Chapter 37 #2
Those four words did something catastrophic to me.
Not because I hadn’t heard want from her before.
I had. I’d heard it in gasps, in kisses, in the desperate little way she said my name when she stopped trying to pretend we were simple.
But this was morning after a night of intense fucking, and today we were sore and soft.
This was her choosing me again when the night was over and the house was waking and neither of us had the cover of darkness to hide behind.
I eased into her slowly.
So slowly it almost hurt to keep myself controlled.
Her breath caught, her body tightening around me, and I stopped before I was fully inside her. Every instinct I had screamed to sink deeper, to chase that perfect heat, but the sound she made pinned me in place. My hand slid up to cover hers against the mattress.
“Breathe,” I whispered. “I’ve got you.”
“I know,” she breathed.
And I knew she meant it.
I moved again by inches, letting her body adjust around mine, letting the ache stretch through both of us until it turned into something deeper, something almost unbearable in how intimate it was.
Her fingers curled into the sheet. Mine threaded through them.
I kissed her shoulder, her neck, the messy spill of her hair, whispering her name like it was the only word I trusted myself with.
Bliss.
Not Pip.
Bliss.
She heard the difference. I felt it in the way her body softened, in the way she let out a shaky breath and pushed back the smallest amount, taking more of me.
“That’s it,” I murmured, my voice breaking around the words. “We don’t have to prove anything.”
Her laugh was barely there, more breath than sound. “That might be the least Cade Mercer thing you’ve ever said.”
I smiled against her shoulder, wrecked and helpless. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Your reputation would never recover.”
“My reputation’s already dead. You killed it somewhere around the time you stole my coffee and started calling me Cross Check out of spite.”
“I did make you more interesting.”
“You made me insane.”
Her breath hitched when I finally sank fully into her, slow and careful, until there was nowhere left for either of us to go. I stopped there, buried inside her, my chest pressed to her back, my arm wrapped around her middle like I could hold both of us together by force.
Neither of us moved.
For a few seconds, the whole room narrowed to that. Her body around mine. My mouth against her skin. The pale light. The quiet. The almost painful fullness of being this close to someone and still wanting closer.
“Cade,” she whispered.
“I’m here.”
“I know.”
Something about the way she said it nearly broke me.
I started moving with slow, shallow rolls of my hips, keeping it gentle, keeping it controlled even when my muscles shook from the effort.
It wasn’t like last night. It wasn’t frantic.
It wasn’t me trying to steal the words that made her think I didn’t want her out of her vocabulary with my hands and mouth and body.
This was quieter.
Worse, somehow.
Every slow drag of my body against hers felt like a confession.
Every breath she took became mine. Every tiny sound she made went straight beneath my ribs and stayed there.
I could feel how sensitive she was, how carefully she took me, how she still chased the feeling anyway because it was us, because the ache belonged to both of us now.
I pressed my mouth to her shoulder. “You feel so fucking good, Pip.”
She went still beneath my hand.
The words had come out before I could stop them, before I could shove them behind sarcasm or heat or some cocky line that would make them less terrifying. My hips stilled too, my body locked deep inside hers, my pulse punching hard against my throat.
I waited for her to panic, or a joke. For her to go quiet in that way she did when something hit too close and she needed somewhere to put it.
Instead, her hand found mine where it rested over her stomach, and she squeezed.
“You can’t just say things like that before breakfast,” she whispered.
I closed my eyes, my face dropping into her hair as a rough, helpless sound scraped out of me. “So fucking good, Pip. So hot and swollen and tight.”
“Don’t tease me. It’s rude.”
I chuckled against her neck. “So rude.”
“Emotionally aggressive.”
“Violent, honestly.”
Her laugh broke a little at the edges, and I moved again, slow and deep, because if I stopped completely, I was going to say too much.
I was going to tell her I didn’t know what my bed was supposed to feel like without her in it anymore.
I was going to tell her she’d ruined silence for me because now quiet only felt right when I could hear her breathing in it.
I was going to tell her that somewhere between her stealing my coffee the minute she asked me to be her subject, insulting my emotional capacity, and looking at me like I wasn’t just some hockey player everyone wanted a piece of, I’d become so completely gone for her I didn’t recognize myself.
