Chapter Fourteen #2
He doesn’t rush. This is the thing about Reece that undoes me every time.
His patience, the way he moves with the same deliberate precision he brings to everything, the total absence of urgency in the hands that map my body as though he has all the time in the world and intends to use every second of it.
His mouth traces down my collarbone, across my sternum, and I arch up into him with a sharp intake of breath.
“You’re thinking,” he murmurs against my skin.
“I am not.”
“You are.” He raises his head and looks at me with those eyes that see too much. “Stop.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Yes, you can.” He brings his mouth back to mine, slow and certain, one hand sliding into my hair and the other pressing warm and flat against my ribs, grounding me. “I’ve got you. Stop thinking and feel me.”
Something releases. Some last tightly held thing in the center of my chest that has been clenched since the day I rolled my eyes at fifty thousand people chanting his name and got myself into this entire extraordinary disaster.
I stop thinking.
Never in my life have I felt the things my body does with Reece.
There’s no other honest way to say it. I’ve told myself the difference is accumulation, weeks of tension, the specific electricity of wanting something you’ve told yourself you can’t have, but lying underneath him with his hands moving over me as if he has memorized every frequency, I understand it isn’t accumulation.
It’s him. The specific, unrepeatable fact of him.
He knows where I need him before I know myself. Knows when to be gentle and when gentle is the wrong word entirely. Knows the precise point at which I stop being Ava-who-manages-everything and become something simpler and more true, a body that wants, feels, and responds without apology.
When he moves into me, I exhale his name.
He stills. His forehead drops to my temple. “Okay?”
“More than okay.” My hands find his back, pull him closer. “Don’t stop.”
He doesn’t stop.
The rhythm he sets is deliberate, deep, impossibly precise, and this is the word my brain keeps returning to—precise—because it’s what he is at everything, and in this context, it undoes me completely.
Every movement is calculated not for his satisfaction but for mine.
Every shift of his hips finds the angle that draws a sound from me, noting it, returning to it, building something I feel in my spine, behind my eyes, and in the soles of my feet.
“Reece…”
“I know.” Low against my ear. “I’ve got you.”
His hand moves between us, and I gasp, my back arching off the mattress. He takes the changed angle and uses it, hitting something so precisely right that my entire body locks up for a suspended half second before it starts to unravel.
“There,” he murmurs, and does it again, and again.
The repetition of it is devastating, the way he catalogs me the same way he cataloged my coffee order, my food preference, and every small thing I mentioned once and assumed he’d forgotten.
He doesn’t forget. He finds what works, and he returns to it with absolute reliability, each thrust finding that exact point inside me until I stop being capable of tracking anything outside this room, this bed, this man.
“I can’t.” My fingers dig into his shoulders. “Reece, I—”
“Come on.” His voice is rough, unwinding at the edges. “Let go.”
I let go.
The climax tears through me like something I didn’t consent to, enormous and rolling, starting at the center of me and radiating outward in waves until I feel it in my jaw, my fingertips, and the backs of my knees.
I cry out, and Reece keeps moving, keeps finding that spot, each thrust extending it beyond the point I thought possible, drawing out the pleasure in long, unspooling waves that crest and crest again before they begin to soften.
I’ve never come like this in my life.
I didn’t know it was possible to come like this.
I’m still trembling when I feel him shudder, a full-body surrender, his hips driving deep, his arms gathering me to his chest as though he needs the contact the same way I do.
The sound he makes is rough, private, and I press my lips to his shoulder and hold on through it.
The feeling of his climax moving through him, the tension, the release, and the shaking exhale at the end does something to my chest that has nothing to do with the physical.
He is completely undone.
For a man who controls everything, his image, his performance, the precise velocity and placement of every pitch he throws, he is entirely, gloriously undone, and I did that.
I feel it like a revelation.
He rolls to his side, pulling me with him, and I go, folding into him the way I do now without thinking, my head finding the exact angle between his chest and shoulder as though it was made for it.
His arms wrap around me, not loosely, not casually, but with intention, as if he’s checked I’m still here and decided to keep me close.
