Chapter Seven #2
He kissed me hard, one hand cupping the back of my skull, holding me exactly where he wanted me.
I made a sound against his mouth—not quite a moan, something closer to relief—and didn’t bother being embarrassed about it.
The kiss was thorough and unhurried, leaving no ambiguity about who was in charge.
I’d been kissed before—had had sex before, had been in relationships that lasted long enough to leave marks—but never like this. Never with the certainty that came with it, the absolute focus of a man who knew exactly what he wanted and wasn’t afraid to ask for it.
My hands found his shoulders, his chest, the solid warmth of him beneath my palms. Something that had been wound tight in my body for months—since Nebraska, since the job, since what had been done to me—started to come loose with each point of contact.
Decker pulled back just enough to really look at me, eyes doing a quick assessment that took in my face, my breathing, the set of my body beneath him. His thumb traced the fading bruise on my cheekbone with a gentleness that was almost harder to take than the roughness had been.
“You’re sure?” he asked again, voice rough at the edges.
I nodded, not trusting my voice, and pulled him back down to me.
His mouth found my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder—working down with focused patience that made my skin burn wherever he touched.
He got my shirt off with quick, efficient movements, then spent a long moment on my nipples—tongue and teeth and the pressure of his palm that had me gripping the sheets and breathing in pieces.
He looked up at me from there, something satisfied in his expression, then kept going—down my ribs, across my stomach, the flat of his tongue tracing the line from my navel to the waistband of my sleep pants.
By the time he got his hand on my cock, I was already half out of my mind, hips moving without permission, the omega heat I usually kept tamped down with suppressants rising warm and insistent under my skin.
Decker stroked me slow and deliberate, watching my face the entire time—reading each reaction, adjusting pressure and speed based on what he saw there.
I got my hand on his cock in return—thick and heavy and already slick at the tip—and the sound he made against my throat was the most honest thing I’d heard from him yet.
He reached for the nightstand without being asked, one hand still working between us, and found the small bottle of lube I’d tucked there out of old habit and a hope I hadn’t admitted to myself. The look on his face when he held it up was brief and warm and knowing.
“Planning ahead?” he asked, voice rough at the edges.
“Shut up,” I said, the words coming out with more breath than voice.
He worked me open with the same focused patience he brought to everything—one finger, then two, slow and thorough, watching my face for the shift from tension to want. When he hit the spot that made my back arch off the mattress, his smile was brief but satisfied.
“Stop being careful,” I said, the words coming out more as a demand than I’d intended.
He added a third finger and crooked them just so, and I stopped talking entirely, one hand fisted in his hair, the other braced against his shoulder.
When he finally pushed inside, it was slow and full and I had to breathe through the stretch of it, both hands fisted, forehead tipped against his jaw. He went completely still, giving me a moment, the muscles in his arms trembling with the effort of holding himself back.
“You okay?” he asked, voice so rough I barely recognized it.
I nodded, rolling my hips to prove it, and he exhaled hard against my throat and started to move—the roughness coming back then, the weight of him, the grip of his hands on my hips, the pace building until the headboard was making noise against the wall and I had stopped caring about anything except the specific pressure of Decker’s body driving into mine.
I came with his hand wrapped around my cock and his mouth pressed against my temple, the rightness of it washing through me in waves that left me boneless and gasping.
Decker followed a few strokes later with a low sound I felt more than heard, his body going rigid above mine, then softening as the tension left him all at once.
We lay tangled and breathing in the dark, the farmhouse still quiet around us.
Decker’s weight was solid and warm against me, his breath evening out as his heart rate slowed.
I expected him to move—to extract himself, to put space between us, to treat what had just happened as the exception rather than a new normal.
He didn’t. Instead, he shifted slightly, pulling me against his chest with the same careful consideration he’d shown before, one arm across my back, hand resting at the base of my neck where it met my spine.
“This okay?” he asked, voice back to its normal register.
I nodded against his chest, not trusting my voice, and felt him relax slightly—the release of tension that came with a decision being made and accepted.
We lay like that as my breathing slowed and my heart rate returned to something approaching normal. The silence of a thing that had shifted and couldn’t be shifted back settled around us—not uncomfortable, but carrying its own weight.
Decker’s heartbeat under my ear was steady, his breathing even.
For the first time in longer than I could account for, I didn’t feel like something that needed to be survived.
Didn’t feel like a problem that needed solving or a situation that needed managing.
Just a person in a bed with another person, the strange rightness of it settling into my bones.
I fell asleep there, one hand fisted on Decker’s chest, his heartbeat the last thing I was aware of before consciousness slipped away. For the first time since Nebraska, my body believed, if only for a few hours, that it was safe.