He pressed his face to her hip and breathed her in. “Fuck, I missed you. Don’t leave without telling me again.”
A tremble raced through her thighs. “Mm, I don’t know. If this is my punishment, I think I’ll start doing it daily.”
“You drive me crazy, Tink.” He nipped the skin of her hip, then slid up her body and braced himself with a forearm on either side of her head.
She reached down and grabbed his cock. “Oh, I haven’t even started…” Her thumb rolled lazily across his head, slicking his pre-come everywhere.
He growled and rolled her over, face down, and she made a satisfied noise in her throat as he pulled her hips up. He lined up behind her, bracing a hand under her hips, and entered in one slow, careful push. The fit was almost painfully tight, and it took every ounce of discipline not to fuck her into the mattress in one go. He wanted this to last; he needed her to know he could still be gentle, even when every cell in his body wanted the opposite.
He started slow, fighting through the urge to go feral, but she rocked back into him, taking him deeper. She met every stroke, harder, rougher, until her knuckles whitened on the blanket and the slap of their bodies drowned out everything else.
He bent over her and pressed his mouth to her ear. “I don’t want to hurt you. You have to tell me?—”
She jerked her head back and bit his bicep hard enough to leave a mark. “I want it. I want all of it, you dumb fuck. I am not breakable?—”
He lost the rest of her sentence to the sound she made when he clamped both hands around her hips and let loose. He pounded into her, and she took it, reveled in it, her voice echoingin the room. She got her arm twisted back far enough to snake a hand between her legs and finished herself off, thrashing under him. Her second orgasm set him off, and he emptied into her, groaning her name.
He collapsed half on top of her, careful not to crush her outright, every muscle in his body singing with the relief and the violence and the rightness of it. He ran his nose up the side of her neck and just breathed her in.
“Jesus,” she said eventually, voice muffled in the pillow. “You really are a Grizzly Bear.”
He laughed, feeling loose and light for the first time in months. “Never stop calling me those stupid nicknames.”
“Only if you stop calling me Tink.”
“No deal.”
She rolled under him and yanked him down for a kiss. This one was softer, slower, her hands gentle in his hair.
She nipped his lower lip, then let her head fall back, face naked with happiness. He tucked her in close, pulled the blankets over them, and just lay there, holding her, until her breathing evened out and she started drifting.
He watched her fall asleep and let himself believe, for one night, that maybe some people really did get a second chance at this.
At some point, they got out of bed to get water and feed the dogs. She made sandwiches, and they ate them at the kitchen counter, bare-assed except for his flannel over her shoulders, and then she pulled him back upstairs and rode him until he saw god.
There was no graceful way for a man his size to collapse on a bed with a smaller woman without threatening to snap her spine, but Greta just wrapped herself around him and held on like she was never letting go.
When dawn came, it spilled in, gray and rainy, through the window.
“No,” she groaned and buried her face against his chest. “Not yet.”
He shifted his weight to draw her closer, but then froze at the sight of the dark finger-shaped bruises at her hips, the constellation of reds and blues along her waist, the crescent bites at her shoulder, the band of abrasion at the inside of her forearm, right where he’d pressed her hands down.
He pulled his hand back like he’d touched a stovetop.
Shit. No. No, no, no?—
He rolled off the mattress, the floor cold under his feet. His heart went hot and wild behind his ribs. He tried to breathe quietly so he didn’t wake her, but she was already shifting, eyes open in a slit.
“What are you doing?”
He stared at her hip. The bruises there. His own fingerprints, clear as any evidence photo, and backed up until his back hit the wall.
The rain came down on the window in long, uneven waves.
He’d always been so careful with his strength, but then she’d been there with her hands and her mouth and her voice in his ear, sayingdon’t hold backand he had listened to her, and this was the result.
Bruises all over her in the shape of his hands.
