Every movement deliberate. I fill the quiet with the sound of my own breathing, until I realize, distantly, it’s not just me. He’s making these low, rumbling noises in response to every way my body shifts and responds to him.
When he slides two fingers inside, I arch helplessly. The fingers on his other hand start to flick my clit as the fingers inside hit a spot that turns my brain completely off. All I can do now is feel.
“Oh,” I hear myself say, and more noises I didn’t know I could make. This feels good. So damn good. I didn’t know it waspossible to feel this good. He watches my face for every reaction and responds accordingly.
After I orgasm hard against his hands, he waits until I’m done trembling and then, only then, does he push into me, kissing me through it as I tense and then melt, my hands holding hard onto the bars of the headboard. He never stops looking at my face.
It hurts at first, he’s bigger than I’ve ever had, but not as much as I expected, and it only matters for a moment before the ache shifts into a keening kind of pleasure, folding in on itself, getting sharper and sharper. It’s building inside and although it’s never happened before, I know I’m about to orgasm for a second time.
“How are you doing?” he asks.
I bite my lip hard and say, “More. Please. Don’t stop.”
And when I say please another time, he shudders, and starts moving, and my whole world narrows to the pressure, the way we fit together, and the way his hands are so big, and the way he kisses me when he can’t help it anymore.
We move hard and fast, like we’ll run out of time or air if we stop. I come hard, sudden, not pretty at all, and he follows after, gentle and raw at the same time, breathing my name against my cheek.
Later, after, I'm against his chest and he's doing the thing with his hand stroking my hair, steady and slow, and I'm thinking about approximately nothing which is a condition I can't usually achieve and am enjoying immensely.
"You're quiet," he says.
"You've rendered me quiet. Take the compliment."
The low laugh. Right under my ear. The best version of it.
"The cabin has two bedrooms," he says, after a moment. “I thought it was one, but it is in fact, two.”
I laugh. Actually laugh, into his chest, a full genuine laugh because of course. Of course he circles back to the practical thing.
"Is that relevant right now?"
"The second one could be your office."
"Anthony."
"Good light in the mornings. South-facing window."
"You're really doing this."
"I've been thinking about it," he says simply, like this is a reasonable thing to say while my head is on his chest after he’s brought me to two orgasms in under twenty minutes. "I wanted you to have your own space. Your own work. This isn't me asking you to fit inside my life, it's me making sure there's room for yours."
Oh.
All of it at once, the south-facing window and the fiber internet and two bedrooms so I have my own space and him lying here in the firelight thinking about how to keep me whole. Not asking me to rearrange myself. Not asking me to move in with him. Giving me the space and time for us to grow our relationship naturally. Having an escape if I need one. Although, I know I won’t.
"Say yes," he says, quietly.
Not to the cabin specifically. To all of it. To the whole shape of what we're building, piece by piece, from a mountain road and an injured elk and two trucks that were always going to the same place.
"Yes," I say.
His arms pull tight around me once before relaxing and resting over me.
I fall asleep to the steady sound of a heart that has become, in the space of one improbable week, the most familiar thing I know.
CHAPTER 10
The grand opening of the Evergreen Resort is everything Holly planned and more. Everything we’ve seen her do over the last week came together perfectly. The practice and the soft launches had shown her all the places she could improve, and she took all our suggestions and ran with them.
