The main street of Copper Creek, Texas, and his mouth on mine, and I didn't care who saw.
We made it to the cottage. Barely. His hands on me the whole walk — my waist, my hip, the small of my back — like he couldn't stop touching me, like his hands had made a decision his brain hadn't caught up with.
Inside. Door locked. And then everything slowed.
The urgency from the bathroom was gone. In its place was something quieter. He stood in my hallway and looked at me, and the grin faded into something else — something serious and open and stripped of all the charm.
"Come here," he said.
I went.
He undressed me in the hallway. Slow. The zipper he'd fought with at the bar — he found it on the first try this time, slid it down with one hand while the other traced my spine. The dress pooled at my feet and he looked at me in the lamplight from the living room and something crossed his face — raw, unguarded — and his eyes went dark.
"You're so beautiful," he said. Not performing. Not a line. The raw, unsteady voice of a man saying something he couldn't hold back. "You walk into a room, and I can't see anything else. You know that? There's just you."
He picked me up — not urgently, gently, my legs around his waist, my arms around his neck — and carried me to the bedroom and laid me down like I was something he'd been trusted with.
He kissed my forehead. My eyelids. The bridge of my nose. My mouth — slow and deep and thorough. He kissed my jaw and the hollow of my throat and the place where my pulse hammered, and I arched into him and whispered “please," and he said "I've got you,” and I believed him.
He undressed himself and stretched out beside me and pulled me against him skin to skin and the full-body contact — chest, stomach, thighs, every inch — made us both exhale like we'd been holding our breath for hours.
"I see you," he said against my collarbone. "All of you. The parts you show and the parts you hide and every single part in between." His lips trailed lower. "And I want all of them."
He took his time. Lips on my breast, my ribs, the dip of my waist. His hand between my thighs — not rushing, not teasing, just learning me with his fingers the way he'd learned everything else about me. Paying attention. Reading the catches in my breath. Adjusting. Coming back to the places that made my hips roll and my hands fist the sheets.
"Right there," I breathed. "Clay — right there —"
"I know." Low, against my hip. "I've got you."
He brought me to the edge slowly. Held me there. His fingers curling, his thumb circling, his breath hot on my stomach, until I was shaking and begging and saying things I'd never said to anyone — "please, don't stop, I need you, please" — and he whispered "let go, I'm right here" and I came apart with his name on my lips and his hand still moving, drawing it out, making it last until I was boneless and trembling and tears were sliding into my hair.
He moved over me. Pressed inside me slowly — inch by inch, watching my face, giving me time to adjust to the fullness of him. My hands found his back. His forehead dropped to mine.
"You feel —" He exhaled. Shaky. "Callie. You feel like coming home."
We moved together. Slow. His hips rolling into mine in long, deep strokes that hit places I didn't know I had. No urgency. No performance. Just his body and mine and the rhythm we found together — the one that felt like it had always been there, waiting for us to find it.
He said it against my skin while he moved. "You're everything." Hips rolling. "You're brave and fierce and kind, and you don't even know —" A thrust that made me gasp. "You don't even know what you do to me."
"Show me," I said.
He showed me. He hooked my leg over his hip and changed the angle and I cried out and grabbed the headboard and he groaned and pressed deeper — "there, stay with me, right there" — and I felt it building — enormous, inevitable, the kind that starts behind your ribs and radiates outward until your whole body is electric.
"Open your eyes," he said. "Look at me."
I opened my eyes. His face was inches from mine. His pupils blown. His arms shook with the effort of holding himself above me while he moved.
"I'm falling in love with you," he said. "I'm already there. I need you to know that."
I came. The orgasm hit like a wave, and I pulled him down and held on and said "me too, Clay, me too" and felt him shudder and follow and his face buried in my neck and my name — just my name — the only word left in him.
We lay tangled together. His fingers tracing my spine. My head on his chest. The room dark except for the streetlight through the curtains.
"Stay," I said.
"Darlin', I'm not going anywhere."
I fell asleep listening to his heartbeat and thinking that this was what it was supposed to feel like. This was what it was supposed to feel like all along.
