Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
DANIEL
I was dreaming about Ellie.
This wasn’t new. The dreams had started the night of our wedding.
The day of the kiss I hadn’t been able to scrub from my memory no matter how many shifts I’d worked or how many cold showers I’d taken.
They were warm, persistent things, soft at the edges, the kind that dissolved the moment I reached for them but left something behind that took far longer to shake.
A residue. A wanting that had no clean place to go.
I’d been telling myself they didn’t mean anything with the same dogged conviction I’d been telling myself everything else didn’t mean anything.
Which was to say not much conviction at all.
This one didn’t dissolve.
Her body was warm against my chest, her back tucked flush against my front, her hair spilling across the pillow and tickling my face.
Awareness trickled in slowly, the way it does in the deep hours of the night, reaching my body long before it reached my brain.
My arms were already around her, one snaked beneath her pillow, the other spread wide and low across her stomach.
Her shirt had rucked up at the hem, ridden up in sleep, and the skin it exposed was warm beneath my palm.
Warmer than anything I had a framework for. Warmer than I was prepared for.
And she was moving.
Slowly. With the unguarded, liquid ease of someone caught in that narrow space between sleeping and waking, her hips rolling back against me in a rhythm so unhurried and instinctive that it bypassed every careful, reasonable thing I’d spent the last several weeks constructing and shot straight to the base of my spine.
The obvious animal response was to meet her, to fall into that rhythm and press my straining erection against the soft heat between her thighs.
And oh, fuck, yes—that felt incredible. Better than it had any right to.
Better than anything I wanted to examine too closely.
I wasn’t thinking. That was the honest answer.
There was no cognition happening in any meaningful sense, no internal voice doing its usual reasonable work.
There was only the warmth of her body against mine, the smell of her hair in my face, the small, barely there sound she made when my hand spread lower across her stomach and dipped beneath the waistband of her sleep shorts, curling around the heat waiting there.
Following some instinct I couldn’t have defended, couldn’t have named, and could not, in that moment, have stopped for anything in the world.
She rocked back harder.
My arm pulled her closer without a single conscious thought behind it, some deep muscle memory of wanting her close overriding every reasonable instinct I had left.
I pressed my mouth against the back of her neck, into the warm tangle of her hair, tasting the faint salt of sleep on her skin, and she exhaled—a long, uneven breath that undid something in me I hadn’t fully known was still holding together.
Something I’d been quietly bracing for weeks, the way you brace a wall that’s already cracking, telling yourself it’s fine, it’ll hold.
Her hand came back and found my hip. Gripped it, her fingers digging into my flesh with a certainty that she wasn’t even aware of yet, and I felt it deeper than my body because it meant I was awake.
I was awake. And she wasn’t.
“Ellie.” Her name came out low and rough and barely recognizable as my own voice, scraped raw and stripped of everything I usually kept layered over it when I said her name.
She stilled for one suspended second, every slow, rolling movement going suddenly motionless.
She came fully awake in that stillness. Recognition moved through her like something shifting beneath still water.
The awareness of precisely where we were, what was happening, what her body had been doing without her consent or knowledge.
I braced for it. The retreat. The composure.
The efficiency with which Ellie Granger had always been able to take something unexpected and quietly convert it into something she could manage and file away and never speak of again.
She pressed back against me instead.
Deliberate. Unhurried and unambiguous, fully awake, fully aware. And whatever remained of my good intentions dissolved the same way the last of my sleep had, leaving nothing behind but the heat of her body against mine and the soft, unsteady sound of both of us breathing.
My hand moved with her, tracing her cleft to find her soaked.
I groaned as she bucked into my hand. She turned her face into the pillow and made a sound I was going to hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
I pressed my mouth to her shoulder, her neck, the soft place behind her ear that made her grip my hip harder and pull, and I understood that completely, that need for something to hold on to, because I was feeling it too.
I’d been feeling it for weeks. Longer, maybe, if I was being honest, though the honesty of that was something I’d deal with later when I had the capacity for it. Right now I only had the capacity for this. For whatever heat and pleasure I could bring her in the privacy of this bed.
