says against my mouth.
“So do you.”
It isn’t clever. I’m way past clever.
“Want to try something else?”
I nod.
He rolls us gently, tucks a pillow beneath my hips, and slides back inside me, and the sound that comes out of me is one I’ve never made in my life.
“Good?”
“Please don’t stop.”
He doesn’t.
He reads me the way he read me at the bar. Every sigh, every gasp, every shift of my hips, he catches all of it and answers before I can even ask, like my body is a language he’s fluent in and I’m only now learning to speak.
When the wave finally crests, it doesn’t feel like losing control.
It feels like taking it.
I cry out his name, except I don’t know his name, so it comes out as nothing at all, just a sound, and I fist the sheets, and I shatter.
Afterward, I reach for the duvet.
He catches my wrist.
“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t cover yourself. Not with me.”
I blush all the way to my hairline.
He looks extremely pleased about it.
“I haven’t been anyone’s first in a very long time,” he says, tracing a slow line down my spine. “That was exceptional.”
“You’re kind of a master at this.” I nudge his calf with my toes.
