Page 149 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

Ethan’s hands lock around my hips, holding me in place as if I might try to escape, but I have nowhere else to go. He’s made an anchor out of his palms, holding me down while the rest of me tries to vaporize.

And just when I think I might break apart, just when the sparks lining my nerves threaten combustion, his mouth lowers, his tongue flicks, and the air tunnels out of my lungs in a moan named only for him.

I come apart so hard, like my entire existence is buffering.

He stays with me through every seismic aftershock, holding me like a question he needs answered, and when I finally exhale, the room snaps back into definition, every edge sharp, every surface humming with the violence of what just happened.

He waits another beat before releasing me, but not before kissing the inside of my knee like a benediction, like he’s grateful. As if I’ve given him some kind of rare gift, when he just dissolved me and ate the evidence.

My hands find his hair, impossible to stop, and I drag him up, greedy for his mouth, for the taste of myself on his tongue, and he obliges, kisses me so deeply it’s obscene.

He’s hard under his jeans, and I see the cost of his restraint in the fine tension at his jaw, the little hiccup in his breathing.

“Fucking hell, Ethan. I want you now.”

There's no hesitation, no barrier, not even my dignity left to drag this out. I want to feel him, now, all the way to the bone. I reach for his fly with both hands, but I’m trembling, my own fingers stupid from aftershock and gratitude and need.

Ethan catches my wrists, pins them to the table, and kisses the crown of my head and my sticky forehead and then my mouth again, until I’m soft and whimpering, and only then does he let me go.

I fumble with his button, then zipper, and his laugh startles me. A joke we both know is on me, but I don’t care.

I want him.

I want him more than I want to breathe.

He steps between my knees, shoves his jeans down just far enough to free himself, and for a split, paralyzed second, I try to remember every permutation of what’s supposed to happen next:

How do you navigate the mechanics of this with a man this beautiful, merciless, impossible,oh, fuck…and my thought short-circuits and the world drops away so that the only thing in existence is Ethan, his hand, his cock, the table scraping under my back with every push.

The friction stretches time.

He’s thick and so fucking slow at first, like he doesn’t believe I can take it, even though at this point I’d take a battering ram if it got me there faster.

I grab at his shirt still clinging to his shoulders, nails dragging down his arms, feeling the muted stutter of muscle. He locks eyes with me, his face close enough that I can see the starburst pattern in his irises, the vulnerability stitched into the lines around his mouth.

The next thrust breaks us both. He gasps, I moan, and it’s as if the last membrane separating us from the rest of the world dissolves completely.

It’s janky and more frantic than I want to admit. I'm so unsure and so greedy, but he never looks away.

His face hovers right above mine, lips parted, brow pinched with that mixture of concentration and disbelief, and in the moment, I'm convinced that we are the only two people in the world who have ever fucked, have ever even tried to put two souls into such dangerous proximity.

My calves are hooked around his waist, toes digging into the small of his back, and each time he presses deeper I forget how to hold myself up, forget how to be the self-contained atom I’ve always been.

I start to say his name, but it comes out a strangled choke, and somewhere in the background a glass tips over and shatters, a miniature apocalypse blooming underneath us.

Neither of us moves to fix it. I’m not sure we can. The table rocks. The atmosphere is flooded with anticipation and static, and something only the two of us can breathe.

He shifts his angle, and it’s disastrous; my body’s so greedy for it that I buck up hard enough to stun even him.

His hands clamp my hips; I’m barely an object in his grasp, a science experiment, a live wire, an equation exploding mid-solution. Ethan’s mouth is on my collarbone, my jaw, my teeth, the desperate wet underside of my chin.

I can feel him smile, teeth scraping low, and then he’s pounding into me, and the friction is otherworldly; I feel every inch of him, every ridge and heat, and my body’s traitorously clutching, desperate for annihilation.

My head is flat on the table, hair spread everywhere, the world sideways. I see the overturned glass, the slow trickle of wine crawling across the floor, and I think that everything I am is leaking out too.

Ethan’s hand slips up the back of my neck, threading into my hair, bracing me as if he knows there’s no other way I’ll stay in this reality.

He’s losing it too. I can read it in the ragged edge of his breathing, the way his rhythm threatens to break apart completely.