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She resisted that. Pulled away from it. He was a stranger to her. A virtual stranger. A man she had been friends with seven years ago couldn’t be all those things. She had no idea who he was now.
You know where he came from.
You know how he built himself.
You know the content of who he is. Really.
But then he began to move and she couldn’t think anymore. Couldn’t breathe. Her world was reduced to him. The feeling of him thrusting in and out, the slow glide of friction as he claimed her, over and over again.
He was perfect. And they were endless. She couldn’t tell anymore if they were two different people.
It made her think back. Made her think back to all those times they had spent together as children. Where they had been stronger together than they were apart.
She was afraid. Knowing that she could feel so deeply when she barely knew him now. At least as the man he’d become.
But she let all that go. All her thoughts, all her fears. She let go of it all. Let go of everything. So that she could simply be. In the moment, with him.
It was everything. Like being barefoot and free, running through a field without a care in the world.
He kissed her and she felt pleasure building inside of her again, higher and higher. She clung to his shoulders and let herself go. Let herself shatter.
And when she came back to herself, she was safe. Because she was in Jude James’s arms.
CHAPTER SIX
JUDEWASENTIRELYBROKEN.That had been the best sex of his life, but even thinking of it that way cheapened it. Reduced it. Because there was so much more to it than that. So much more to her. It was like being healed, and he couldn’t fully articulate why. He didn’t think he would ever be able to.
Because she was Penny. Just like she always had been.
And she had always been more than that. She had always been everything. It was still light outside. The sun was streaming through the window, and she was lying beside him, the golden beams highlighting the beauty of her naked body. The brilliance of her golden hair. She was an angel. Even if a fallen one.
She’s fallen because of you.
Yeah. Well. That was the thing he had always worried about with her.
But maybe it was in a permanent state. Because this was just a moment out of time.
This was just a moment.
She put her hand on his forearm. “Don’t leave me,” she said.
“What?”
“You just had that look on your face. You used to get it all the time when you were a kid. Like you wanted to run away. But also like you wanted to stay. Like something was torturing you. And whenever you looked like that, I couldn’t quite reach you.”
“Just thoughts,” he said. It was weird, though, the way that she had honed in on that. Because those had been his constant thoughts when he had been young: How could he get out of there? How could he take her with him?
He felt like he was too tangled up in all that they had been. In all that their community was.
He hadn’t known how to take care of a family. How to take care of a girl like Penny. He’d had a hard time imagining them grown, even though he had wanted to. He had wanted to figure out how to become a man. A good man, but he didn’t have a waypoint. He didn’t have any idea of how to change himself. There were no examples around him. Not really. And so, he knew exactly what she meant.
Because there had been moments when he had lost himself. When he let himself imagine what a future with the two of them could look like. But only if they were different. Only if they were somehow more than Penny and Jude, raised by dysfunctional people who had instilled dysfunction deep within them.
He had wanted to imagine them in a two-story house. With a big backyard.
A strange trickle of fear slid into his stomach as he realized that he lived in the exact kind of house he used to imagine being in with her. Oh, he had imagined it being more in a neighborhood. A little more like houses he had seen on TV, because that was the only way he could fully picture that life. But he had gone and bought it, and here she was in it, a few days later.
What did that mean?
