Chapter Nineteen. Mackenzie #2
I let out another laugh. Sam’s eyes stay steady and resolved on mine.
“Damn if I wasn’t right about both,” he says. “I admired you. I was scared of you. Hell, sometimes I still am.”
Those eyes are still on mine and I want—god, I want too much. I want to be loved by him so badly, but I know if I let him, it will be terminal. I could come back from the others. I don’t think I could ever come back from him.
But if I don’t take this chance, I’ll never know.
“I don’t want to be scared anymore,” I breathe.
His expression cracks long enough for me to see something I recognize. That quiet line between hope and fear. I’ve been straddling it for so long, and never once thought he was on it with me.
Maybe this means as much to him as it does to me. Maybe, for the first time, I’m not falling alone.
He buries his face in my neck. “You’ve got nothing to be scared of,” he tells me, pressing the words into my skin like a promise.
I don’t trust promises, but I trust Sam. I always have. Our rivalry wouldn’t have lasted a second if it hadn’t been there—that quiet understanding. That inherent faith.
It isn’t quiet anymore. I lift my hips, searching for him, needing him. All of him. Like something was sealed that day we first met and it’s high time we get to collect.
“Have you got a—” he starts, and when I shake my head, he says, “Hold on,” and comes back from the bathroom with a condom. He approaches the edge of the bed, his eyes near starved, but I lift my bare foot up to catch him by the chest.
I’m not afraid of this. But now I’m something else entirely.
“Sit,” I command, shifting my gaze to the top of the bed.
He raises his eyebrows, but does as he’s told. I wait until he’s settled on the pillows, raking my eyes up and down his body, the lightning briefly illuminating the sheen of sweat on his skin. I ease myself on top of him, hovering just above his lap.
“Don’t move,” I say, lowering myself. Just the tip of him against my entrance is enough to make my breath hitch in my throat, but I stay in command. Slowly, slowly, watching the high flush in his cheeks and the rise of his chest as he tries with impossible effort to stay still.
I slide farther down, opening myself up to him, feeling every slow, pulsing inch of him fill me. That look is in his eyes again, but this time I let it wash over me. Let it anchor me.
I wrap my hand around the back of his neck, lifting up one pinky off the top of his spine. Tap. He’s still watching me, not catching on yet. Tap. He blinks slightly. Stirs. Tap.
“You wouldn’t,” he pants. “Mackenzie. Don’t make me beg.”
“Then you better tell me what you want,” I say, pressing the fourth tap into him with more pressure than any of the others.
The rivalry may have just ended. But the games have just begun.
“Please,” he says, his hands on either side of my face, then burying themselves into the thick tangle of my curls. “You have no idea how good you feel. Please, Mackenzie, please—”
I settle the last tap just as I slide the last few inches, taking him all the way inside me.
We both gasp at the suddenness of the plunge.
I rock on top of him, the sensation so consuming that I dig my palms into his chest to anchor myself.
He’s got me by the ribs, steadying our rhythm, every thrust so satisfying that I have to bury my face in his neck to muffle my own noise.
“No,” he says. “I want to hear you.”
I’m stunned there’s anything to hear at all. Nobody has ever made me sound like this. I’ve done this before, I’ve done all of this before, but never imagined how much more of me there was to feel.
Our foreheads meet and we’re scorching against each other, sweat pooling from my hairline, mingling with his.
Another bolt of lightning streaks light, and I see it in his face, too—the shock and the reverence.
The impossibility and the inevitability.
The way we never could have imagined this moment, but it was never going to lead anywhere but this.
He pushes my damp hair off my shoulders and kisses me. “Beautiful,” he murmurs.
He tightens his grip on my ribs, slowly sliding out of me.
I let out a choked noise at the temporary loss of him, putty in his hands as he eases me onto my back on the mattress.
When he settles himself above me this time it isn’t with urgency, but intensity.
We must be in the eye of the storm; everything is quiet but our rasping breaths and my heart thrumming all over my body.
There are no quips and comebacks. Not one word left to hide behind.
He never once takes his eyes off mine as he slides back into me and we set a new pace, one that starts deliciously slow before it builds—a quiet verse building up to a thundering chorus—a swell that starts low and pitches higher, and higher still, until it starts to peak.
“Sam, Sam, Sam,” I gasp, louder than I’ve ever been, his name chased by words I’ve never said to anyone before: I love you, I love you, I love you.
It’s the sweetest, most terrifying, most divine thought I have ever had. It brings a crest of pleasure so intense that all I can manage is a whimper, like my body can’t fully fathom it.
His voice is rough in my ear, so ragged that I know he’s close to coming himself. “I’ve got you,” he says. “Always.”
For the second time that night, I’m entirely unprepared for the crash of my own orgasm.
My body trembles through the crest and aftershocks, Sam clutching me against him as he follows just behind with a deep moan.
He buries his face into my hair as he pushes in and out of me, giving me the strangest out-of-body sense that maybe we are in some new infinity—that we’ll never stop feeling this—that we’ve reached a peak impossible to climb down from.
Then there’s the comforting weight of him on top of me, and his lips between my brows again, on the tip of my nose.
Then there’s the few minutes we lie there, trying to catch our breath, sneaking glances at each other and smiling like we’ve got some new secret between us that nobody in the world will ever understand.
Then there’s Sam sitting up and hoisting me by the elbows, leading us to the bathroom where we wash each other in the shower, slow and gentle in the warm spray.
The rain is still pattering on the window outside when we ease back into bed. I press my forehead into his collarbone and he wraps his arms around me, pulling me in as I breathe in that burnt-honey smell of him.
For the first time, I’m not tempted to lie awake and wonder. I have nothing I need to say, and nothing I need to hear. I feel it already, in the steady beat of his heart against my open palm. In the way his knuckles stroke the top of my spine, a gentle up and down, lulling like a tide.
My eyes slide shut, but my lips are still moving. I let myself mouth the words one time—the lyrics I chased these past few weeks, but could never catch until now: I love you.
They wash over us so sweetly that I’m still smiling as they carry me to sleep.