Chapter Ten #2
His mouth finds mine again, and everything else fades away. There’s no media, no Coach Bishop, no complications. There’s only this. Us. The way we fit together, the way he touches me with this mix of confidence and wonder, the way I feel completely safe and completely wild at the same time.
His hands map my body, learning every curve, every sensitive spot. When he kisses down my stomach, I thread my fingers through his hair, and he looks up at me with so much heat I forget how to breathe.
“Ava,” he says, voice rough. “I need you to know something.”
“What?”
“This isn’t casual for me. It never was.” His hand splays across my ribs, right over my racing heart. “I’m all in. Completely. And if you’re not there yet, tell me now, because I’m about two seconds away from losing any remaining control I have.”
I could deflect. Make a joke. Keep my walls up even now.
Instead, I say, “I’m all in too.”
The smile that crosses his face is devastating. Then he’s kissing me again, his hands are everywhere, and I’m arching into him, completely surrendering to this. To him. To us.
“Reece,” I gasp.
“I’ve got you.”
And he does.
He absolutely does.
Reece moves down my body, fingers curl around my shorts and underwear, and he pulls them down my legs as he stands. He drops them to the floor, then kicks off his sweats. His cock is huge and completely erect.
“Your turn.”
“For what?” I rise to my elbows.
“Lie back,” Reece orders.
“Bossy.”
His hand strokes his cock and smiles. “You love it.”
Before I can argue, a wicked smile crosses his face. Reece grabs my ankles, causing me to fall back, dragging me to the edge of the bed.
“Reece!”
He drops to his knees and laughs. “You’re so beautiful.”
Whatever I was going to say dies on my tongue when he kisses the inside of my thigh and places it on his shoulder.
Reece swivels his head and kisses the inside of my other thigh, but this time I place my leg on his shoulder.
“Good girl.”
Then his mouth is on me. His tongue flicks my clit, and he sucks. A gasp escapes me as he explores my body. His hands grip my ass as he devours me. The roughness of his stubble adds to the friction he’s creating between my thighs.
With wanton abandon, I rock against his face, my eyes closed as every sense and nerve ending is focused on what he’s doing to me. Reece inserts a finger, then two, and I feel myself building toward a release.
This man knows what he’s doing as he sucks and probes my pussy. Another finger is inserted, he stops what he’s doing with his mouth, and my eyes open on a whimper. He’s staring at my pussy as his fingers move in and out of me.
“I need more,” I plead.
“And you’ll get more.”
Reece puts all of his fingers inside me as his thumb circles my clit. My body adjusts to the intrusion, but it’s not enough.
“I need your mouth.”
“I know. Relax, Ava. Let me love you, and I promise you’ll have a good time.”
Reece removes his hand and licks his fingers.
“You taste sweet, and you’re so wet for me, Ava.”
“Reece, please,” I beg.
He smiles, looks down at my pussy, and carefully inserts his whole hand, then slowly moves it in and out of me. It is a full feeling, but I need more. And as if he can sense what I want, he lowers his head and sucks my clit while moving his hand in and out.
“More.” I grip the bed sheets and move in time with his hand. “Faster.”
Reece’s tongue flicks over my clit and sucks as he presses his hand in farther, and it’s then that my body detonates.
The orgasm washes through me, and I’m chanting his name like a prayer.
He’s sucking and pumping in and out of me, and I keep on coming.
I’ve never come this hard in my life. The feeling of fullness and the pressure of his mouth on my pussy feels as though it’s never going to end.
I rock harder into him, and I swear my body reaches a new level of pleasure.
Reece drags his chin over my clit and sucks again. The pain and then the pleasure course through me until I’m a crying mess. He doesn’t stop until he’s pulled every last tremor from my body. Slowly, he removes his hand and kisses his way to my lips.
“Are you okay?” Reece whispers.
With tears still wet on my cheeks, I nod, unable to form words. It feels as though my body is vibrating.
“Too much?”
I try to smile and shake my head.
“Want more?”
He looks vulnerable and suddenly unsure.
I cup his face and kiss him. “I want you,” I murmur.
“You’re so beautiful.”
His cock is hard and pressed against my stomach.
“What do you want?” I whisper.
“I want you to ride me.”
My body is trembling from pleasure. Reece moves up the bed, and with unsteady limbs, I straddle him.
There’s no embarrassment, but I swear my legs are shaking so hard, I don’t know how I managed it.
Gripping my headboard to steady myself, I position his cock at my entrance and lower myself onto him.
Not only is he huge, but his cock is thick.
It takes a second for me to adjust to the feel of him, and then I rock my hips.
Reece lets out a growl, and his hands go to my hips. “Dammit, Ava, you feel so good.” His hand moves to cup my breast and tease my nipple as I ride him. Reece flexes upward, and I gasp in pleasure, moving faster. “Ava, look at me.”
One of my hands moves to his chest as I ride him harder. My fingernails dig in as we keep eye contact. The hand on my breast moves down between us as his thumb presses against my clit.
“Reece!”
“Come for me again, Ava. Come for me as you ride my cock.”
His thumb presses harder, and I shatter.
It tears through me faster than I expect, a hot, rolling wave that starts where he’s touching me and spreads until I feel it in my throat, behind my eyes, in the soles of my feet.
