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The spaces inside my brain are filled with dust and fear and
I never wanted you to see that. To know me as that girl.
I always wanted you to just see me
p. love. (Your Love)
As I am. The girl who likes to swim and lets you wind your fingers into her hair until we are just one string tangled forever
That is to say, I love
I love you. I love you.
“It’s . . .” I suddenly stammer, heart pounding the longer he takes, the more I track his gaze roving across my words. “I wrote it. For you. Is that so weird?”
His brow furrows and his eyes rise to mine reluctantly, like he’s angry he has to look away from my heart on that paper.
“Every poem I’ve ever written has been about you,” he says, almost exasperated. His breath saws out of him again. “You . . . you wrote a poem for me?”
“I just . . . I needed you to know. To understand—”
His body covers mine, pushing me against the soft pile of blankets. His palm braces the back of my head as he lays me flat so rapidly, I forget to breathe.
Bennett’s hands make quick work of my clothes, an edge of roughness to his usual calm demeanor. His eyes are wholly black, chest rising and falling rapidly above me. I pull at his buttoned-up flannel until he nearly rips it off, shoving down his pants and underwear and tearing open a condom with his teeth—a fierce intensity I’ve never seen in him. Like he’s unraveling before my eyes, nearly feral with desperation. For me.
“You write poems about me?” I ask, brain fuzzy with lust and want—but the words stick.
He thrusts into me, my entire body bowing to his strength, spine arching as he catches my waist and keeps me suspended.
“You’re the only thing in my head,” he whispers, eyes feral as they take stock of my body, the dips and curves and shadows. “I have to write about you.” A kiss to my mouth, almost too harsh, too frantic. “I’d never written a poem of my own until I met you. I didn’t think I could—and then, you.”
His fingers dig into my skin, holding me still as he thrusts hard into me again. A loud whine bursts from my lips.
“Your hair in my fingers like silk,” he says. “Let me inside of you—your mouth, your body”—he juts his hips forward, before bowing over me to kiss my temple and touch my hair—“your brain, your heart.”
He’s writing poetry with my body, his own like a pen and mine the paper. I can feel my walls tightening around him, fingernails gripping into the mass of his biceps as I struggle to hold on while falling over the precipice of pleasure.
“‘Bite down on my shoulder again and let me show you,’” he growls into the skin of my neck, fucking me harder and my teeth lance his skin as I come; my words from his mouth.
Bennett flips me over in his grip, settling my knees against the cushioned pallet beneath us as he takes me from behind, covering my entire body with his bulk. He moves my hair and kisses the back of my neck.
His hips stutter, fast and slow, then give one last deep thrust as he comes and groans into my shoulder, his lips soft—before the slight sting of a bite that makes me squeeze him again.
“I love you,” he mutters, repeated like a mantra into my hair as his fingers weave around the strands. “Your mouth. Your voice. Your hair.”
“Bennett,” I moan, my body boneless, like a heap only he’s holding up.
“Slip me into your brain,” he says, his hands circling my ribs, cradling my body like an offering as he keeps his hips flush to my ass, dipping his head to kiss the center of my back so reverently. It’s like being worshipped. “Keep me forever.”
I want to.
Chapter 48
THEN: Freshman Year, December
Bennett
I stare over the papers again, fingers ghosting across the pages where my black ink markings are—her messier ones just across on the next page. Like a living metaphor of the poems.
