Chapter 29
Matt
I carried her through the apartment like a man who'd been given something he'd been told he couldn't have.
She laughed against my neck, her arms around me, her weight in my hands, and the sound of her laughing while I carried her was the best sound I'd heard in weeks.
Better than the goal horn. Better than the crowd.
Better than anything that happened on ice.
My arms tightened around her, and I could feel the week leaving my body, all of it, the silence and the fear and the sleepless nights arguing with myself about whether I deserved this, draining out of me like ice melt, replaced by the simple, staggering fact that she was here. In my arms. Warm. Laughing. Mine.
Her bedroom was small. A queen bed with rumpled sheets.
Clothes draped over a chair. Jewelry scattered on the dresser beneath a round mirror that reflected the two of us standing in the doorway.
I caught the image for a half-second, me holding her, her arms around my neck, both of us looking like two people at the end of something hard and the beginning of something worth it.
I set her down beside the bed and kissed her before her feet were steady. Not the desperate hallway kiss. Something deeper. Slower. The kind of kiss you give someone when you know there's no clock on it, no interruption coming, nobody standing on the other side of a door about to ring the bell.
We had all night. And I planned to use every minute of it.
She pulled at my hoodie. I helped her get it over my head and she tossed it behind her without looking. Her hands went to my chest immediately, palms flat, fingers spreading, tracing the lines of my body like she was relearning territory she'd been away from too long.
"I missed this," she breathed against my mouth.
"The hoodie?"
"Your chest. Your skin." Her fingers traced down my stomach. "All of it."
I walked her backward until her legs hit the bed.
She smiled up at me. Anticipating. Wanting.
And the look on her face, open and unguarded and completely unafraid, did something to my chest that had nothing to do with want and everything to do with the fact that this woman had chosen me after every reason I'd given her not to.
I kissed down her jaw. Her neck. That spot below her ear that I'd mapped weeks ago and never forgotten. She gasped, tilting her head to give me more, and I spent time there, feeling her pulse race under my lips, tasting the salt of her skin.
My hands found the hem of her tank top. Pushed it up slowly, revealing skin inch by inch, feeling her muscles tighten under my fingers.
She raised her arms and I pulled it over her head.
No bra. Her breasts bare in the low light of her bedroom, nipples already tight, and the sight of her made my hands unsteady.
"You're staring," she said.
"I'm appreciating."
"Appreciate faster."
I leaned down and took her nipple in my mouth. She arched into me, her hands locking into my hair, a sharp breath pulling through her teeth. I sucked, circled with my tongue, then bit down gently, and the sound she made, low and raw and surprised by its own intensity, went straight to my cock.
I moved to the other breast. Gave it the same attention. My hand cupping the one I'd left, thumb rolling the wet nipple, and she was making sounds now that were driving me out of my mind, small desperate noises that she couldn't control and wasn't trying to.
Then she stopped me.
Her hands on my shoulders. Pushing gently.
I pulled back. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." That smile. The wicked one that had been getting me into trouble since the gas station. "But I have plans."
She stepped out of my reach. Hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her sweats and pushed them down. Slowly. Deliberately. The fabric pooling at her ankles. Black underwear underneath, simple, and soaked through. She stepped out of the sweats and stood there, nearly bare, watching me watch her.
Then she reached up. Gathered her blonde hair. Pulled it back and tied it in a ponytail with an elastic from her wrist.
The gesture was the single hottest thing I'd ever seen a woman do. Something about the deliberateness of it, the preparation, the fact that she was getting ready for what came next with the calm focus of someone who knew exactly what she intended and was looking forward to every second of it.
She dropped to her knees.
Right there on her bedroom floor. Looking up at me with those brown eyes, the gold flecks catching the light from the lamp beside the bed.
Her hands went to my belt. Worked it open with fingers that were steady even when mine weren't. Button next. Zipper. She peeled my jeans and boxers down together, and my cock sprang free, hard and aching and straining toward her like it had its own opinion about the timeline.
She wrapped her hand around me and I groaned. Her fingers were warm and firm, and the first slow stroke from base to tip made my knees buckle. I grabbed the edge of her dresser to stay upright.
