Chapter 23 - Wren #2
I am entirely here for this. Not floating above myself, not watching from a careful distance.
Every nerve in my body is reporting in. The warm pressure of his hands holding my hips steady.
The heat of his mouth. The way the daybed is slightly too narrow and I don't care, have completely stopped caring.
He slides one finger inside me.
The sound I make is embarrassing and I don't care about that either.
He curls his finger forward, finding the angle, and the sensation coils tight and hot low in my belly. A second finger joins the first, stretching me open, and his tongue keeps its rhythm, and I feel the orgasm assembling itself from somewhere deep and urgent —
"Logan —"
He doesn't slow. His fingers crook and press and his tongue applies exactly the right pressure and I break apart completely, gasping into the quiet room, my hand fisting in his hair, my whole body shaking with the force of it.
He stays with me through every second — patient, thorough, drawing it out until I'm trembling and oversensitive and have to pull him away by his hair because I can't take any more.
He looks up at me.
His chin resting on my inner thigh. His eyes, in this moment, are nothing like the predator's appraisal and nothing like the controlled blank. Just him — the version behind the mask, the version he showed me when his hands were shaking in the dark.
"Come here," I manage.
He moves up over my body, his weight settling alongside me, and I reach for his boxers.
My left hand is still clumsy but I'm not stopping now, and he helps without making it a thing, and then the last barrier is gone and he's alongside me and I can feel the full length of him against my hip — thick, hard, the heat of him against my skin.
The want that moves through me is immediate and total.
I get my left hand on his chest. Run my palm over his body, over the scars I've memorized in graphite. I trail my fingers down his stomach, feeling the muscle jump beneath my touch.
My hand reaches down and wraps around his cock.
He exhales, sharp. He's thick in my grip, fully hard, and when I stroke him slowly from base to tip his whole body goes taut. I do it again. His hand comes up and covers mine, not stopping me, just holding. Present.
"Wren." My name in his mouth, rough at the edges.
"Master," I say, feeling an odd thrill that has nothing to do with fear.
I guide him toward me. He positions himself and pauses — looks at me once, the question in it — and I answer by pulling him closer.
He pushes inside me.
Both of us still.
The fullness of it is almost too much to process. He's all the way inside me and neither of us is moving and I can feel my pulse everywhere — in my throat, in my chest, in the places where our bodies are joined — and the connection is so complete that my eyes sting with it.
His forehead drops to mine.
We breathe the same air.
Then he begins to move.
Slow at first — long, deliberate strokes that I feel from some deep center outward, that pull and fill and pull again, building the sensation in expanding rings. I wrap my good arm around his back and hold on, not gripping, just holding. Keeping contact.
He changes the angle and I gasp.
"There." The word comes out before I can stop it, completely undignified. "That."
His mouth curves against my temple. He does it again — deliberately, hitting exactly that place, watching my reaction with those open eyes — and I dig my fingers into his back.
The pace builds. His hands slide to my hips and tilt me to take him deeper and I meet every thrust because I want to, because my body is so far ahead of my mind that any pretense of control abandoned me several minutes ago.
I can hear us — the rhythm, the daybed moving beneath us, my own breathing going ragged.
The sounds I'm making are nothing like quiet, and I'm glad the door is locked and we are in here together making a mess of his controlled office.
I look at his face.
I keep looking. His face right now is the most open I've seen it outside of the dark of his apartment with his hands shaking and no more armor left. Hunger and care, all of it present simultaneously in a face that usually gives nothing away.
It undoes me faster than anything else could.
"I have you," he says, low, against my ear.
Not a command. Not possession. Something that has traveled a long way from the van and the mask and the park. I have you. The tenderness of it, from this man.
The orgasm builds from somewhere deeper than the first one, wider, pulling more of me into it as it rises. I feel my body tightening around him — feel him feel it, hear the change in his breathing — and I hold onto his back and let it come.
It doesn't crash. It opens.
Wide and deep and total, moving through me in waves that keep going, my whole body shaking with it, and it would be only physical if that was all there was but it isn't, it isn't close to all there is.
Something else crests in the same wave — enormous and undeniable, filling my chest to the point of overflow, stinging my eyes, and I understand it completely even without the word.
The five cities and the temp jobs and the cheap motels and the two-in-the-morning forum posts and the flight to Miami, all of it was pointing here, to this room, to this man, to being this completely and overwhelmingly present inside my own life.
I am not numb.
I am the devastating opposite of numb.
The tears spill over. I don't have the bandwidth to be embarrassed because the orgasm is still moving through me and I am too wrecked for anything except feeling it.
He drives deeper, harder — I feel the control fraying at its edges — and then he buries himself inside me and the shudder that moves through his body is total, uncontrolled, pulled from somewhere he doesn't let anyone reach.
The sound he makes is low and wrecked and real, nothing like the composed register he maintains for the world.
His hands grip my hips hard and then go slack, and he shakes, and I hold him through every second of it, and I watch his face come undone — what it looks like when Logan Cruz stops holding himself together — and I know, with absolute certainty, that I am the only person alive who has seen this.
He pulls me onto his chest.
The warmth of it — his skin under my cheek, still flushed, his heartbeat loud and fast against my ear. His arms come around me, not possessive or urgent, just present. Holding. His hand moves in slow arcs across my back, unhurried.
I lie still and listen to his heart slow.
The tears dried on my face somewhere in the last few minutes. He didn't comment on them.
"Are you warm enough?" he asks, after a while.
The domesticity of it. This man. This question.
"Yes."
His hand keeps moving on my back.
Everything is perfect, I think.
Outside the locked door, the war waits exactly where we left it.