I fucked her deeper, still careful but losing rhythm, my hips snapping forward. The pressure built fast and brutal. Every time her fingers brushed the base of my cock where we were joined, I saw stars.
“Come on my cock, baby,” I demanded, voice rough and filthy. “Want to feel this pussy come all over me.”
She came again with a loud, broken moan, her walls clamping down on me in rhythmic pulses. The feeling—her coming while touching herself, while I was buried inside her—was too much. I thrust through it, groaning her name, and followed her over the edge. I came so hard my vision whited out, pulsing deep inside her as pleasure ripped through me in heavy waves.
We stayed locked together, breathing the same air, my cock still twitching inside her as the last aftershocks rolled through us.
I don’t know how long we stood like that—her on the table, me between her legs, both of us breathing hard and not moving and not speaking. My hands were on her thighs, thumbs tracing absent circles on her skin. Her fingers were still tangled in the hair at the back of my neck.
The kitchen was quiet. A candle she’d left burning on the counter had melted down to a low pool of wax, throwing soft, uneven light across the ceiling. Through the window over the sink, the sky had gone fully dark.
I pressed my lips to her forehead. Her temple. The bridge of her nose. Slow and deliberate—committing every part of her to memory.
“You okay?”
My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. Low and rough and stripped of everything I usually kept in place.
She smiled against my jaw. “Better than okay.”
I pulled back to look at her, and whatever she saw in my face made her expression change—her eyes softened, her lips parted, and she looked at me like she was seeing something I didn’t usually let people see.
The hard edges I wore—at the fire scene, at the diner, at the cookout, on every call for the last fourteen years—were gone. I’d let them go. For her, I’d let them go.
“Stay,” she said. Different from the first time. Quieter. Steadier. Not a plea. An invitation.
I tucked a curl behind her ear. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I lifted her off the table and she wrapped her arms around my neck. I carried her the short distance to the bedroom. I pulled back the covers and laid her down and climbed in beside her and curved my body around hers, my chest against her back, my arm across her waist.
Her breathing slowed before mine did. I lay there listening to it—even and deep, the breathing of a woman who felt safe—and pressed my face into her hair and let the certainty of it sink in.
This wasn’t falling. I’d already fallen. Somewhere between the smoke and the curb and the diner and the cookout and the hallway where she’d fisted her hands in my shirt and saidstay—I’d landed. There was no version of my life that made sense without her in it.
I closed my eyes and let her breathing under my palm be the last thing I felt before I slept.
7
BRENNA
Iwoke up warm.
Not the surface warmth of blankets or sunlight or a room with good insulation. This was deeper—structural—the kind of warmth that came from another body pressed against yours through the night, radiating heat into your bones while you slept.
Gabriel’s arm was across my waist. Heavy, deliberate, his hand spread flat against my stomach like he’d anchored himself there in his sleep. His chest rose and fell against my back in a slow, steady rhythm, and his breath moved across the nape of my neck in soft intervals that made the fine hairs there stand up.
I didn’t move.
Not because I didn’t want to—I needed to use the bathroom and my left arm was tingling from being pinned at an awkward angle—but because the second I moved, this became something we had to talk about. The second I shifted and he woke up, last night would transition from something that had happened to something that was happening, and I wasn’t ready for that yet.
His T-shirt was twisted around my torso. I’d put it on at some point during the night—I remembered that vaguely, stumblingto the bathroom in the dark and grabbing it off the floor because the apartment was cold. It smelled like him. Not the smoke from the call—that had faded—but underneath it, something clean and warm. Soap, maybe. Or just skin. Just Gabriel.
The morning light was coming through the window above the bed, landing in a stripe across the sheets. I watched it move. Slow and steady, creeping toward his hand where it rested on my stomach, and I had the absurd thought that when the light reached his fingers, I’d have to face this.
His fingers twitched. Then his breathing changed—a deeper inhale, a pause, the slight tension of a body transitioning from sleep to consciousness. His hand pressed against my stomach, a reflex, like he was checking I was still there.
I was still there.
“Morning.” His voice was rough with sleep. Low and unhurried, vibrating against my spine.
