"That's — ambitious —"
He put his mouth on me and I stopped talking.
I stopped thinking. I stopped being anything except the place where his mouth was.
He was relentless. He found the rhythm that made my hips lift off the bed and he stayed there — patient, focused, his hands pinning my thighs open when I tried to close them because it was too much, too good, too everything. I fisted the sheets. I saidhis name. I said it again, louder, and he groaned against me, and the vibration of it sent me over the edge so hard my vision whited out.
He didn't stop.
He worked me through it and then — before my body had even finished shuddering — he shifted. Changed the angle. Added his fingers and curled them and found something inside me that made my back bow and a sound come out of me that I didn't recognize as my own voice.
"Again," he said. Not a question.
"I can't — I —"
"You can." His mouth and his hands working together, mercilessly coordinated, and he was right — I could. The second one built on the aftershocks of the first, sharper, deeper, and when it hit, I grabbed his hair hard enough to hurt, and he groaned — low, guttural,hungry— and pressed deeper.
I was still shaking when I pulled him up. Grabbed his face in both hands. Kissed him — tasting myself, not caring, wanting him closer, wanting everything.
"Inside me," I said against his mouth. "Now. Clay.Now."
He reached for his jeans on the floor. Wallet, foil packet. His hands were shaking. This man, who rode two-thousand-pound bulls for a living — his hands were shaking trying to open a condom wrapper because of me.
"Having trouble there, cowboy?"
"Shut up." But he was grinning. And his hands were still shaking.
When he pushed inside me, I wrapped both legs around him and pulled him deeper and we both swore at the same time and it would have been funny if it hadn't felt like the entire world narrowing to the place where our bodies met.
"God," he breathed. Forehead against mine. Eyes open. "Callie."
"Move."
He moved. And something in him let go — the patience, the restraint, all of it — gone. His hips drove into mine and I gasped and dug my nails into his back and he groaned and thrust harder and I met him beat for beat.
I bit his shoulder. He hissed and looked at me with those dark eyes.
"Do that again."
I did. His whole body jolted, and his face dropped to my neck.
"Fuck," he said. "Callie —fuck—"
He picked up the pace until the headboard was hitting the wall and I was crying out with every thrust and neither of us cared who heard.
He got his hand between us. Found the spot he'd already mapped with his tongue. Pressed. Circled. His hips still driving and his fingers working and his lips on my throat and I was drowning in sensation, overloaded, every nerve screaming —
"Stay with me," he whispered. Not a request about the night. A request about everything.
"I'm here," I said. "I'm right here."
The third time was different. It started in my spine and spread outward and I clenched around him and said his name — not quiet, not careful,loud— and watched his face come apart. He held my gaze and I held his and I saw the moment he lost himself — jaw clenched, tendons standing out in his neck, his whole body going rigid above me — and then he was there, my name, just my name, shuddering, and I held him through it with both arms locked around his back and tears running sideways into my hair.
Not sadness. Joy.
We lay tangled in my sheets. His arm was under my head. My leg was thrown over his. The lamp was still on, and neither of us moved to turn it off.
"So," he said. "That happened."
