He nods against my ribs. Once.
"Then come up here."
He comes up. Gold eyes in the half-light, his face two inches above mine, his thumb at my temple. He's trembling — the man is trembling above me, and I am the only thing keeping him together.
"Now," I say.
"You're sure."
"Now, Lex. I'm asking now."
He notches himself against me and pushes in, slow, inch by inch, and I feel every one of them — the stretch, the thick, relentless drag of him filling me after three years of no one. His forehead drops to mine. His eyes close. The breath leaves him in a shudder that sounds fifteen years long.
"Christ. Maeve."
"I know. I know. I know."
He holds there, buried to the hilt, not moving, until I lift my hips and take the last of him, and he makes a sound I'll remember when I'm old.
"Move."
"If I move I'm going to?—"
"I don't care. Move."
He moves. The first stroke is the kind that ruins people — the slow drag out, the deep drive back, the head of him hitting a place that pulls a cry out of me. He shudders. He kisses me like a man handed the one thing he'd stopped letting himself want. Again. The third stroke. The fourth.
"Faster, Lex. I'm not going to break."
"You might break me."
"Then break."
He fucks me harder, then — his hand hooking under my knee to lift it, open me, take me deeper — the bed moving under us, his mouth at my throat, the "yes" he keeps saying like a prayer, the "Maeve" that's stopped being a name. I feel the second one building where we're joined, tighter and hotter than the first, and he feels it too, because his rhythm goes ragged and his control starts to come apart in my hands.
Then a sentence. Hot. Into my hair. The whole of it.
"I have wanted this for three years."
My back arches off the bed.
And the world is finally perfect.
Chapter 15
Lex
Fifteen Years
She arches.
Her name is in my mouth, and her hand is fisted in my hair, and the world is finally what she said it was — not a metaphor. A place. The place I am buried inside, the place I have been waiting years to find, without knowing I was looking for it.
"Maeve."
"Don't stop."
She tightens around me, and I feel all of it — the slick, fierce clench of a woman whose body has decided to come and is doing it, gripping my cock in waves, dragging at me — and I lose the rhythm. I lose it because I felt this exact grip three years ago, her hand fisting my shoulder after the gala, and the memory and the live feel of her clamping around me land in the same heartbeat, and there is no version of me that survives both.
