“Talia—fuck?—”
I came down her throat with a roar, my hips jerking once, then again, while she stayed right there and took it, coughing around the last of it before pulling off slow and wrecked and shining with me.
Shit.
She looked up at me from her knees, mouth swollen, eyes dark, chest damp where her spit had run, and the sight of her like that did something dangerous to me. I was already gone enough to love it, already too deep to pretend this was only about heat.
For a second after, neither of us said anything. The board sat forgotten on the coffee table, the room thick with wine, skin, and sex, while she stayed there with her hair mussed, her lips fuller than before, and my self-control hanging on by a thread.
I reached down and thumbed the corner of her mouth, gathering the last slick trace of myself there before I helped her up.
She came easy, still catching her breath, and I kissed her softly that time.
Soft, but not innocent.
My taste was still on her mouth. Hers was still on mine. The kiss carried all of it between us, salt and heat and the filthy little truth of what we had just done. She made a quiet sound against my lips and kissed me back like she didn’t mind any of it. Like tasting herself on me and me on her only pulled her closer.
That got me somewhere deep.
Because it wasn’t just nasty. It was trust.
It was her letting me have that part of her and still standing in my arms afterward, soft and warm and unashamed.
I kissed her again, slower this time, soft enough to let her feel what sat underneath all the filth. Soft enough to remind both of us that I wasn’t just taking from her because she let me.
“You good?” I asked against her mouth.
She nodded, still breathing hard. “Mmhmm.”
I pulled her into me after that and let her stand there in my arms while both of us came back to ourselves.
She leaned her forehead to my chest and laughed once, low and wrecked. “You started all that over Scrabble.”
I kissed the top of her head. “You were talking reckless.”
“I was winning.”
“No, you were losing with confidence.”
That got another laugh out of her, and damn, even that did something to me because it was never just the sex with her. It was this too, her warmth in my arms, her laugh in my living room, the easy little silence after we had done something filthy enough to make lesser people awkward.
I looked down at her and knew I was already in deeper than I had planned for.
The bad part was, I liked it there.
twenty
. . .
On Tuesday morning,I was already irritated before coffee.
My period, now on day 2, was bearing down hard, my sleep had been disrespectful at best, and I had not slept next to my man the night before, which apparently had become enough to throw off my whole internal system.
That was information I did not appreciate learning about myself.
Kendra’s text came through while I was still in bed, one hand tucked under the pillow and the other pressed low against my stomach like I could negotiate with my uterus through pressure.
Kendra: You up?
