She's milking me, pulling every drop from me. And it's too much. Too intense. Too consuming. I can't think. Can't breathe.
"Fuck, Lily." My voice cracks with the strain. "You're taking it all, aren't you? Every goddamn bit of me."
"I can't stop," I confess, the words torn from somewhere primal. "I can't stop filling you."
My vision blurs, my ears ringing, but I can't stop fucking into her body, needing to spill my cum and my soul into her at the same time.
She doesn't let go for a second, happily taking me and holding me, inside and out, until the storm raging subsides.
Sometimes I think I have actually lost it for real. I must have, what else can explain this need for another person like this?
I feel utterly vulnerable, stripped bare in the aftermath, but with her trembling in my arms, it doesn't scare me. And as our bodies slow, spent and shaking, I hold her closer.
She is mine. Only mine. Only mine.
"Hi," she whispers.
I smile against her neck. "Hi."
She pulls back enough to see my face and pushes my hair off my forehead with gentle fingers. "You never have to hold back with me."
"I'm not." I brush her hair out of her face, my hands tired but determined. "I won't."
"I love how you make me feel." She's still whispering, her voice wondering. "You call me your slut and I feel free."
She keeps caressing my hair as I caress hers, both of us touching each other like we're making sure the other is still real.
"You call me your whore and I feel cherished."
I drink in her face, every freckle and every eyelash, memorizing her the way I've been for months.
"Is that fucked up?" she asks, almost shy.
I kiss her as an answer. I kiss her over and over, anywhere I can reach, her forehead and her cheeks and her eyelids and the corner of her mouth, because I am feeling too much and if I don't shut her up, I will ruin it.
Because she doesn't deserve my ruin. She deserves the world.
27
LILY
Fall arrives in Harbor Hill, the trees turn gold and rust along the roads. Erin's shop windows shift from summer wildflowers to autumn arrangements. The air smells like salt and woodsmoke, that particular October scent that means the season is settling in for good.
I've been here eight months now. I've built something here that I love fiercely, something that feels more like home than anywhere I've ever lived.
For me and Callahan, it's been four months of locked doors and late nights and secret trips to cities where no one knows us. Four months of falling asleep in hotel rooms with his arm heavy across my waist and waking up to room service and his face on the pillow next to mine, instead of alone.
He's come with me to every med school interview. Stanford, for one, required lying to his father about a fishing trip,Zuri covering for us without asking questions, because Zuri is the kind of friend who knows when not to ask.
There are no more interviews. No more reasons to travel together. The clock I've been ignoring, the one that's been ticking quietly in the background of every stolen night and secret morning, will become impossible to avoid.
I went to Chicago alone last week. It was getting too obvious otherwise, too many trips, too many coincidences, too many times Rome almost caught us in a lie we couldn't explain away. So I went alone, and I told myself it would be fine. Three days. I could handle three days.
The trip itself was fine. The friends were fine. The dinners, the city, the interview. All fine. I was the disaster.
We've spent every free second on the phone. Texting him from cabs, calling him at midnight from a hotel stairwell because I missed his voice and couldn't wait until morning.
He sent me pictures of his day, so many snapshots, each of them captioned something about me.
