Her mouth tightens. For a moment, she looks very young. Not childish. Just painfully new to this part of herself. New to pleasure, to pain, to wanting and admitting it.
Then she lifts her chin. “I wanted it to be you.”
Everything in me stops.
She says it like a challenge, like she’s daring me to turn it into something shameful.
I don’t.
I can’t.
My voice lowers. “Say that again.”
Her breathing changes. “I wanted it to be you.”
The words go through me harder than the sex did.
I reach for her face, then stop before touching her.
She notices. Her expression softens by a fraction. Then she takes my wrist and brings my hand to her cheek herself.
My thumb moves along her cheek before I can stop it.
There are many things I could say. Possessive things. Ugly things. The kind of things a man like me thinks when a woman tells him she chose him for the first time.
Instead, I lean in and kiss her.
Not like before. Not taking. Not proving.
Just my mouth on hers, slow and firm, because anything else would be too close to confession.
When I pull back, her eyes are wet, but no tears fall.
Good. She would hate that.
She looks at me for a long second, like she doesn’t know what to do with honesty when it comes from me.
Then she kisses me. Not shyly. Not like the woman who was nervous beneath me minutes ago. She kisses me with her armsaround my neck, her body warm in my arms, my shirt hanging loose around her.
“I want you inside me again,” she whispers against my mouth.
My hands tighten around her. “You’re sore.”
“I know.”
“You bled.”
“I know.”
Her mouth finds mine again, softer this time, but the softness doesn’t last. She bites my lower lip, and the sound that leaves me is enough to make her breath catch.
“I still want you,” she says.
That ends the argument.
Her body is tender now, but she’s wet again by the time my fingers find her clit. She grips my wrist, not to stop me, but to hold herself steady as I circle it slowly, coaxing the ache back into hunger. Her eyes close, and I kiss her throat, her jaw, the soft curve of her breast where my mouth left marks earlier.
When I push inside her again, she gasps and buries her face against my neck.
