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“No. I want. I want all of it.”

He leans down and kisses me like this is the answer he hoped for. His hand glides down from my cheek to my breast, down my stomach to my hip bone, where his fingers slide along the elastic band of my underwear and pause.

I lift my hips from the couch. I can feel him smile as he kisses me. His fingers pause for only a second before they slide under the lacy fabric.

Goose bumps spread across my skin as he slips two fingers inside me, and all I can think is how I could stay exactly like this forever. This man. This apartment. Where nothing bad can touch us. Sustained entirely by this euphoric feeling of falling fast and Harmony’s questionable baked goods. We could be so happy.

My body, however, has different plans.

Those fingers. Those strong musician’s fingers. They play my body with the same delicate strokes as when he plucks his guitar.

I come, hard and fast, sinking my hands into his hair as I let myself come apart, and the world goes blurry for a moment.

He strokes my hair and whispers worshipping words that sound a little like one of his songs.

“I’ve got you, just let go…”

I close my eyes and let go of everything I have been holding on to these last few months—the good, the bad, the hard. The feeling makes my whole body shiver.

“You’re sure you’re not cold?”

I open my eyes to find him watching me, concerned, a hand resting on the blanket slung over the back of the couch.

“I’m perfect,” I tell him, and I mean it. “But how do you feel about moving this to a bed?”

He doesn’t actually answer but instead rolls off the couch and scoops me into his arms. I wrap mine around his neck and lay my head against his chest, where I can feel his heart beating wildly inside. And I know it’s for me. I know it in the careful way he lays me down on my bed. In his quickened movements as he removes his clothes and slides under the covers next to me, like those few seconds apart were too long. Like our bodies were meant to be just like this, touching and stroking, feeling and tasting.

His hand finds my cheek in the dark, and he asks one last time if I am sure. I almost tell him that I have never been so sure about anything before in my life, but instead slide open the drawer to my nightstand and pull out a condom.

“Come here,” I whisper.

He moves to straddle me. Arms braced on either side, he lowers his chest to mine and places a chaste kiss on my lips.

He rolls the condom on and then groans as he sinks into me. The sensation is so wild that I have to grip the bedsheets with both hands.

“Fuck, Annalise. You feel incredible.”

I love the sound of my name on his lips. The profanity. The way it comes out, half moan, half whisper, as he begins to move. His tempo starts out smooth and rhythmic and then picks up like he’s listening to my body as if it were a song, filling the moments between the beats exactly as I need them.

“I’m close,” I say, although it sounds strikingly similar to his moan-whisper. He brings his mouth to mine and covers it with a hungry, feverish kiss.

When I cry out, Mackenzie’s pace picks up, becoming faster and more urgent. I think he says my name. It’s hard to tell because waves of pleasure are ripping through me, and I can’t think of anything else aside from how good it feels.

Eventually, I start to notice my breath again and that Mackenzie has stilled above me, although I can feel him still pulsing inside me.

We lie there for a few moments before he pulls out and rolls away with a small moan, dropping his legs over the side of the bed to remove the condom. He bumps around in the dark for a few minutes, then climbs back under the covers, pulling me to him. I lie there and listen to his breathing as it becomes smooth and even and deep. It mingles with the city sounds outside—the reminder of the world still out there.

But tonight, we are cocooned in my bed, where everything is easy, good, and right. Nothing can touch us, and I let myself fall asleep thinking only of that.

24

I awaken the next morning to him kissing my temple. Our legs are tangled together with the bedsheet, and my comforter is across the room on the floor, having been thrown from the bed sometime during the night. We stay in bed until well after lunch, repeating the events of the night before but switching the order slightly and throwing in a couple new positions. Eventually, Mackenzie calls in our lo mein order to Rol San. It arrives thirty-six minutes later with a message scrawled on the front: Next time you hurt her, you deal with me.

Mackenzie shrugs when he reads it. I pretend I have no idea what it means.

The next night, we fall asleep on the couch, me sprawled across his chest, the Hudson’s Bay blanket draped over both of us as another Christmas movie plays out on the screen. The following morning, when I shower for work I find an imprint of the TV remote on my stomach. It spent the whole night sandwiched between us.

The night after that we spend in his bed. Then, two more in mine because he has late shows and crawls in after them to sleep next to me when he gets home.