So I kissed her instead, because even without words, she fucking knew.
I kissed the back of her shoulder and the side of her neck and the soft place beneath her ear while I moved inside her like we had all the time in the world.
Like reality didn’t exist outside my bedroom door.
Like my teammates weren’t somewhere beneath us, eventually going to wake up loud and obnoxious and hungry.
Like a monster hadn’t already put his hands on her in ways that made violence live under my skin.
In here, she was safe.
In here, she was warm and sleepy and mine in a way that had nothing to do with possession and everything to do with the fact that she kept choosing to stay.
Her breathing changed first. It always did. Little catches at the end of each inhale. A soft tremor through her body. Her hand tightened around mine, and her hips began to meet mine with more need, still careful, still slow, but no longer passive. She wanted more. I felt it in every inch of her.
“Cade,” she breathed.
“I know.” My voice was wrecked. “I feel it.”
“You’re doing it again.”
A laugh punched out of me, low and strained. “What am I doing, Pip?”
“Making me feel stuff while you’re inside me.” Her voice shook, but the attitude still tried to survive. “That feels like cheating.”
My chest burned.
I slid my hand higher, keeping her pressed against me. “Pip, I’m so far past cheating I don’t even know what game we’re playing anymore.”
Her breath broke on a tiny sound.
I felt her fall apart slowly this time, not with the sharp, desperate crash of last night, but with a trembling surrender that moved through her body in waves.
She tightened around me, her head pressing back against my shoulder, my name leaving her mouth like she couldn’t decide whether it was a curse or a prayer.
I held her through it, moving just enough to keep her there, to make it last, to feel every second of her letting go around me.
The control I’d been clinging to started to tear as I buried my face in her neck, my arm locked around her, my hips moving deeper now, still careful but no longer calm. “I’m close.”
Her hand slid back, fingers digging into my thigh. “Don’t pull away.”
As if I could. As if there was a version of this where I could be inside her, hear her say that, and survive with any part of myself intact.
“Never,” I said, and the word came out too honest. Too loaded. Too much.
Her body softened around me again, and that was what took me under. Not the heat. Not the ache. Not even the way she felt, though that was enough to ruin me for the rest of my life. It was the trust. The quiet. The fact that she was still holding my hand while I fell apart.
I came with my mouth pressed to her shoulder, a low, broken groan tearing out of me as everything inside me emptied into her.
It wasn’t sharp like last night. It was deep and endless, a slow pull from the center of my chest, like I was giving her something I didn’t have a name for yet.
My hips jerked once, twice, and then I went still behind her, shaking with the effort of keeping my weight from pinning her too hard.
For a long time, neither of us spoke.
The room had gone brighter, morning spilling across the floorboards, catching on the pile of clothes near my dresser and the half-empty water bottle on my nightstand. Somewhere downstairs, a door opened and closed. Pipes groaned. Hockey House started to breathe awake beneath us.
I didn’t move away.
I couldn’t.
My arm stayed locked around her waist, my body still tucked against hers, my face buried in her hair while I tried to remember how to exist outside of this exact second. She was warm and soft and a little damp with sweat, her fingers still tangled with mine against the sheet.
“Cade?” she whispered after a while.
“Yeah?”
“You’re kind of clingy after sex.”
A tired laugh shook through me, rough and quiet. “After?”
She smiled against my arm. “Fair.”
I kissed the back of her head, then her shoulder, then the delicate curve of her neck because stopping felt impossible now that I’d started. “I can move.”
She tightened her hand around mine. “I didn’t say that.”
My chest caved in around something dangerously close to relief.
I stayed exactly where I was.
Outside my bedroom, the house grew louder by degrees, the muffled crash of male voices and footsteps beginning somewhere below us.
The world was waking up. My life was still out there.
Hockey, scouts, expectations, cameras, noise, every sharp-edged thing waiting to pull at me the second I opened my door.
But in my bed, Bliss breathed slowly against my arm, and for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, I didn’t feel like I was bracing for impact.
I felt still.
Raw.
Spent.
Terrified.
Hers.