“I’m not interested in a break,” he breathed, tilting his head back to look up at me. “I want you with me all the time, actually. I’d also like it if we were this close, always. Or even closer. Because…I don’t know, I still don’t feel close enough, Eleanor. With you, I always want more.”
“I think I want more, too,” I whispered because parts of my body were pulsing in ways I hadn’t felt in weeks.
“Mm,” he hummed, one of his hands sliding to my hip, possessive and all-encompassing. A finger hooked in the waistband of my bottoms, and the simple skin-to-skin contact was dizzying. “You can take it, you know. Whenever you’re ready, you can take anything from me.”
“Can I?” I breathed, feeling flushed and lightheaded.
Sully nodded and then let one of his legs fall, straightening it beneath me until I straddled only one of his thighs—thick and muscular and rubbing against my core as he used his grip to reposition me so I was perfectly in place.
My breath hitched at the jolts of pleasure. It startled me, so foreign after a month of feeling so betrayed by my body, so out of touch with it. But so, so good, too.
Sully’s eyes grew hooded, narrowing in on my mouth before flicking up to my gaze. And he must have been able to tell that I was panicking a little because he murmured, “It’s okay, El.”
I experimented with flexing my hips, grinding myself on his thigh, and when a whimper slipped out of me, Sully encouraged me to move faster, harder. His breaths fell from his lips in heavy pants as he watched me.
“I just want…just a little.” My words sounded strangled as I pressed closer to Sully, his heat. He hummed in approval, and I shivered from the vibrations, the sensations shooting through me. And then they grew stronger, and I— “Oh.”
“That’s it, baby,” he crooned, and the air grew thick, heady with vulnerable want. “Use me. Get off on me.Please.”
I was already so unbelievably close to doing that, on edge from the feel of Sully, his proximity, the swirl of his woodsy scent around me. Even though we were fully clothed, there was something so wicked and indecent about riding his thigh like this. The pleasure coiled in my gut until it was nearly unbearable, and when I moaned his name, Sully seemed to hang on every syllable.
“I’m right here,” he promised as I lost myself in the safeness of his body, his warmth. “Always here.”
When I collapsed into a shuddering mess against his chest, he groaned in a way that made me think that just my touch had pushed him over the edge, too. I reached up, cupping his sharp jawline and watching as his eyes fluttered shut, but only for a moment. “Always?”
“Yeah, El. Always is how I feel about you.” He turned his head to the side and pressed a kiss to my palm. “And I don’t see that ever changing.”
After breakfast the next morning, Sully and I got into his car and headed into the cities. It was a bright early autumn day, sunny but with that crisp, invigorating quality to the air.
The drive to Sully’s high-rise apartment didn’t take long. He lived close to Cream & Craft, which explained how he’d gotten there so quickly that night. And now that he’d confessed to having my location—well, it all made sense.
Things were starting to feel like they made sense again.
“Wow, this is…” Stepping inside Sully’s apartment, I took in the floor-to-ceiling windows and sparkling view of downtown Minneapolis. “Reallynice.”
“Thanks.” Sully rubbed the back of his neck before he becamea blur of motion, throwing dishes in his sink and kicking shoes out of the way, hiding them beneath the lower shelf of his entry table. “It’s, yeah—it’s…” He glanced around, making a face when he spotted the dirty towel draped over his boxy-looking couch. “Well, I left in a hurry the last time I was here.”
For a split second, I found it hard to breathe. The last time he was here, he’d just come home from spending the night at Maple Street. When I’d pushed him away, even though I’d most definitely needed him.
“I know,” I acknowledged softly, wandering past him into the living room. He didn’t have much as far as decor, but he did have a shelf of things he’d created, like a LEGO model of the Shire that I imagined him taking pictures of to send to Chloe when he finished. “I don’t care about the mess.”
I stopped by the windows, appreciating the view. The sun shone with a brilliant ferocity, like it knew that the occupants of the streets below only had a few more days of beautiful weather left before the tides turned and a long winter settled in. People milled around—young women carrying yoga mats, couples walking home from the farmer’s market.
Once upon a time, I thought that would be me. Sully and me. I thought that after college, if we decided to stay in Minnesota, we’d live in an apartment like this together. We’d go out for drinks with friends in the evening, catch matinees at the Guthrie ofThe Christmas Carolor something Shakespearean when we were feeling a touch sophisticated. I imagined us biking across the Stone Arch Bridge to grab a beer in Northeast.
When I turned, I caught Sully in the act of hastily snatching a stack of paper from a coffee table that was far too large for the space. Highlighters rolled off the smooth surface, banging on the hardwood flooring when they fell.
“What’s that?”
Sully tucked the papers beneath his arm, giving a tight shake of his head. “Nothing.”
But then a few of the papers fluttered out of his grasp,landing on the floor face up, and my stomach churned in ways I didn’t know how to describe.
Anticoagulant prophylaxis in pregnant women with a history of venous thromboembolism: A systematic reviewread the bold letters at the top, and I just sort of…stopped breathing as I stared at it. At all the words I couldn’t make out because they were suddenly blurry and the lines that were highlighted across the paper.
Bending down, Sully swept the papers back up. He sighed, seeming to know that I’d seen them. “I’d been doing some research.”
“You were doing research,” I repeated numbly.
