Page 130 of Uncoachable

“You want it that bad, Ivy?” he rasps, his eyes dark with a lethal kind of satisfaction.

A raw breath shudders out of him, pulled from somewhere deep. His pace shifts into a rhythmic, heavy slamming that makes the bed creak and groan in protest. He drives into me with a primal force, each thrust bottoming out with a jarring intensity that rattles my teeth.

The friction builds into a searing, white-hot ball of pleasure. I can feel the exact moment my body begins to fray at the edges. I can feel myself squeezing him.

“Cal!” I scream his name, the sound torn from my lungs as the first wave of the climax hits.

My fingers dig into the hard, knotted muscles of his back, my nails leaving red crescents in his skin as I try to anchor myself to him while the world dissolves into pure, vibrating sensation. My vision goes white, my entire body locking up in a prolonged, agonizingly beautiful spasm.

“I know, I’ve got you,” he says, his voice thick and strained.

He doesn’t stop.

He drives through my climax, his movements turning into a blurred, desperate friction that pushes me higher and higher until I am sobbing for breath. He follows me over the edge with a violent shudder, his body tensing into a cord of pure, vibrating energy.

He thrusts one last time, buried to the hilt, holding himself there as he pours himself into the condom. He buries his face in the crook of my neck, breathing in the scent of our shared exertion as we both sink into the mattress, finally anchored, finally still.

We lie there in the golden dimness, the silence a weighted blanket. He keeps his weight on me, his face buried in my hair, his hands still clutching mine as if he’s afraid I’ll vanish if he lets go.

It is a terrifying thing to realize that your armor was actually just a cage.

For years, I’ve equated being untouchable with being successful. I thought that if nobody could get close, nobody could see the parts of me that aren’t perfect.

But as Callahan’s hands move over me with a reverence that makes my heart ache, I know I don’t want to be in that cage anymore.

I realize then that I’m crying—not out of sadness, but out of the sheer, exhausting relief of being known. Being cherished.

He pulls back just enough to look at me, his thumb catching a tear.

“Hey,” he whispers, his voice cracking. “Don’t cry, Ivy. I’ve got you.”

I laugh weakly, trying to turn my face away in the dark. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what, Ivy?”

“Like I matter.”

His expression shifts, softening in a way that steals the air from my lungs. He leans down and presses a soft, lingering kiss to my forehead.

“You do,” he says firmly. “You’ve always mattered. I just had to wait for you to see it.”

The words settle deep within me, more permanent than any contract. The city noise fades, and all I can hear is the heartbeat that finally made mine remember how to feel.

***

We eventually find our clothes, or at least enough of them to be decent, and end up on the floor because the bed feels too small for the energy still humming between us.

Our backs are against the couch with takeout containers scattered between us.

He nudges my knee with his. “Favorite city?”

“Zurich,” I answer without hesitation. “Yours?”

“Boston,” he says, smirking as he opens a carton of noodles. “The parts that don’t smell like spilled beer.”