My entire body is warm and replete in a way I have no previous reference for. His hand moves through my hair. The string lights cast everything in an amber glow. His heartbeat under my ear is still elevated, still coming down, and I match my breathing to it without deciding to.
“Ava.” My name in his voice, low, wrecked in the best possible way.
“Yeah.”
“I—” He stops.
I wait.
The hand in my hair stills. I feel him consider it, feel the weight of the words he’s choosing between the ones he’s decided and the question of whether now is the moment. His chest expands on a slow breath.
He shakes his head, the smallest movement, as if he’s decided against the words. Instead, he brings his lips to my forehead and closes his eyes, and the thing he doesn’t say fills the room anyway.
I feel it in both hands still holding me, in the careful way he breathes, and in the adoration on his face, unguarded and unperformed. It’s the version of Reece Steele that exists only in this room, at this hour, with no audience, no cameras, and nothing to manage.
He looks at me as if I am the only thing worth looking at.
Like he has been waiting to look at me for longer than he can rationally account for.
Like whatever he almost said is so large he can’t find the right shape for it yet, so instead, he holds me with both arms and lets the feeling be the sentence.
I close my eyes and let it be enough.
Afterward, we stay tangled together in the amber light. His hand traces the line of my shoulder. My head is on his chest, his heartbeat slowing under my ear into something steady and reliable.
“You almost said something,” I say into the quiet.
A pause. “I did.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Timing.” His hand keeps moving. “I’ll say it when it won’t terrify you.”
“What makes you think it would terrify me?”
“Because you’d immediately think of twelve reasons it was too soon and build a whole case against it before I’d finished the sentence.”
I open my mouth.
Close it.
“That’s fair,” I admit.
He presses his lips to the top of my head. “I know,” he says it gently, without any of the usual amusement. “When you’re ready, I’ll say it. You’ll know it’s coming.”
The certainty in his voice does something to me I can’t name yet. I press my hand flat to his chest, breathe, and decide to stop cataloging this particular feeling and simply let it exist.
This is new for me.
It’s terrifying in the specific way good things are terrifying.
I close my eyes.
His phone buzzes.
The first time, neither of us moves. It’s a single notification, easily ignored.
The second time, I feel his chest tighten beneath my palm before the sound registers.
The third, fourth, and fifth times come in rapid succession, the specific staccato of multiple alerts arriving within seconds of each other, the pattern of something spreading rather than something singular.
I sit up.
Reece is already reaching for his phone on the nightstand, and I watch his face in the glow of the screen.
He has excellent control over his expressions.
I’ve noted this, cataloged it, and used it as information during sessions when I needed to know how he was handling pain.
He doesn’t flinch visibly. He processes quietly.
But I’ve been studying his face for weeks, and I know the difference between his neutral and his controlled. What I see right now is controlled, with something underneath it that hasn’t decided yet whether it’s going to be anger or damage management.
“What is it?” I ask.
He sits up, hands me the phone.
The screen shows a sports blog I’ve never heard of, with a large enough following to matter.
The post is time-stamped eleven minutes ago.
The photograph is grainy, shot from across the street at night, but entirely clear enough, the angle of the studio door, the streetlight, a man in a Wildcats cap stepping out of Ink District at eleven forty-seven on a Tuesday.
Reece. Leaving my studio.
The caption below it reads…
Is Wildcats ace, Reece Steele, receiving special treatment from a connected insider?
Sources confirm the coach’s daughter runs Ink District Studio, where Steele has been a regular late-night visitor.
With contract negotiations underway, questions are being raised about favoritism, distraction, and what exactly is being traded for access.
#Wildcats #ReeceSteel30 #CoachBishop
I read it twice.
Then I set the phone face down on the bed and get up.
My robe is on the back of the door. I put it on because I need the armor of having something on, some layer between my skin and the specific quality of exposure I’m currently feeling.
I stand at my bedroom window, looking down at the street below.
It’s empty, ordinary, the same street it was an hour ago, and I try to locate myself inside this moment.
‘Coach’s daughter.’
‘Special treatment.’
‘What exactly is being traded for access?’