It wasn’t frantic. After weeks of circling and denying and filing things under headings that were getting harder and harder to maintain, if I’d ever dared let myself imagine this, I would’ve pictured more urgency.
Something desperate and tumbling, hands and breath and the relief of finally, finally.
But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t urgent at all.
The tension between us built the way a wave builds out at sea, slow and deep and inevitable, rising and stretching and gathering itself with a patience that seemed less like wanting and more like arriving somewhere I hadn’t known I’d been headed until I was already there.
Like relief. Like setting something heavy down after carrying it so long you’d forgotten the weight had a name.
I delved a finger into her wetness, drawing it up and around her clit over and over until she whimpered a quiet, “More,” that would’ve happily made me fall to my knees to do anything she asked.
But that would require moving from this spot, and I wouldn’t have done that for a gun to my head.
Shifting the angle of my hand, I nudged a finger inside her.
Her walls clamped greedily onto me in a way that had my dick pulsing with a firm hell yes.
I didn’t have to ask Ellie if she was okay.
She widened her legs to let me in deeper, and I sent prayers of thanks up to every deity I could think of as she rode my hand and rocked back against my cock seeking more friction, more heat, more of me.
I slid in a second finger and drank down her gasp of pleasure, filing it away to carry for the rest of my days.
Her head bowed back, and her breath shortened into pants.
I pulled her even closer, curving the arm under her pillow around her chest and finding one tight nipple and rolling it between my fingers.
She detonated, turning her face into the pillow to muffle her cry as her whole body bucked and shuddered against me in wave after rolling wave.
My dick strained in furious protest that it was his turn, that it was only fair.
I told him to shut the hell up and be grateful he got to be here at all.
This had been for her. A quiet, stolen, early morning miracle we weren’t going to examine too closely or question to death.
Afterward the room settled into a deep stillness, the curtains pale and gauzy with the first thin wash of morning light, and she was still there, still in my arms, her breath coming in uneven heaves, her shoulders pressing back warm and solid against my chest as I gently, carefully eased my fingers free.
Neither of us had moved to create distance. I waited for it, braced for it, even. The reassessment. The careful, methodical reconstruction of reasonable boundaries. The moment one of us cleared their throat and said so in that tone that meant we were going to pretend to be sensible about this.
It didn’t come.
Her hand had found mine where it rested against the soft plane of her stomach. Her fingers lay loose across my knuckles, not gripping, not clutching, just resting there. Just present. Like it was the most natural place in the world for them to be.
“Daniel,” she said after a long while.
“Yeah.”
A pause that stretched out long and unhurried between us.
The bird outside resumed its quiet, persistent song.
The distant sound of a car passing on the street below drifted up and faded again.
The morning was assembling itself piece by piece, with no awareness whatsoever of what had just quietly and irrevocably shifted in this room.
“I don’t know what to do with that.” Nothing but raw, open honesty in her voice.
“You don’t have to do anything with it right now.”
She turned to look at me, and we were close enough that I could read every small, unguarded thing moving across her face.
The soft heaviness of sleep still clinging to her eyes, the flush of color high in her cheeks, the way she was looking at me like she was searching for solid ground and wasn’t entirely sure yet where to plant her feet.
“We should probably talk about it,” she said.
“We probably should,” I agreed. “Later.”
She held my gaze for a moment, something working itself out quietly behind her eyes. Then something in her settled, some small internal decision reaching its conclusion. “Later,” she repeated. “Okay.”
She didn’t move away.
I didn’t move away.
Downstairs, Gus was going to wake up before long and shuffle to the kitchen and want breakfast, and the world was going to reassert itself with all its usual noise and demands and the chaos of a Saturday morning in this house.
We were going to have to figure out what came next.
What this meant. What we were going to do with it, and what it changed, and what it didn’t.
How two people who had known each other since the third grade were supposed to navigate the fact that everything was different now and somehow, impossibly, exactly the same.
But she was warm against me and her fingers were resting easy over mine and the morning light was still soft and pale against the curtains, and for right now, in this quiet pocket of time before the world remembered we existed, that was enough.
Later, I thought, pressing my lips gently to the back of her hair.
We’d figure it out later.