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‘Baby.’ It’s all I can muster, so caught up am I in his focus. I slide my hands over his shoulders, and feel the muscles in his back ripple.
‘I just want to make you feel good.’ His voice wobbles at the end.
‘You are, you are.’ I kiss him, sliding my mouth against his. ‘You make me feel so fucking good every single day.’
He kisses my chest, my throat, sucks on my earlobe before finally, finally, slipping in. My legs curl around his hips, ankles finding their place on his hip bones, drawing him closer, and somehow deeper. The bottle of lube falls off the bed and hits the floor, rolling somewhere out of reach.
It doesn’t take Gabriel long to find a rhythm; or to take control. He’s strong and precise andconsistentin his lovemaking and my toes curl every time he slides in the right way. Our bodies press together, the heat of him like a searing brand and god, it’s wonderful. I’d never thought Gabriel would be like this in bed—so dominating and passionate, but I love it. Fucking love it.
Gabriel grips my thigh, driving into me. The bedframe hits the wall behind us, but neither of us cares.
Everything is so good and before I know it, I’m speaking, rattling my pleasure mindlessly, ‘So good, so so good, Gabi, baby, so good.’
Then comes that same narrowing pleasure—everything I feel becomes focused, almost overwhelming, and then it bursts. I hear myself cry out as my body snaps like a band.
A few seconds later, Gabriel groans into my shoulder, jaw clenched, overwhelmed and blissed out. I hold him as pieces of the room come back to me; the dampness of the sheets beneath my back, the soft roll of the waves through the open window, the way my knee creaks as I lower it from Gabriel’s hip.
Gabriel rests his head on my chest, and I kiss his sweaty hairline. He slurs something in French. Or something resembling French.
‘Weirdly, Duolingo doesn’t cover pillow talk,’ I murmur against his temple. Gabriel just chuckles in response.
‘Brain broken. Try later,’ he sighs, and then rolls to lie beside me.
I take the condom because that seems like the gentlemanly thing to do, wrapping it and throwing it in the rubbish bin. Then, I return to Gabriel and pull a sheet over our bodies.
‘You okay?’ I push his hair away from his face. ‘Blink once for yes. Twice for no.’
Gabriel smiles against the pillow, still blissed out and a little loopy. ‘I’m okay. That was great.’
I laugh, running the backs of my fingers over his cheek. ‘You were pretty fantastic.’
39
Gabriel
Just over two weeks ago, I’d sat next to Phoebe in her hospital bed as she’d told me her injury was career-ending.
That her time playing tennis was over.
I’d sat and listened to her, but all the while, I could only think about myself. What would happen if I was in the same situation? If the game was ripped away from me? Who was I if I wasn’t a tennis player?
I love tennis so much that it was hard to face that something, eventually, could take it away from me. An injury, illness, an accident beyond my control. One day, despite my best efforts, my body will decide it has had enough, even if my mind has not.
But tennis will always be a part of me, at least in some form, whether it’s playing professionally, or coaching, or commentating, or something completely different. I know this because on the fourth morning we spend in the Whitsundays, I wake up with a burning desire to play tennis.
‘You’ve got to be joking,’ Noah says as we eat breakfast on the patio. Yesterday it rained and we’d spent the entire day in our villa. No prizes for guessing what we’d done. Even now, Noah only wears a robe. The tie of his robe is loose, revealing a long sliver of skin. ‘Hey, eyes up here.’
I look up.
‘You just played two weeks of tennis,’ Noah says soberly. ‘Your blisters have barely healed and you still have a limp.’
I look down at my hands; at the calluses. The bandages are off and the blisters have scabbed over and the bursitis that afflicted my knee has subsided with a few days rest. ‘Yesterday was far more taxing than a round of tennis. Besides, it’s just you and me. It’s not like I’m playing the world number one.’
‘Fine,’ he relents. ‘One game.’
‘Onematch,’ I clarify.
‘I know what I said.’