"Carrie—"
She took me in her mouth.
The wet heat of her lips closing around me shut down every thought I'd ever had. She took me deep, her tongue working the underside, her hand following her mouth in a rhythm she found immediately, like she'd been thinking about this the same way I'd been thinking about her.
I looked down. Watched her. This woman who'd fought for me, who'd argued with me, who'd told me she loved me standing in a doorway with nothing to gain, on her knees in her bedroom with my cock in her mouth and her eyes locked on mine.
The connection, the intimacy of watching each other while she did this, was almost more than I could handle.
And underneath the pleasure, something else.
Something I hadn't expected. Gratitude. Not just for what she was doing but for what she was telling me by doing it.
That she wanted to give me this. That making me feel good was something she chose, not performed, and the difference between those two things was the difference between everything I'd had before and everything I wanted now.
She hummed around me and the vibration traveled through my entire body. My grip on the dresser went white-knuckled. She took me deeper, all the way to the back of her throat, and the sound I made was not composed or controlled or anything I'd allow in any other situation.
"God, Carrie. Your mouth."
She pulled back enough to speak, her lips wet and swollen, her hand still stroking. "Good?"
"I can't think. I can't breathe. My legs are about to give out."
"Good." She took me in again.
She worked me with her mouth and her hand and her tongue, building the pressure in long, devastating strokes, and every sound she made, every small moan of pleasure like she was enjoying this as much as I was, pushed me higher.
I could feel the orgasm building at the base of my spine, coiling tighter with every pass of her tongue.
"I'm going to come if you don't stop."
She looked up. Met my eyes. Pulled back slowly, letting me slide from her mouth with a wet sound that nearly finished me anyway.
Then she stood. Kissed me once, letting me taste myself on her tongue, and pushed me backward.
I sat on the edge of the bed. She straddled me in one fluid motion, her underwear gone, and I didn't know when she'd taken them off and I didn't care because she was positioning herself above me, her wet heat hovering just above my cock, close enough to feel without contact, and the anticipation was its own kind of agony.
"I love you," she said. Simple. Easy. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"I love you too." Just as easy. Just as simple. And I meant it the way I meant a promise I planned to keep for the rest of my life.
She sank down onto me.
Not slowly this time. Not inch by inch. She took all of me in one long, smooth stroke, and we both cried out, the sound filling her small bedroom, raw and honest and ours.
She was so wet, so tight, so impossibly warm around me that my vision blurred and my hands locked on her hips and every coherent thought I'd reconstructed in the last ten minutes dissolved.
"Oh God," she breathed, her head falling forward, her hands braced on my chest. "You feel—"
"I know."
"Every time. Every time it's—"
"I know."
She started to move. Not gentle. Not the slow, emotional rhythm of the movie night. This was the sex of two people who'd been through the worst and come out the other side and were done being careful. Hard, fast rolls of her hips that drove me deep and made her gasp on every downstroke.
I gripped her waist and pulled her tighter, matching her rhythm, thrusting up to meet her. The angle was perfect, my cock hitting her deep, and I could feel the spot that made her cry out, the one that turned her sounds from breathless to desperate, and I aimed for it on every stroke.
Then I saw us.
In the dresser mirror. Across the room, angled just right, and the reflection hit me like a second wave of arousal so strong my whole body tightened.
Her back. The curve of her spine. Her ponytail swinging with each roll of her hips.
The muscles in her thighs flexing as she rode me, her body rising and falling, taking me in and releasing, and the visual of watching her move on me from the outside while feeling every inch of her from the inside was almost too much.
I could see my own hands on her waist, gripping, guiding, and I could see the place where we were joined, the slick evidence of how much she wanted this, and the image burned itself into my brain in a way I knew I'd be replaying for the rest of my life.
"Matt?" She'd felt my grip tighten. "What—"
"Mirror," I managed. "Behind you."
She turned her head. Saw what I was seeing. Our bodies together. Moving together. The reflection of two people who'd spent a month trying to find each other finally, completely found.
Her eyes went dark. She turned back to me with an expression that was pure heat.