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He held out his hand when I came into the front room. His bed stood beneath the window, my boxes stacked against the far wall.

He glanced at the boxes. “I should’ve moved those.”

“Leave them.” I drew him toward the bed.

I pulled off my sweater, and Seb helped me out of the rest. When I stood naked in front of him, he went still.

My breasts had changed. My hips were softer, and there were pale stretch marks low on my stomach. I’d made a person. I was proud of it, though I still watched his face as he saw me.

“You’re going to have to say something,” I said.

“I’m trying to work out how to say it without making a mess of it.”

“Just say it.”

“You’re fucking beautiful,” he said. “I knew you would be, and I still wasn’t ready.”

He eased me onto the bed. When his hand reached my stomach, he paused.

“You’re allowed to get on with it.”

“In a minute.”

“Seb.”

“Sixteen months,” he said. “Give me the minute.”

So I gave him the minute. He rested his hand over the marks on my stomach, then bent and kissed them.

Then he kissed his way down my body, settled my thighs over his shoulders and put his mouth on me. He refused to be hurried.

Not when I pulled his hair. Not when I told him to.

“Seb.”

“No.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do.” He said it against me, and I felt him say it. “Give me five minutes, songbird.”

He worked my clit with the flat of his tongue, slow and steady, the way he’d learned I needed. He slid two fingers into me and didn’t change the rhythm, however much I begged or how hard my heel dug into his back.

I came with my hand clamped over my mouth so I wouldn’t wake Sparrow. He stayed where he was and carried me through every second of it.

He didn’t stop.

“I can’t—”

“You can.”

The second one hit before I’d recovered from the first. I said his name into the back of my wrist. Then he came up my body with his mouth wet and his eyes dark, and I tasted myself when he kissed me.

“Get naked, Seb.”

He was off the bed before I’d finished saying it. His shirt landed on the floor, then his jeans and underwear. When he came back to me, I pushed him onto his back.

He reached toward the table beside the bed. “Condoms. Top drawer.”