Page 61 of What We Become

“Yes.” I cover his hand with both of mine. “Touch me like you know I’m alive. I need to feel like I’m still here.”

His breath goes ragged. That’s all the warning I get before his mouth is on mine—not careful this time, all that banked restraint finally giving way. His free hand slides into my hair and cradles the back of my skull like he’s holding something he already lost once.

“You tell me,” he says against my mouth. “Anything hurts. Anything.”

“I’ll tell you.”

Then his hands are everywhere, and I’m not cold anymore. He peels the blanket away, lays me back into the pillows, and maps me with his palms—skirting the bruises on my ribs, the healing burns, learning the difference between my body and my injuries like they’re two separate countries. His mouth follows. My throat. The scar at my neck, which he kisses like it isn’t evidence. My sternum. All the soft places between the damage.

When he reaches my hips, he pauses and looks up.

“Don’t stop.”

He doesn’t. He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my sweats and draws them down slow, easing the fabric over the burns on my legs like he’s handling something sacred. I lift my hips when he needs me to. My underwear goes with them, and then I’m bare beneath him—bandages and bruises and trembling, but not from cold anymore. Not even close.

His gaze travels the whole length of me, slow and hungry and barely held.

“Tell me where not to touch.”

“Nowhere,” I say. “Just start slow.”

He settles between my thighs, and the sheer size of him there should crowd the bed, should make me feel cornered. Instead it’s like being sheltered. His hands slide under my hips, lifting me a fraction, careful of the ribs, and then his mouth is on me.

The first touch of his tongue rips a sound out of me I didn’t plan. My back arches off the mattress before I remember the rib, the burn of it flaring. But I don’t care, I don’t care, because for the first time since the wall my body is producing a sensation that isn’t pain, isn’t fear, isn’t the phantom grit of sticky foam against my palms.

“Knox—”

He hums against me, and the vibration makes my thighs shake around his shoulders.

Slow is an understatement. He works me in long, deliberate strokes, circling the places that make my breath stutter, learning me through his tongue while his hands anchor my hips in place. Every time the pleasure spikes too sharp and my hips jerk, he gentles, waits, starts again. Reading my body the way he reads a perimeter. Methodical. Thorough. Missing nothing.

I fumble down and find his head, gripping what I can of his short hair, and he growls low in his throat without stopping. The sound travels straight through me.

“Tell me,” he says against my skin, and his voice is wrecked.

“More. Don’t stop. Please⁠—”

He gives me more. Two thick fingers slide into me, slow and deep, curling until I cry out, and his tongue stays on my clit, relentless and patient at once. The pressure builds, and I hear myself saying his name, saying yes, saying words that don’t make sense anymore.

“Fuck. That’s it. Make me come, Knox. Make me⁠—”

I come apart with his name in my mouth and his hands holding me down like he’s keeping me from moving so much I hurt myself. The orgasm rolls through me slow and devastating, and I feel every second of it from somewhere outside the numbness I’ve been carrying since the foam.

“Better?”

I nod as I lie there breathing, staring up at the ceiling. “Much better.”

“Good.” He stands, straightens, and turns toward the en suite.

“Where are you going?”

“Getting something to clean you up.” He’s already moving, all that coiled strength pointing itself at a task. “Then you’re going to bed.”

“No.”

He stops and looks back at me.

“I want you.” My voice doesn’t shake. “I want you inside me. Please.”