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“Like what?”

He pulls back and looks at me in the dark. The nothing-face, except it isn’t anymore, hasn’t been for weeks — there’s more behind it and I can read it all now, every inch of it, and what I’m reading right now is that being seen does something to Theo Mercer he can’t put back in the box.

“Like tell you it matters,” he says, “that you were there.”

Oh.

There it is, in a Burlington Marriott at almost-two in the morning, the thing we don’t say. He says it to the dark, to the thin wall, to the version of me that only exists when I’m too tired to manage. My chest does the full complicated thing — the tight and the tender and the terrifying all at once. I cup his jaw in both hands and I kiss him before either of us can say anything else we can’t take back.

And then we stop talking for a while.

I keep waiting for the part where I step outside myself and start monitoring. That’s the old reflex — the part of me that stands off to the side during sex and keeps score, makes sure I’m doing it right, checks his face for feedback like I’m running a performance review. It used to happen every single time. Since Theo, it doesn’t. I don’t know what he did or how he did it and I’m not going to examine it too hard because I’m afraid I’ll break it. But here, in the dark, with him, I’m just — here. In my own body. In my own want.

He takes his time. He always does, like I’m the one thing in his schedule that doesn’t have a slot and he’s going to use every minute of it. His mouth goes down the side of my neck, my shoulder, the mark from the night before that’s gone tender and gold now, and when he touches it with his lips, I make a sound I feel in my whole spine.

“Still there,” he says. Not a question. Satisfied.

“Still there,” I confirm, and I feel him smile against my skin, and God help me, it’s the smile he never shows anyone, the one I’ve been collecting like evidence.

I get my hands on him. All of him — the ridiculous unfair architecture of him, all that hard-worked muscle and the tattoos running both arms that I know by touch now. I feel him breathe out long and slow, the decompression he only does here, like I’m the one room he doesn’t have to fill up with anything. And what gets me, every time, is the gap between who he is in the world and who he is in the dark with me. Out there, he’s six-foot-four of scowl and silence and don’t-try-me. In here, he says it matters that you were there and means it so hard he tries to swallow the sentence before it gets out.

Two completely different people. Both of them his. And I’m the only one who gets both.

His hands span my hips, reminding me just big his hands are, and it makes me feel delicate and small. His fingertips, rough and calloused, send a shiver down my spine, and then he’s lowering his head to suck a pebbled nipple into his mouth. I suck in an audible breath, my skin hot, my core clenching. God, this man drives me wild, even when he’s gentle. And he’s so, so, gentle. He leads me to the bed, and lays me down as if he’s afraid I’m going bolt at any moment, and I want nothing more than to assure him he has me, that I have no plans of leaving this room, this moment. The building could be on fire and I wouldn’t care because these stolen moments with Theo have become so vital. He moves his mouth to my other nipple and I dig my nails into his big, round shoulders, savoring the feel of him under my hands. Hard, hot flesh, and a body carved from a lifetime of being an athlete.

I pull him up to me, and he comes, sealing his mouth over mine as he settles between my parted thighs. His erection presses against my clit, and I whimper, body aflame with desire for him. Only him.

I slip a hand between us and wrap my hands around his hard length, pressing his cock to my wet entrance. My body is primed for him, and I feel the furious tempo of his heartbeat against my chest. When he pushes inside me slow and steady, it’s a whole conversation I don’t have words for — the full and the warmth and the there it is, the thing I’ve been carrying since I watched him play, finally having somewhere to land.

He drops his forehead to mine. Stays still a second, letting us both settle.

“Okay?” he asks, low, the way he always does, the one word he never skips.

“So okay,” I breathe. “Move.”

And the thing about Beau and Sloane being one wall away is that it should terrify me — and it does, it’s just that the terror and the want are occupying the same circuit, have been for weeks, and I’ve stopped being able to tell them apart. So I bury my face in his shoulder and keep my sounds low and interior. He’s got a hand over my mouth for a long, beautiful stretch in the middle of it, and I don’t care. I actively love the constraint. I love that we’re doing this in the reckless, stupid, wrong place, and neither of us stopped — because I have managed everything in my life since I was old enough to understand what management was, and I don’t want to manage this. I don’t want to be careful with it. I want it exactly as dangerous and alive as it is.

He takes me apart carefully and thoroughly and without hurry. His thrusts are slow and measured but so, so deep. And I love it. The way he reads my body, reads me, and gives me what I need before I even know I need it. He hooks my leg around his hip, and the change in angle is perfect. Nothing else exists outside the rhythm of our bodies, the way he fills me with ever slow thrust of his hips. When I finally go over it’s with my face pressed to his throat and his name gone voiceless on my breath. He follows me not long after — jaw locked, whole body tight and shaking — and then it’s just the two of us, wrecked, while the rest of the world sleeps.

For a long beat, nothing. Just our breathing, coming back down. His heart against my palm.

Something’s different. I notice it the way you notice a change in a room — not while it was happening but after, in the stillness that follows. Everything we’ve done in the last three weeks has been good, has been more than I signed up for, but this is a specific kind of present in my body I can’t account for. A warmth. A rawness. A —

Oh.

Oh no.

I do the accounting I should have done before the hand at my jaw and the slow deliberate kiss and the part where I lost my entire mind, and it comes up short in exactly one column.

We didn’t use a condom.

We have never, not once in any of the reckless circumstances we’ve manufactured, skipped the condom. And tonight neither of us reached for one. Neither of us even thought about it. That’s how far past careful we are. That’s how completely the arrangement has stopped meaning what it said.

I’m on the pill. Have been since I was sixteen, because my body has always had opinions about scheduling and I have always had opinions about control. So the risk is managed — technically, in the specific way I manage everything I’m afraid of. But the pill was a plan I made before him, for a life I was living before him, and lying here in this hotel room realizing he’s the first person I’ve ever simply forgotten to be careful with —

That’s not nothing. That’s actually quite a lot.

I press my face into his throat and I don’t say anything. I’m on the pill. We’re fine. This is fine.