Page 12

"It's light out."

"I know."

"You said in the light."

His breath leaves him against my neck, unsteady. Then his hand slides under the hem of the t-shirt I borrowed and moves up my stomach, slow, and stops under my breast. He waits. I cover his hand with mine and push it up. His thumb drags across my nipple and I arch back into him, into his cock, hard and hot against my ass through his jeans, and he makes a sound I feel in my spine.

"Tell me if you want me to stop."

"Cole. No."

He rolls me onto my back. Daylight pours across the bed, and he pulls the shirt over my head and looks. He takes his time. He looks at all of me, and his throat works.

"Look at you," he says, rough.

His mouth finds my breast. His beard scrapes, and then his tongue, and I put both hands in his hair and hold on. He moves down my stomach, kissing, and settles between my thighs like a man who has nowhere else to be.

"Hands on the headboard."

"Bossy."

"Hands."

I put them there. He pulls my underwear down my legs and tosses it somewhere, and then his mouth is on me, and I stop being funny. He licks me slow and flat, then finds my clit and stays there, patient, relentless, two thick fingers sliding inside me and curling until I'm swearing at the ceiling.

"Nobody for twenty kilometres," he says against my thigh. "Be loud."

I am. I come with my heels in the mattress and his name coming out of me in pieces, and he doesn't stop until I'm shaking and pushing at his shoulder. Then he kisses the inside of my knee, almost tender.

He sits back on his heels and strips his shirt off. Scars. Grey in the chest hair. A man built by work, with four years of nobody on him. He finds a foil packet in the nightstand, checks the date, and I laugh until he looks at me. Then I stop.

"Come here," I say.

He comes. He settles over me, and the head of his cock presses against me, and he stops. His forehead drops to mine. His whole body is trembling.

"Four years," he says, barely audible.

I cup his face in both hands. "I'm here."

He pushes into me slowly, an inch at a time, watching my face the whole way, and I feel every inch. When he's seated deep, he groans into my mouth and goes still.

"Look at me," he says. "Keep your eyes on me."

"Then move."

He does. Long, deep strokes that I meet with my hips, my nails dragging down his back. He pins my wrists to the pillow with one big hand, and I love it. I love the weight of him and the rasp of his breath, and the way his eyes never leave mine.

"That's it. Take it. You feel that? That's me."

"Yes."

"Say it."

"Cole." I'm already tightening around him. "Cole, Cole."

"Come for me."

I do. It breaks over me hard and long, and he follows with my name torn out of his chest. He drives deep, shudders, and collapses on me, his mouth on my shoulder, both of us gasping.