Chapter 51
Callum
“Iwas only gone five days. How much did you read?”
“Making up for lost time. I didn’t get a lot of reading done during the semester.” She grazed her teeth along the shell of my ear. “Tough course load.”
A shiver ran down my spine.
I turned, caught her waist, and set her squarely in my lap, her knees bracketing my hips. She squeaked—a sound I would catalog for later, alongside the first time I’d made her laugh, the first time she fell asleep on my chest, the first time she told me she loved me and meant it.
She blinked in mock outrage, then squared her jaw, as if determined not to cede the moment. She succeeded, mostly. I let her.
“Tough course load, you say?” I slid my palms up her back.
She pressed against me. “Brutal.”
“Sounds like you’ve earned a reward…” I traced a slow line up her spine.
“For enduring such an exacting, unsympathetic professor.” I tangled my fingers in her hair—not to pull.
Not yet. Just enough to make her still. “Lucky for you, he offers extra credit.” I tipped her chin until her eyes locked on mine.
She held her breath.
“But it’s rigorous…and very hands-on.”
“Better be. Or I’ll be forced to leave a scathing course review.” She rocked forward, the motion calculated and criminal.
“You wouldn’t dare.” I looped an arm around her waist and pulled her in until there was no air, no daylight between us, nothing but the thrum of her pulse under my hands and the soft, devilish curve of her smile against my mouth.
The spell broke with the graceless chime of an incoming email. Gabrielle flinched, and we both looked toward the desk. She climbed off my lap, freeing me to lean forward and tap the trackpad. The preview alone was enough.
SUBJECT: Notification of Formal Disciplinary Hearing
I exhaled—a hiss more than a sigh. “Well, they do move quickly.”
She hovered beside me, arms folded tight. “When is it?”
I skimmed the message. “Tomorrow at eight. The tribunal’s been assembled, and I am summoned to answer for my many and varied sins.” The phrase ‘expedited process in the public interest’ chased itself in a loop behind my eyes. That was code for ‘we want this done before the holiday weekend.’
She rested a hand on my shoulder. “What do you want to do today, then? Anything at all.”
I looked up at her. The question felt ceremonial—a last meal before the executioner’s sword.
I wanted to say crawl under a rug and stay there until the heat death of the universe.
Or let’s drive north until we hit Canada and change our names once we’ve crossed the border.
Or even fuck it, let’s fly to Vegas and get married tonight.
So there’s at least one true thing in the record, even if the rest of my life gets redacted.
“Want to take the motorcycle out?” she offered. “Let me put my life in your hands. Only seems fair.”
I glanced out the window. “In this heat? It’s a hundred degrees in the shade. We’ll absolutely boil.”
“Drive fast enough, and the wind will cool us down. Isn’t that a thermodynamics thing?”
I snorted. “Cute. Perhaps you do need summer remediation.”
She feigned offense, emerald eyes wide. “We didn’t cover convective heat loss in your class.”
“Negligible, in this climate. Besides…” I let my gaze walk up the length of her, basking in the anticipation. “The only ride I want is with you. In bed. Right now.”
It was a joke—mostly—but the way her breath caught told me she knew the truth beneath it.
I stood and pulled her flush against me. “I’m a condemned man. Would you deny me this last request?”
She bit her lip and shook her head—cheeks flushed, pupils blown. “Absolutely not. That would be a human rights violation.”
I swept her into my arms. “So glad we agree.”
She pressed her mouth to mine, hard, and in that moment, every extraneous thought—tomorrow’s hearing, every threat and accusation, even the distant echo of my father’s voice—evaporated. There was only heat, the flutter blooming in my chest, and the taste of her on my tongue.
We were clawing each other out of our clothes before we even hit the bed. She sprawled beneath me, loose and wild-haired, her body a territory I’d spent the last six months mapping and still hadn’t finished.
She looped her arms around my neck, pulled me down, and whispered against my ear, “There’s something I want you to teach me, Professor.”
She said it with a smile, but the challenge was real.
“At your disposal,” I said, propping myself on one elbow.
She trailed her fingers down my chest. “You once told me you could rock my world in fourteen dimensions.” She bit her lower lip, her voice sultry. “I don’t doubt you, but I’m struggling to picture it.”
“Hate to flatten a fantasy, love, but I’m a wounded man.
Cut me some slack,” I said, slipping my hand between her thighs.
She was already wet, her breath catching with my touch.
“Besides, you’d need a crash course in string theory to appreciate the full fourteen.
And I’m far too impatient.” I grazed my thumb over her clit. “Let’s start with five.”
Her laugh was more gasp than sound. “I know the first three…”
“I’d have never allowed you into my course if you didn’t,” I said, working her with my fingers, relishing the flutter of her eyelids.
“Length, width, and—”
I plunged a finger inside her. “Depth.”
She arched into my hand, desperate and defiant all at once. “And the fourth is…time?”
I kissed the hollow above her collarbone. “Very good.” Her pulse bounded under my tongue.
“And the fifth?” she whispered.
“A higher dimension acts on the one below it.” I grazed my teeth along her neck. “So let’s see if I can stop time.” I slid two fingers inside her—and she broke open.
She moaned—long, low, from somewhere marrow-deep, and in that moment, I was certain that whatever awaited me in that hearing, however thoroughly they meant to ruin me—this woman was my salvation. And she was worth it all.
She ground against my palm, greedy for friction, her nails carving crescents into my biceps as I coaxed impossibly sweet sounds from her throat.
Her eyelids fluttered, and a terrible, gorgeous ache bloomed at the base of my spine.
I pressed my thumb down, slow and relentless, and she clung to my shoulders like she no longer trusted gravity to keep her tethered to the bed.
