“You know what.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
She looked at me. Flushed, breathing hard, her wrists still above her head even though I’d let go. “I want your mouth on me.”
I gave her my mouth. Slower this time — long, dragging strokes of my tongue, drawing out every sound she made. She was swollen and sensitive from the first time and she came faster, her thighs clamping tight around my head.
I didn’t let her come down. I was inside her before the aftershocks had finished, and she wrapped her legs around me and pulled me deeper.
“Don’t hold back,” she breathed.
I didn’t. I drove into her hard enough that the headboard knocked the wall, her nails raking down my back, Bea crying out with every thrust. I hauled her hips up, changing the angle, and she cried out louder. I held her there and didn’t stop until she shattered again, dragging me with her.
We lay in the wreckage of the sheets, sweat cooling, breathing ragged.
“We might have woken someone up,” I said.
“I don’t care.” She turned her head and looked at me. Her hair was a mess, her mascara was smudged, and she looked like the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. “Do you?”
“No.”
She settled back against my chest. I pulled the sheet up over us and held her.
?
I woke with Bea still in my bed. Her back against my chest, my arm across her waist, her breathing slow and even. I didn’t move. Didn’t want to break it. The room smelled like both of us — her shampoo, sex, sweat, the particular warmth of two people who’d spent the night finding their way back.
She stirred. Pressed back against me, still half-asleep. My body responded before my brain caught up — I was hard against the curve of her ass and she made a soft, sleepy sound and pressed back harder.
“Morning,” she murmured.
“Morning.” I kissed the back of her neck. The knob of her spine. The spot behind her ear.
She reached back and found me, her hand wrapping around my cock, stroking lazily. “You’re up.”
“You’re in my bed.”
“Fair point.” She guided me between her thighs, and I slid into her from behind — slow, easy, the morning version of what we’d been doing all night. She rocked back against me and I matched her rhythm, my hand finding her breast, her nipple hard under my palm.
This time was slow. No urgency, no desperation. Just the steady rocking of two bodies that knew each other, that hadspent the night remembering. I pressed my face into her hair and breathed her in. My hand slid down her stomach, between her legs, and I circled her clit in time with my thrusts.
She came quietly — a long, slow shudder, her hand gripping my forearm, a single breathless “oh” — and I followed her, my hips pressing deep, my arm tightening around her waist.
We lay there for a while. Not talking. Not needing to.
“Bea.”
“Mm.”
“You’re not going anywhere today.” Not a question. A statement.
She turned in my arms and looked at me. In the morning light her eyes were clear, and I could see everything in them — the fourteen months, the hurt, the careful rebuilding, and underneath all of it, still there, still stubborn — love, plain as anything.
“I’m not going anywhere, Holden. Not today. Not ever.”
“Yeah.” I pulled her closer. “That’s what I thought.”
She kissed me. Soft. No hurry, no question in it.
