He kissed me first. Slow. Teasing. His hand slid from my hip to the small of my back, pulled me against him until no space remained between us, warm skin on warm skin, the ocean filling the silence where words weren't needed.
I pulled his shirt over his head. He reached for mine but I caught his wrists, guided his hands back down, pulled it off myself. His eyes tracked every movement. In the faint starlight I watched his gaze move across my skin, and the hunger in it made my stomach tighten.
He already knew the map of me, and I knew his, and there was something devastating about being touched by someone who remembered everything. Yet he always took his time.
His obsessive attention became devotion when he touched me, every inch explored, his mouth finding the places that made me gasp and lingering there until I was gripping his hair and breathing his name.
His mouth found my throat. My shoulder. The inside of my wrist, where he pressed his lips against the pulse point and lingered until I felt my heartbeat against his mouth. He kissed the curve of my waist, the dip of my navel. His fingers traced the line of my hip while his mouth moved to the soft skin of my inner thigh, and I stopped breathing.
"You’re so responsive," he murmured against my stomach. His fingers traced the waistband of my shorts. "Every sound you make teaches me something."
"What does this one teach you?" I gasped as he bit gently at my hip bone.
"That I should do it again." He did. I made the sound again. He smiled against my skin and the feeling of that smile on my body was its own kind of undoing.
He pulled my shorts down slowly, his mouth following the fabric, pressing kisses along my thigh, behind my knee, the inside of my ankle. He was thorough in a way that should have felt careful but didn’t because there was hunger underneath the patience, barely leashed, and I could feel it in the way his hands gripped my thighs when he settled between them.
"Tell me what you want," he murmured. His breath warm against me. His gray eyes looking up from between my legs, dark in the starlight, pupils blown.
"You. All of you."
"Be specific."
I gasped, "Your mouth. Now. Please."
He gave me his mouth and the world dissolved. The stars above the tent blurred into streaks of white and I gripped the blanket with both hands and his name came out of me broken and desperate.
He groaned against me like the sound of my pleasure was feeding something in him that had been starving. He was relentless, learning me in real time, adjusting to every shift of my hips, every change in my breathing, finding the rhythm that made my legs shake and staying there, until I came apart against his mouth with a cry that carried out over the water.
He kissed his way back to me, up my hip bone, to the hollow between my breasts where he rested his forehead and breathed. My jaw. The corner of my mouth. Then my lips, full and deep, and I pulled him down against me because I needed his weight, needed to feel every part of him pressed into every part of me.
"Inside me," I whispered against his mouth. "I need you inside me."
He positioned himself between my thighs. Pushed forward slowly. The stretch, the fullness, the feeling of him filling me completely made my back arch and my nails dig into his shoulders and a sound tore out of both of us that the ocean swallowed.
He moved slowly at first. Long deep strokes that I felt in every nerve ending. The tent fabric glowed faintly with starlight and I could see his face above me, jaw clenched, eyes locked on mine, and the intensity of being watched while he was inside me was overwhelming in the best way. He saw everything. Everygasp. Every flutter of my eyelids. The tears that formed when he hit the place inside me that made the world go white.
"More," I breathed.
His hand gripped my hip. Shifted the angle. Deeper. I gasped, and his forehead dropped against mine, his breathing ragged, his control fraying at every edge. I wrapped my legs around him, pulled him closer, because there was no such thing as close enough. Not tonight. Not after everything.
His hand slid between us. Found me. Moved in time with his body, and the pressure built in waves that climbed higher with each one.
"Stay with me." His voice dropped, soft but threaded with something commanding underneath, something that sent a shiver straight down my spine. "Right here. Stay with me."
I couldn't have looked away if I'd wanted to. His gray eyes were almost black. His face was open and wrecked and beautiful and I let him see everything, the pleasure building in waves, the tears, the way my lips parted when I couldn’t hold it anymore.
"Come for me, Anna."
I shattered. The orgasm ripped through me in waves, my whole body clenching around him, and I kept my eyes on him because he’d asked me to. I watched his face while he watched mine and the intimacy of it was staggering. He followed me seconds later, his rhythm breaking, his forehead dropping against mine, my name on his lips like a confession he’d been holding for years.
We stayed tangled together. His face buried in my neck. My fingers drawing slow lines down his spine. The waves outside, the stars above, his heartbeat against mine, steady and unhurried, counting nothing, asking for nothing, just there.
After a while he rolled onto his back, pulling me with him so my head rested on his chest. I didn’t realize I was crying. Thetears slid down my face, onto his chest, and I could feel them pooling in the hollow of his collarbone.
He felt them. His hand moved from my hair to my face, tilting it up gently. His thumb brushed my cheek, and when I looked at him his gray eyes were clear, present, with nothing behind them but him.
"Hey," he said softly. "I like you happy. Not crying."
