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When she’d thought Zaxx had no birthday gift for her, Gia had felt relieved—but maybe it would be more accurate to say that she’d told herself she was relieved. They were one week into an actual relationship, nearly two months after a one-night stand. Rationally speaking, it was too early for a romantic gift of any magnitude, but nothing else would have seemed right, either.
Now, though, coming on the heels of that bizarrely intense, shatteringly romantic moment by the door, Gia’s heart throbbed as she took the box from him.
She held it, watching the light play in the pattern of the paper.
“You know,” Zaxx said softly, a teasing smile on his face and in his tone, “there’s actually something under the paper, inside the box.”
Playing into the mood, Gia made her eyes wide. “Really? Oh, you shouldn’t have. This right here is all the present I need.”
When he made to take the box from her, Gia snatched it back. Then she ripped the paper off and tossed it away. Lifting the lid, she found a silver bracelet bedded on a puff of black satin. It was a cuff bracelet, with a large oval stone, deep blue. She took it from the box and found an image etched into the stone: a nearly inverted Y, with six tiny, sparkling stones. A constellation in a dark night sky.
“Cancer,” Zaxx murmured, “but not a sea bug or anything people would make raunchy. Just stars in the sky.”
He’d told her he’d grown up with astrology like a religion in his family but he didn’t believe in it now. His love was in the stars themselves.
This bracelet was everything: it was beautiful, it was her taste, it recalled an intimate moment between them. It also filled a small gap in her identity, that almost-but-not-quite insignificant frustration of not being able to participate in the childhood ritual of cheap keychains, plastic license plates, novelty mugs branded with her zodiac. She’d drawn the short straw there and had never had any cheap gizmo of her stupid star sign.
She’d felt the same occasional frustration with her name. As much as she loved it, Gia was not a name one found on rickety spinners in tourist-trap shops. Neither was Zaxx, for that matter. Something they shared.
Never before had a man given her a gift like this, so full of meaning and promise, so completely right.
A flood of words and feelings washed through Gia’s mind and body. Words and feelings she couldn’t let out; they were too big, too powerful, too caught in this moment. They clamored on her tongue, beat against the backs of her teeth.
Before they broke through, Gia hooked the cuff over her left wrist, pushed the box away, and slammed her mouth on Zaxx’s.
He grunted at the impact, then fell into the kiss with her. His tongue met and clashed with hers. They kissed with abandon, as if everything about sex could happen at this single point of joining. But it was more than that single point. His large, hot, rough hands slipped under her t-shirt, crossed her back, and hooked around her sides. She slipped her hands into his hair and twisted her fingers into fists.
It wasn’t enough. She needed all of him. No more waiting. Peeling one eye open, Gia shot a glance toward the windows and saw the shades were drawn. Thank fuck. She shifted on his lap, trying to straddle him, ignoring the irritating pinch and pull of stitches in her thigh. She did not care if they broke.
Zaxx wasn’t so lost to lust he let that by. His hands dropped at once and caught her hips, and he ducked out of the wild dance of their mouths.
“Your leg,” he gasped. “We can’t.”
“I don’t care,” Gia insisted, seeking his mouth again.
He dodged her. “I do. I won’t do anything to hurt you.”
He already had hurt her, back in May, but Gia kicked that stupid thought away. Past was past, and this present was perfect.
But he had a point—it was more than whether she cared if she had more pain. It was also his guilt if he was a party to causing that pain. Gia had gotten a crash course in guilt this summer, and she knew Zaxx had been laboring under a mountain of it himself—almost entirely undeserved, but that didn’t matter. He felt it, he struggled under its weight; it hurt him.
She wouldn’t push this point and give him more.
But fuck, she wanted him more intensely than she’d ever wanted a man. She felt more intensely, by orders of magnitude, than she’d ever felt for a man. She did not want to give this moment up.
All she could do was stare at him, into the blue depths of his eyes, and want.
He stared back, panting, his want etched on his face, a match to hers.
Then a smile flickered at one corner of his mouth. “Do you trust me?”
Gia nodded and said a word that carried a message from all the others she wasn’t ready to speak into existence. “Implicitly.”
That smile gained traction and took over his lips. Then he set her aside and stood up.
Before Gia could ask what was happening, he turned back to her and shrugged his kutte off. He folded it in half and hung it over the arm of the sofa. Then, facing her, saying nothing, he began to strip, starting with his Docs.
Whatever he had planned, Gia knew she was getting what she wanted. Grinning, she grabbed at the button of her shorts.