I savored the violence of her need—how the careful, self-possessed woman I knew unraveled under my touch.
I slowed. Withdrew my fingers. She whimpered, a ragged, aching protest. I held her gaze as I drew my wet hand up her belly, pausing at the dip of her ribs, then higher still, savoring the way her chest rose and fell, uneven and desperate.
I brought my fingers to my lips. She watched, wide-eyed, as I sucked her taste from them.
But it wasn’t enough. I wanted to taste her every tremor.
I slid down, kissing a shaky, reverent path down her ribs, her stomach, the sweet hollow above her hip.
She was already trembling when I pulled her thighs apart, and when I licked a slow stripe up the length of her, she gasped, both hands diving into my hair.
I didn’t tease. Not today. Not when the world might crack open at any moment.
I buried my tongue inside her, greedy and worshipful, and she arched into my mouth, her thighs locked around my shoulders.
The sounds she made were velvet and thunder—helpless, and entirely mine.
I lost myself in it—in her—in the way she gripped my head, fingers threaded deep in my hair. I could have come right then, undone by the beauty of her helplessness. By the proof that I could remake the woman who had so often remade me.
She was close—she always tried to chase it down early, as if not trusting her body to deliver on the promise.
I held her at the edge, tongue and fingers in counterpoint, calibrating every twitch and gasp until she stopped making sense—until logic fled and the raw animal core held court.
When she came, it ripped through her whole body, arching her so hard she nearly threw me off her.
She pulsed against my mouth, but I didn’t let up—not until she went soft and limp with aftershock.
“Holy. Fuck,” she rasped. And pride bloomed in my chest.
I kissed the inside of her thigh, then rested my cheek there, unwilling to rush the moment. “Does that mean I successfully stopped time?”
She dragged a hand through her hair, still breathless. “Fifth dimension unlocked.”
“And the sixth,” I said, pressing a slow kiss to her hip, “is all possible timelines. Every version of reality.” I crawled up her body, settling flush against her. “Want to know what happens in all of them?”
She nodded, eyes wide.
“In every timeline,” I whispered against her skin, grabbing a condom from the nightstand, “I find you like this.” I tore the wrapper and rolled it on. “I make you come undone in my hands, again and again—until the universe runs out of ways to rearrange the stars.”
Her breath caught.
“And then I fuck you like the laws of physics never applied at all.”
She clung to me, legs locked tight around my hips, hands clawing for leverage on my back. I wanted to savor her—every delectable inch—to kneel at the altar of her pleasure. But my need was too immediate. I was already shaking, already half-mad with it.
I drove into her in one slow, deliberate thrust, feeling the give, the heat, the way she stretched to take me. She gasped—sharp, involuntary, broken open—and clawed my shoulders. I stilled, buried to the hilt, and let her feel me—every inch, every wild heartbeat.
“Fuck,” she whispered, voice breaking on the consonant. “Don’t stop, Cal, please—”
Not even if the house was burning down around us.
I pulled out nearly all the way, then slammed back in—no gentleness, no pretense of restraint. She met my every thrust, grinding her hips up, greedy and bold, mapping my back, my arms, my ass with her hands, like she meant to memorize every molecule before sunrise.
“You’re perfect,” I rasped, barely holding back. I kissed her throat, the pulse behind her jaw, the soft shell of her ear. “So fucking perfect.” Every thrust was a physics proof—an elegant loop of torque and friction, her body answering mine with equal and opposite need.
She bucked hard, desperate for more, and I gave it.
No practiced rhythm now—just brute, hungry pistoning.
The sheets twisted beneath us, sweat slicking my back.
She was all around me—clutching, clawing—wired directly to me at a thousand nerve endings.
The deeper I drove, the more she moaned, a melody of surrender that shorted out all my higher functions.
I couldn’t look away, even as my climax built, slow and devastating. Her hair fanned like a corona, mouth open and gasping. Sweat glimmered along her collarbone. She arched her breasts into my chest with each downstroke. She looked like a woman made for sin. And I wanted her to know it.
“Still with me?” I murmured.
She nodded, eyes closed, lashes trembling. “Barely.”
“Good. Hold on.”
I pulled almost all the way out—then slammed back in. Her breath hitched like I’d knocked the wind out of her. I rocked into her, steady and deep, anchoring myself in the sound of her—those small, helpless gasps she only made for me.
I shifted my weight, angled my hips, and ground down until I found the spot—exactly where she needed it. She bucked, electric, her whole body seizing. She clamped around me, hot and pulsing and wild. Her delicious screams echoed off the walls.
I drove into her, relentless now, every thrust a translation of my undoing. The pressure built, and I let it crest—let it hollow me out, then flood me with a rush that scorched every cell in my body.
I came so hard I could have sworn the air changed, the light flickered, the axis of the planet wobbled. For one wild, ecstatic second, there was only my body and hers, the heat and ferocity of our collision, and then the aftershocks—rippling, unstoppable, rolling through us both.
When my brain rebooted, I was slumped above her, forehead pressed to hers, both of us slick with sweat and trembling in the aftermath. I couldn’t have strung a sentence together if someone held a gun to my head. I just breathed, tasted the salt of her skin, and held on to the moment.
Eventually—though I can’t say when, since time had well and truly stopped—I pulled out and collapsed beside her.
“I felt that…in my feet,” she said between breaths, voice airy and whimsical.
“I felt that in my shoes, and they’re across the room.”
She laughed—hoarse and loose—and rolled toward me, slinging a leg over mine. My skin buzzed where she touched it. “I bet you can’t explain that with physics.”
“I absolutely can,” I said, curling my fingers around hers. “That’s entanglement. Two particles reacting across space, no matter how far apart.” I kissed her knuckles. “Rather like us.”