“Theo,” she breathed at the shell of my ear, and the way she said my name nearly brought me to my fucking knees. Sweet fire. Wild honey. Silken chaos.
Her bedroom was a thing of soft lavender shadows, fluffy white bedding on a high bed with a quilted cream headboard. Smaller paintings dotted the light purple walls—quiet moments rendered with yearning. The angle of a coffee cup. Light sluicing through the blinds. But I couldn’t concentrate on any of it.
All I could see was her.
I laid her down with such tenderness it was a wonder my hands didn’t shake. She pulled me with her, impatient hands tugging at leather and denim with a quiet urgency that made my skin burn.
“Are you sure?” I asked even as my body cried out with need, already leaning heavily into her warmth, her softness, her gravity.
She kissed me. Hard, deep, with the hunger of someone who’d done enough waiting. Her immediate answer didn’t come in words but in the slide of her fingers beneath my belt, the way her thighs parted beneath mine.
“I’ve never been more sure of anything,” she whispered against my lips.
Her blouse slipped off in one fluid motion. No hesitation, and no shame. We’d experienced enough shame, and tonight, I wouldn’t let it cloud this. It was skin and heat and the way her breath hitched as I took her in, kissing down her throat, my mouth greedy for every inch of her. Her collarbones, the curve where her shoulder met her neck, the small dip between her breasts.
Her body arched against mine, all invitation and flame. She gasped my name when my hand slid beneath the waistband of her hiking pants, slipping beneath her cotton panties, my fingers mapping the path of heat to her core, finding her soaking wet for me. Every sigh she gave was poetry.
She was already trembling, grinding down on my palm when I whispered, “Let me take my time.”
“Please,” she said, arching her back. “Please.”
Iworshippedher.
Wendy
Theo’s hands had learned, somewhere in his thirty-four years, how to tell a story, how to make you mutter unintelligibly, words tumbling out of your mouth like you were narrating a book for morons who couldn’t string together a proper sentence. But I felt exposed, and in the most beautiful way. Not vulnerable like that frantic night we’d fucked against my car, but seen.Actually seen.His eyes traced every each of revealed skin like he was memorizing a masterpiece, his fingers curving inside me and making memeltbecause god, oh god, he was undoing me.
“Let me hear you,” he commanded softly, his tone still something of a suggestion. I could ignore him and he would not mind. But I didn’t want to. Ididwant him to hear me. I wanted him to know exactly what he did to me.
I moaned, my breath catching in my throat as he thrust two fingers inside my wet heat, his thumb brushing roughly over my swollen clit with each stroke. I couldn’t contain the noises. They spilled from my throat like wine from a cask, sweet and flowery and dark and intoxicating.
“Come on my palm,” he said, voice heavy and thick with lust. “Come for me.”
My toes curled of their own accord, hips lifting off the bed as he chased my orgasm with those calloused fingers, thrusting hard and fast until—fuck.
I was coming.
I was coming.
I was fucking coming.
In the aftermath, we both lay there panting on the bed, staring up at the ceiling fan, running on the lowest setting, round and round. Full circle, each time. Just like this. Just like us.
When we undressed each other, we did it with infinite care this time, each piece of discarded clothing a deliberate choice, a conscious step toward intimacy that had nothing to do with trauma and everything to do with—love.
God, I was in love with him.
This was love. Not the desperate attachment we’d confused for a connection, but something real and solid and tangible and true, built on the foundation ofactuallyknowing each other.
When he settled between my thighs, his body covering mine with the perfect weight, I wrapped my legs around him, welcoming him inside my body. He wasn’t filling a hollow dead space, not some void I’d spent thirty-six years trying to fill.
We were choosing each other.
Not our traumas. Not our delusions. Not our pain or our loneliness or everything else we’d been carrying for far too long.
We were choosing each other.
“I love you,” I whispered, a tear slipping down the corner of my cheek as he moved inside me, slow and deep and absolutely right. “Not the fantasy version, not the stranger from that night—you. Theo Garner, who quotes poetry and makes teenagers fall in love with dead empires and holds my hand like it’s the most precious thing he’s ever had the pleasure of touching.”
