Chapter 6
Chris
I don’t remember deciding to kiss him.
There’s a second—maybe less—between walking out the door and turning back, where all I can feel is the pressure building in my chest like something’s going to snap if I don’t let it out.
And then I’m inside again, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt and dragging his mouth to mine like it’s the only thing tethering me to the present moment.
He doesn’t resist. Doesn’t ask questions. Just opens his mouth and lets me take what I need.
I kiss him like I’m trying to bruise both of us. Like maybe if I take him apart with my mouth, I’ll find whatever part of me I lost in that bed with them last week, that never really came back.
His hands go to my waist, steadying. Guiding. Like he’s bracing himself in case I start to fall.
My hands move fast. Desperate. Under his shirt, peeling it over his head. Then over bare skin, until I feel the scar at his shoulder. Know it’s the one from the bullet he took for Mason. For Nina. It shouldn’t make my stomach tighten, but it does.
I pull away just long enough to look him in the eye.
“Don’t make this mean something,” I rasp.
His brow creases, but he doesn’t argue. Just nods, once. It’s enough.
We stumble backward toward the couch. The boxes are still there—stacked, half-labeled, full of Nina’s life. I fall back into the cushions and he straddles me, pushes me back with another kiss, his mouth grazing across my jaw to my throat.
This isn’t about dominance. It’s about control. Mine, unraveling. His, offered.
I pull him back to my mouth and kiss him again, slower this time. Ever since I came home something inside me has been crumbling. The only time I felt whole again was that night in LA, with him inside me. With Nina’s taste on my lips, my mouth tight against her core.
Whatever held me together didn’t survive the first briefing when I got back to Langley.
I hoped he wouldn’t notice. But of course he did. Like we were still connected.
His hands go to my shoulders, weight pressing down. He’s not directing. Just holding me there, grounding me.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I whisper. “I don’t know how to want this.”
“You don’t have to know,” he says. Soft. Sure. “Just don’t lie about wanting it.”
I exhale through my nose. My head falls back against the cushions. My eyes are closed when I say it. “You gonna make me ask?”
“No,” he murmurs. “But I’d like to hear it anyway.”
I lift my head, rest my forehead against his shoulder, breathe him in. Let the words scrape their way out of me.
“I want you inside me.”
His breath catches. I feel the tremor in his thighs. But when I open my eyes, there’s no hunger in his gaze. Just heat—and something that might be reverence.
“You sure?”
I nod. “I need…”
I trail off. Because the rest is too much.
Wyatt brushes a kiss over my mouth. Stands and takes my hand. Leads me toward the bedroom without another word.
The room smells like her. I almost stop.
But then he squeezes my hand and I remember—
She was the one who opened this door in the first place when she reached for him in that elevator.
When I kissed her in front of him I was claiming territory, making sure he knew who she belonged to.
That I was back to take what was mine all along.
But she had other ideas, and the momentum of her desire caught me up, carried me along.
She’d been the one in charge from the start, a decade earlier.
She was the one in charge that night too.
Now, surrounded by her scent, her belongings, I let go of the hesitation. Strip down to nothing.
Half a beer isn’t enough courage for what comes next and neither is the painful throb of my erection.
Facing this want and knowing it’s coming from me and not the booze is far more difficult.
He takes my hand again, squeezes once. Then he slides his hand up my arm—slow, patient. Every touch deliberate.
He kisses the scars on my chest, tracing each one as if mapping my past to understand where all my triggers are buried.
He presses me back against the sheets like he’s afraid I’ll shatter, but the truth is—I already did.
Maybe in Vicente’s bed, when I learned how to simulate control instead of feeling it.
But this… this isn’t that.
His hand settles flat against my chest. “Stay with me,” he says. “Don’t disappear.”
I nod. It’s all I can manage. Because I want to. Disappear, escape, vanish under the weight of my own needs. Make this about release and nothing more.
But he won’t let me make it impersonal. Goddamn him for making this feel real.
My chest rises and falls too fast, nerves vibrating under skin I can’t seem to settle into.
Wyatt’s gaze roams over me, slow and unhurried, like he’s taking stock of something valuable.
