I thrust into her one last time, deep, deliberate, absolute, and the world reduces itself.
Everything narrows.
The dusty warmth of the room, the bench solid under my hands, Millie’s arms around my neck, her breath against my skin, and the slick, relentless grip of her body around mine, holding me there, pulling, a sensation so acute it registers somewhere behind my eyes as light.
My jaw locks.
My spine pulls taut.
Every muscle in my body draws in at once like a fist closing. For one suspended, dizzying second, everything is absolutely still, absolutely unbearable. I hang there at the edge of it with Millie’s name in my chest and her heartbeat against mine.
Then it breaks.
It hits low in my spine and rolls outward in steady waves, stripping away thought, intention, anything that isn’t her, right here, breathing against my throat. My hands grip her hard enough that she makes a soft noise. I bury my face in her hair and groan her name into it, nothing left of the control I walked in here with.
“Millie.”
She holds me through it, both arms locked around my shoulders, her lips pressed to the side of my neck, and she doesn’t say anything. She stays exactly where she is while thewaves move through me and slow, and finally, gradually, release their grip.
My breathing is ragged. My legs have opinions I am choosing to ignore. Her hair is against my face, and she smells like herself, and something that is already starting to smell like this place, like sawdust and old timber, and my chest is so full I don’t entirely trust myself to speak.
So, I don’t.
I press my mouth into her hair.
I keep both arms around her.
And I stand here in her bakery, in the room that doesn’t exist yet, holding the woman who is my whole life, and I ambreathless.
The pantry goes absolutely silent.
Both of us are trying to catch our breath.
Nothing else.
Then my knee connects with the shelving unit, and it rattles, as if it has been waiting all afternoon for the opportunity.
Millie makes a sound that starts somewhere between a gasp and a shriek and collapses entirely into laughter, the kind she can’t manage, the helpless kind, and I press my face into her hair and let out a rough sound that is somewhere between a laugh and a groan.
“That…” she says, when she can speak, “… was most definitely not OSHA-compliant.”
“This isn’t a workplace yet.”
“It is in my head, and you just got written up, sir.”
I cup her face in both hands and kiss her, unhurried and thorough. She sighs into it, holding my wrists, and the laughter drains out of both of us into something warmer.
Eventually, she slides down off the bench and puts herself back together with the kind of composure that suggests nothing just happened… even though we both know better.
I slide off the used condom and throw it into a cardboard box that already has some trash in it, then drag my shirt back on. I settle my cut across my shoulders, and she closes the distance without asking, straightening the collar, smoothing the leather with careful hands, her gaze lowered in concentration, and the intimacy of it catches me somewhere I can’t quite name.
“I cannot believe we just—” she starts.
“I can.”
She looks at me. Her eyes are bright. “You’re very smug for someone who nearly knocked over an entire shelving unit.”
“The shelving is fine.”
