Page 23 of While I’m Still Here

"You're stunning again."

She snorts, but there's a flush spreading down her neck toward the mole near her collarbone. The one I've wanted to kiss for seven years. So I do. I step closer, press my mouth to that tiny mark, and feel her pulse stutter under my lips. Her hands come to my shoulders. Then lower. Then she's tugging at my shirt, and I let her pull it over my head. Her palms flatten against my chest, and something in her face softens.

"How often have you thought about this?" she asks me.

"Obsessively."

That gets a laugh, small and breathless, and then I'm guiding her backwards until the backs of her knees hit the sofa cushions. She sinks down, and I follow, her body opening beneath me as I settle between her thighs.

The moment stretches. Gold-flecked eyes searching mine.

"Colin."

"Yeah."

"I want to feel alive."

I kiss her hard. Deep enough that her head pushes back against the cushion. One hand braces beside her shoulder; the other skims down her side, over the curve of her waist, the flare of her hip. She gasps into my mouth when I reach between her legs.

"You're soaked," I say.

I press the heel of my hand against her, and she makes a sound that goes straight to my cock. Her hips roll up, chasing pressure, and I let her. For a moment. Then I pull my hand away, and she whines.

That whine changes when I sit back and watch her face. I’m still too dressed. This isn't how I imagined our first time—but nothing about tonight is how I imagined it. Better, maybe. Because it's real.

I slide off the couch and kneel on the floor between her legs. Her thighs part wider without prompting. Her hand drops into my hair. "Colin⁠—"

"I've wanted to taste you for seven years."

She opens her mouth to respond, but I don't give her the chance. My tongue finds her first, and whatever she was going to say dissolves into a moan. Her hips jerk. Her fingers tighten in my hair, pulling just shy of painful, and my name spills from her lips like a plea.

She tastes warm and sharp, and the sound she makes when I lick her again. I know I should go slow. I know she's spent all day being poked, prodded, and handled. But the way she moves against my mouth isn't asking for slow. It's asking for now.

"Colin." Her voice is high and urgent. "Don't stop."

I don't.

I focus on her clit with the kind of single-minded attention I've given to exactly one other thing in my life: loving her. My tongue circles her, flat and sure, and her thighs clamp around my ears. She's close already. I can feel it in the way she trembles, in the way her breath catches on every downward stroke.

"More," she gasps. "Please—I need⁠—"

I slide one finger inside her, then two, and she cries out. Her back arches off the couch, and I crook them forward, searching for that spot, and when I find it, she unravels.

Not a pretty, quiet orgasm. The kind that sounds like a sob, like she's been holding her breath for weeks and only now remembers how to let it go. Her body clenches around my fingers. Her thighs shake. I keep my mouth on her through it, gentler now, drawing it out until she's squirming from the intensity. When I finally look up, she's covered in a thin sheen of sweat. Her chest heaves. Her eyes are closed, and there's a crease between her brows like she's trying to memorise the feeling.

"Hey," I say.

She opens her eyes.

"I'm not done."

I climb back over her, shoving my jeans down with some difficulty and kicking them off. Boxers next. And then it's just us, skin to skin, her legs winding around my waist and her arms around my neck. She can feel me now, hard against her, and she makes a small sound of want.

"Condom," I manage.

"Drawer."

"Someone's optimistic."