"I've got you." His thumb moved and I gasped. "Stay with me. Right there."
I was shaking. My whole body, trembling at the edges, right on the verge of something enormous.
"Look at me," he said.
I looked at him.
Big mistake. The best mistake. His eyes dark and certain and completely present, no ghosts in them, nothing but me, and I felt that as much as I felt his hands.
"There she is," he murmured. "Come on, beautiful. Let go."
It broke like a wave — long and rolling, my back arching clean off the mattress, his name torn out of me. Forrest didn't stop, didn't slow down, kept moving through every second of it, his breath ragged against my throat, his control fraying at the edges.
"Willa." Wrecked. My name completely wrecked in his mouth.
"Yes," I breathed. "Yes, please, I want—give me?—"
He buried himself deep and shuddered, a groan low in his chest that I felt everywhere, his whole body shaking with it, his arms tight around me like I was the only solid thing.
We stayed like that for a long moment.
His weight on me. My arms around him. Both of us breathing like we'd run somewhere.
Outside, the creek. The goats. The Hill Country dark and soft around the cottage.
He pressed his face into my neck.
I turned my face into his hair.
Neither of us said anything for a long time and it was the best silence I'd ever been in — full and warm and completely still, the kind that didn't need anything added to it.
Eventually he lifted his head and looked at me.
I looked back.
His hair was a mess…his eyes were soft. He had a red mark on his shoulder that I realized even in the dim light was from where I must’vebitten him.
And it made me laugh.
He laughed too.
“That good, huh?” he asked.
I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “Actually. Yeah…yeah, it was that good.”
He pressed his lips to my temple, my cheekbone, the corner of my mouth — not hungry anymore, just present, just warm, like he was learning the map of me now that he had time.
I let him.
"You okay?" he asked, against my jaw.
"Yes." I meant it completely. "Are you?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"Yeah," he said. Like it surprised him a little. "I really am."
I turned my face toward him and he kissed me properly, slow and unhurried, and I felt the last of the tension go out of my shoulders — tension I'd been carrying so long I'd stopped noticing it.
