It doesn’t feel like I’m not good enough.
I think for the first time since I cracked my stupid head three years ago, I feel a bit like me.
My lips on hers, tongue sweeping across the seam, looking for permission before she meets it. Hands tangling and tugging in the hair at the nape of her neck.
Sloan, perfect the way she’s always been perfect, every single swell and angle exactly the right shape and size to fit against me.
Her fingers, curling into the cotton of my T-shirt before her hands scramble across my back, nails digging into my shoulders.
A tiny moan into my mouth, and I’m done for.
She doesn’t feel like this person carrying around all this heavy baggage I saddled her with when I pick her up. Her legs wrap around my waist instinctually, and she might as well be weightless, actually.
We’re probably floating above this boat. In the stars, where we were definitely written for each other.
My hands leave bruises on her thighs, and hers tug sharply at my hair.
I kick the bathroom door closed behind us, and I kick the door to her room open, too.
I think the view of the ocean looks beautiful, but it’s not really anything compared to her.
Not when I lay her down on the bed, unmade sheets swirling around her, and the last inches of sunlight drenching her skin.
“I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen,” I tell her, lips still against hers.
Sloan says nothing, but I think her mouth shifts, maybe into a smile, right when I start to move mine along her jaw.
My teeth find the lobe of her ear, tugging gently three times, my cock throbbing against my shorts with each one. “These ears? The ones that you use to listen and learn and take in so much about the world around you? That find somethinginteresting and something wonderful in everything? So fucking perfect. So fucking enough.”
Her hands find my shoulders, her breath catches in her throat.
I move down her jaw again, over the lines of her neck, to the crook of her shoulders, dragging my tongue across her skin. “Flawless skin on flawless shoulders that might be the strongest part of you because they carry so much more than they have to. But they never collapse, even when you feel like they do.”
Her back arches, chest straining against the lace of her bra, and I press my lips across the whirling edges, all the way to the curve of her left breast, teeth grazing her. “Your heart? Don’t even get me fucking started.”
I spend some time up there—thumb stroking her through the lace, brushing over each perfect, peaked nipple until she starts with the breathy moans, her hips shifting under me.
She gets a bit impatient when my hands grip her waist, thumbs stroking upwards across her skin in these tiny, gentle sweeps I know she likes.
I could spend all day—the rest of my days, actually—just like this, mapping her body with my tongue, but there’s a lot I need to tell her.
“Here? Where all these things that keep you alive live?” I move down her stomach, resting my chin right above the lace of her underwear, tongue swirling across the band before I flick my eyes up. She’s propped up on her elbows, hair tumbling across her shoulders, a flush on her cheeks. She blinks at me, and I say quietly, “Where I hoped a piece of me would live one day? This body? The home you’d give a baby? Perfect. Dokonalá. Very, very, very much enough.”
A sharp inhale. Her eyes shift to cerulean, and I know she’s trying not to cry.
“Ty jsi dokonalá,” I whisper, brushing my mouth along the edges of the lace again before, very regrettably, leaving the spotso close to between her legs and propping myself up on the pillow beside her.
“I don’t know that one,” Sloan says softly.
“I won’t make you guess.” I give her a smile, half rueful, half sad. “You’re perfect.”
A furrow puckers her brow and she shakes her head. “It’s weird because I don’t feel ... perfect or anything close to it, really, most days. And that’s by and large because of my brain, but it’s also—”
“Because of me.” I don’t let her finish, partly because I’m selfish and I don’t think I could take hearing it from her. Not right now, not when I’m this close to her for the first time in over a year.
But mostly because I want her to know—I’m keenly aware every second of every minute of every hour of every day what I did.
“Yes.” She sniffs, but then her face softens. “But right now, with you touching me, I feel about as close to it as a human being could possibly be.”
