Page 119 of The Hollywood Switch-up

“Erika.” He stopped short, close enough to see the pulse jumping in her throat. “We don’t have to⁠—”

She kissed him before he could finish.

This kiss wasn't like the desperate, grief-soaked ones in his villa, the kind that tasted like tears.This one started slow. Her mouth found his and stayed there, and her fingers curled into his shirt and pulled him closer.

He let her lead. Her hands, her pace, her mouth mapping his jaw, his throat, the hollow below his ear. She kissed him like she was building a memory. This feels like a woman saying goodbye, a voice in him said. He told it to shut up.

“I want to be here.” She whispered it against his neck, her fingers finding his buttons, working them loose with unsteady hands. “Whatever happens—I chose this.”

Whatever happens. He filed the words away with the others.

His shirt fell. Her palms spread across his chest, warm and searching. Then she did something that stopped his heart. She pressed her hand flat over his sternum, fingers splayed, and held it there. Not moving. Just feeling his heartbeat. Counting it. And the look on her face—concentration, tenderness, a grief so raw he almost couldn’t breathe.

He covered her hand with his. Held it against his chest. Didn’t ask.

He reached for the tie of her robe and waited—his fingers on the silk, not pulling, just holding—until she nodded. The fabric slipped from her shoulders and pooled at her feet and she stood in front of him in nothing but moonlight and he felt the air leave his chest because she was thinner than she’d been, her collarbones sharp, the shadows deeper, and he could see what the past week had cost her.

“Hermosa.” His voice cracked on it. He couldn’t find more. “Hermosa.”

She pulled him down onto the bed instead of answering.

She was urgent—pulling at his waistband, arching into his hands, her mouth hungry on his skin—and he followed her. Not directed, not choreographed. He followed. Where her hips moved, his mouth went. Where her breath caught, his hands lingered. She gasped when he kissed down her stomach and he stayed there, feeling her shake beneath him, and when he went lower, she made a sound that was part moan and part sob and her fingers knotted in his hair and held on.

“Don’t stop.” His name tangled into it—Stefan, don’t stop—and he could taste salt on her skin, the sea or tears, he couldn’t tell and didn’t want to know.

He took his time with her—not to perform, not to prove anything, just because she deserved someone who paid attention to what made her shake. She came apart with her back arched off the sheets and her hand reaching for him—not pushing him away, reaching—and the sound she made was the most honest thing she’d given him all night.

She pulled him up before she’d stopped shaking. “I want you. I want to feel you tomorrow. After—” She stopped herself. But he’d heard it. After.

“Yeah.” His voice was wrecked. “I’m here.”

He entered her slowly, watching her face, and her mouth fell open and her eyes found his and held and he saw it all—the love, the grief, the goodbye she thought she was hiding—and he made his choice.

Every instinct told him to stop, to give her the out she was too proud to ask for. He stayed anyway. He chose this—her body and her silence and whatever pieces of herself she was willing to give him—because if this was the last time, he was going to make sure she remembered it.

She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him deeper and they moved together—her rhythm, not his, her hips and his answering—and she pressed her face into his neck and breathed him in, long and deliberate. Like she was memorizing him. Her eyelashes were wet against his throat. He held her tighter.

“Te amo,” he said, and it fell out of him. It had been waiting. “Erika. Te amo.”

She kissed him. Deep and desperate and tasting of wine and salt. She didn’t say it back, and he understood—not because she didn’t feel it but because saying it would make the leaving real, and she was already leaving. He could feel it in the way she held him, too tight, her nails cutting crescents into his shoulders, marking him, and he let her because the marks were proof. Tomorrow, when she was gone, he’d press his fingers to the bruises and remember that this was real.

She came with his name on her lips and her eyes on his—not because he’d asked her to look but because she chose to. That was the difference. That was the thing Martin could never touch. He came with her face in his hands and her tears on his skin.

He held her through the aftershocks, both of them breathing hard, her face still pressed into his neck.

For a while, they just breathed. Her head on his chest, her leg thrown over his hip, her hand still resting over his heart. He could feel her heartbeat against his ribs, fast at first, then slowing, and he traced patterns down her spine and didn’t say anything because the silence between them wasn’t empty. He wasn’t ready to break it.

She broke it first.

“You’re staring.”

Her voice was thick with almost-sleep, but there was a smile in it. She hadn’t opened her eyes.

“I’m admiring,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

“Mmm.” She nestled closer, nose pressing into his chest. “You’re still staring. I can feel it.”

“Can’t help it. You’re very admirable.”