"Move."
He swallowed, then did as I asked.
He moved slow. Torturously, devastatingly slow.
Like he had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it.
I was used to fast. Fast was safe. Fast didn't leave room for eye contact or the kind of quiet that made you say things you couldn't take back. Fast meant bodies, not people.
This wasn't fast.
Brody rolled his hips in a steady, deep rhythm that had me feeling every single inch of him, and I couldn't look away from his face. Couldn't find the exit. Every time I tried to tip my head back, break the circuit, his hand came up and cradled my jaw like I was something worth holding onto.
"Stay with me," he murmured.
Damn him.
"I'm here," I said. Barely.
"No." His hips rolled forward and I gasped. "Staywithme."
I understood the difference. I hated that I understood the difference.
My fingers curled into the warm skin of his back and I pulled him closer because it was the only response I had. He pressed his forehead to mine and kept moving, kept that slow, wrecking-ball pace that was doing something to me I had no framework for.
Sex had always been something I didtopeople. Something I controlled from start to finish, kept at arm's length even when there was no arm's length to be had. I choreographed it. Directed it. Walked away from it clean.
There was nothing clean about this.
"Brody—"
"I've got you." He said it like a fact. Like it wasn't even a question.
I turned my face into his throat so he couldn't see my expression. He let me. His hand slid into my hair, not directing, justholding. His lips brushed my temple and I squeezed my eyes shut.
My body seemed to have already signed a contract my brain hadn't approved, because I was arching into him, meeting every slow thrust, pulling him closer when the smart thing—theCalvinthing—would have been to create distance. To perform. To be theviperand not whoever the hell this soft, trembling woman underneath him was.
He shifted the angle slightly and I bit down on his shoulder to keep from saying something I couldn't take back.
"There," he breathed. "Yeah, baby, right there."
The endearment landed somewhere tender and I absolutely refused to examine that.
"More," I managed. "I need?—"
"I know." And boy, did he. He knew without me finishing the sentence, without me explaining or directing or performing. His hand slid between us and his thumb found my clit and I stopped being able to think in full sentences.
Just sensation. Just him. Just this gutting, gorgeous thing happening in the half-dark of a house he'd bought for someone else.
The orgasm that crested was nothing like the others. It didn't crash—itopened. Like a door I'd been pressing my whole body against finally swinging wide. I gasped his name against his shoulder, hands gripping him hard enough to bruise, and he followed me over the edge with a wrecked sound against my neck that I felt in my spine.
For a long moment after, neither of us moved.
His weight pressed me into the tarp and the sweatshirt and the ratty towels, and I let it. His breathing was ragged against my throat. Mine wasn't any steadier.
Then, carefully, like I was made of something fragile—a theory I had always vehemently rejected—he rolled to his side and gathered me against his chest.
I should have made a joke. Should have stretched and reached for my shirt and started reestablishing the perimeter.
