It was different this time. The motel had been a marathon, as much as I’d tried to rush it. This was a sprint, all or nothing. His hands went behind my thighs and I climbed into his lap, because if I was doing this—and I was urgently doing this—it would be on top, with my eyes on the window and the battle before us.
“Still strictly business?” he asked against my throat.
“Shut up and?—”
“I know the speech.” He yanked my shirt over my head, mouth dropping to my collarbone, my breast, no patience in it today. His motel-room thoroughness traded for something hungrier and meaner that suited me just fine. The first static snap jumped from his lips to my skin, and my magic turned toward it like a sunflower toward light. “God, you’re empty,” he muttered. “So stubborn. You let it get this low out of spite?—”
“It wasn’t spite?—”
“It was spite. You’d rather black out than knock on my door twice in one week. But don’t worry, baby, I’ll fill you up.” I tugged his hair roughly, not to end the argument but to keep it going. He groaned, already on the same page.
Board shorts have one virtue—speed.
There was a scramble of laces and elastic and his hands bruising my hips as he yanked aside my swimsuit, and then I sank down onto him and the whole tower hummed. An old, sun-bleached rescue board rattled on the wall, thirty years of sand shivering out of the floorboards and rising around us in a slow, glittering haze. The magic nearly capsized me.
“Fuck, Selena?—”
“Quiet,” I breathed. Was it to him, the tower, or me? I wasn’t sure.
“You’re the one outshining the lighthouse.”
I glanced down. Gold to the wrists already, leaking light through the window slats.
He laced his fingers through mine—combat or tenderness, genuinely unclear; everything with him felt like both—and pinned our hands behind my back, arching me into him. He bit my nipple, hard.
“Let me bite you, baby.”
“You already did.” My thighs were burning, but it was what I craved, controlling where he hit inside me, grinding against him with every thrust.
“That was nothing. I mean a real bite.”
“That’s gonna leave a mark.”
He peered up at me, and the iris of his eyes had been swallowed by black.
“That’s the idea.”
“No way.”
He groaned, and the sand haze swirled tighter around us, his mouth finding my ear with that low, wrecked voice that wasn’t RipTide’s Chase, wasn’t El Tiburón.
“You can’t hide from me, baby. The line’s open, Selena. It’s open both ways?—”
“Stop talking?—”
“Make me.”
So I did. I rode him harder with the clock running and the light rising, chasing it viciously, like I usedto chase match point—with a feral hunger I’d folded up and put away for years.
His eyes rolled back, and he grabbed my hips, his fingers digging in as he lifted me up and down, perfect whimpers falling from his lips.
“You want it?”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk?”
“There are exceptions.”
He reached between us, his fingers pressing against my clit in perfect, rhythmic circles, synced with the thrust of his hips.