I cry out, my hips stuttering, losing the rhythm I’ve been holding, and Reece grips me, holding me steady while my entire body comes apart on top of him.
“I’ve got you,” he says, low and certain.
I believe him. God help me, I believe him.
He keeps moving beneath me, drawing it out, his hips rolling up in slow, deep strokes that hit somewhere so precise I can’t catch my breath between one pulse of pleasure and the next.
My nails dig into his chest. I feel him watch me with his focused, patient attention that undoes me, and I stop caring what I look like, stop managing any of it, and simply feel.
“Look at me,” he says again, quieter this time. Not an order. A request.
I open my eyes.
He’s watching my face the way he watches the strike zone. Nothing else in the world exists. I’m the only thing worth reading.
Something cracks open in my chest that has nothing to do with the orgasm still echoing through me.
“Reece.” His name comes out differently this time. No warning in it. Just him.
“Yeah,” he says, and he hears the difference too.
I lean down and kiss him deeply and slowly.
It’s nothing like our first kiss outside the studio or the desperate, stolen things we’ve managed in the weeks since.
This one says something I don’t have words for yet.
He makes a sound against my mouth, low and undone, his hands sliding from my hips up my back and pulling me closer as if he can’t get enough of the contact.
I roll my hips and feel him shudder.
His control, the thing he wears like armor, the thing that makes him legendary on the mound, is gone. All of it. He’s just a man with his hands in my hair, his eyes closed, and his breath ragged against my lips.
I did that. Me.
The thought is heady and soft at the same time, and I chase it by moving again, finding the rhythm we lost, setting it back on my own terms this time, slower, deeper, watching his jaw work and his chest rise and fall.
“Ava.” Wrecked. My name has never sounded like that before.
“I’ve got you,” I say back, using his own words. He opens his eyes, and the look on his face does something to me I’m not ready to name.
I rock forward, change the angle, and he groans and grips the sheets.
“Don’t stop,” he commands.
“I’m not stopping.”
I keep moving and kiss his jaw, throat, and that spot below his ear I’ve cataloged carefully. He tilts his head back, throat exposed, every line of him surrendered, and I feel the exact moment his body stops holding back.
He comes with my name on his breath and both arms wrapped around me, pulling me flush against his chest, and I feel every second of it, the tension, the release, the shudder that moves all the way through him and into me.
I press my lips to his shoulder and hold on, and he buries his face in my hair.
We stay like that, tangled and breathing hard, until the room stops spinning.
The string lights are warm above us.
The city hums somewhere outside the window.
And neither of us speaks for a long time.
His hand strokes up my spine slowly, thoughtlessly, and tenderly, the way you touch something you want to keep.
“You still waiting for the other shoe?” he murmurs into my hair.
I press my hand flat to his chest and feel his heartbeat slowing, steadying underneath the tattoo I haven’t put on him yet. I’m going to ink underneath his ribs in a week and a half. Underneath whatever this is that I haven’t named because naming things makes them real, and real things can break.
But then, with his heartbeat steady under my palm, I say, “Less than I was.”
He pulls me closer, and I let him.
Much later, we’re tangled together in my sheets. My head is on his chest, his fingers tracing lazy patterns on my shoulder. The string lights cast everything in a soft glow, and I’ve never felt more content.
“I’m tattooing you,” I say into the silence.
His hand pauses. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I know what I want to design.” I prop myself up on an elbow, looking down at him. “It’s going to hurt. Ribs are sensitive.”
“I can handle it.”
“And it’s going to take multiple sessions. This isn’t something I can finish in an hour.”
“I’ve got time.”
“And you can’t complain if you don’t like the design. Once I start, I’m finishing it my way.”
“I wouldn’t dream of complaining.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “When do we start?”
“Next week. I’ll need time to refine the design and get the stencil ready.”
“Whatever you need.”
I settle back against his chest, and his arms wrap around me. This should terrify me. The intimacy, the commitment, and the fact that I’m agreeing to permanently mark his body with my art, but all I feel is certainty.
“Reece?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for driving over, even with the inside-out shirt and the disaster hair.”
He laughs, the sound rumbling through his chest. “Thank you for texting, even though you deleted the message fifteen times before sending it.”
“How did you—”
“I know you, Ava. You overthink everything.”
“Not everything.”
“Most things.” He presses a kiss to the top of my head. “But not this. Tonight, you didn’t overthink. You chose what you wanted and went for it.”
He’s right. For once, I didn’t calculate the risks or map the escape routes. I wanted him here, and I made it happen.
“I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop,” I admit quietly.
“I know.”
“What if it does?”
“Then we’ll handle it. Together.” His arms tighten around me. “But, Ava? I’m betting there is no other shoe. I’m betting this is real, and good, and everything we’re both too scared to name yet.”
“You can’t know what.”
“Watch me.”
I close my eyes, breathing in the scent of him, feeling the steady rhythm of his heartbeat beneath my cheek. He’s probably right. This is real. This matters. And for the first time in years, I’m ready to stop running from it.
“Stay,” I whisper.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
And for tonight, with his arms around me and my walls completely demolished, I believe him.