His hands are warm. Broad. They skim down my arms, over my ribs, before they settle on my hips.
He dips his head and brushes a kiss just under my sternum, and I shudder.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs, lips ghosting over my skin.
I nod, but the words catch in my throat.
He kneels between my legs, nudging them apart with a confidence that doesn’t ask permission but still waits for it.
I let my thighs fall open, exposing everything.
There’s no hiding the hard line of my cock, flushed and heavy, curving against my abdomen.
Wyatt’s eyes darken, and he strokes his palm up my thigh before cupping my balls, rolling them with reverent fingers.
“Fuck,” I whisper.
“Beautiful,” he says, like it’s the simplest truth.
Then he leans down and takes me into his mouth.
I arch off the bed, fingers tangling in the sheets as he sucks me deep. His tongue flicks against the underside of my shaft, tracing the vein there. Then he hollows his cheeks and pulls back slow, letting my cock slip from his lips with a wet sound that sends heat flooding my belly.
His eyes meet mine. Holding. Anchoring.
“I want to see you,” he says. “When you come apart.”
My breath shudders out, my voice a gravelly scrape. “You will.”
He kisses the inside of my thigh as he lifts my leg, pushing it up to gain access. Darts his tongue along the crease of my ass. Then again, wetter now, closer to my entrance. My heart stutters.
Wyatt shifts lower, settling between my legs as he lifts them both carefully, hooking one knee over his shoulder, holding the other in a gentle grip. Exposing my hole. I expect him to go for the lube, but he doesn’t. Not yet.
His breath hits my rear opening, warm and damp.
And then he licks.
A single, wet swipe over the tight ring of muscle that makes my spine bow and my cock jump against my stomach.
“Jesus—fuck—”
His hands keep me still. He goes in again, slower this time, tongue circling, then prodding gently as he opens me with careful pressure. He tongues me like he’s learning me. Worshipping. His spit makes everything slick and hot, and when he pulls back, I’m panting, shaking even more.
He grabs the lube from Nina’s nightstand drawer. The snap of the cap is loud in the silence. Hers. Even here, she’s between us.
Wyatt doesn’t hesitate.
He dribbles lube over his fingers and slides one inside me.
I flinch, then groan as the stretch starts to ease. He adds more lube, then a second finger, working me open slow. His free hand strokes my thigh while he murmurs quiet things I barely register—just the rhythm of his voice, the grounding of it.
“Breathe. That’s it…”
I moan when he crooks his fingers and finds the spot that makes stars explode behind my eyes.
“Wyatt—”
“I’ve got you.”
When he pulls his fingers free, I feel the absence like a wound.
Then I hear the rustle of foil.
I glance down. His cock is thick and flushed, long and veined, glistening with lube. He rolls the condom down and pumps once, slicking himself.
Then he looks at me.
“Ready?”
I nod. “Yes. Please—”
He lifts my legs to rest over his shoulders, then leans forward, lining himself up. The head of his cock nudges against my entrance, and I go still. Breath caught. Body wound tight.
Wyatt watches me. I want to look away, but there’s no hiding.
When he finally enters me, it’s not fast.
It’s deliberate. The absolute precision of his first stroke makes me feel like I’m being rewritten from the inside out.
And still—he watches me.
Vicente never did that.
Vicente couldn’t. Because Vicente was always the one on his knees, face in the pillows, chasing whatever ghost he needed to outrun that night.
I groan as the stretch burns, and my eyes squeeze shut.
“Eyes on me,” he says.
I force them open. He’s right there. Face flushed, breathing hard, eyes soft with something that shouldn’t be tenderness, not now. Not with how raw I am. But it is.
And it breaks me.
He bottoms out, hips flush to mine, cock buried inside me. The ache is sharp, but not unkind. I’ve taken worse. But never like this.
Never while being seen.
I lurch up and grip the back of his neck, haul him down into a brutal kiss.
He braces one hand beside my head as we kiss, then remains close as he starts to move—long, measured thrusts that drag against every nerve. My cock rubs against his abs with each motion, leaking steadily. His rhythm deepens, pace building, hips slapping against my ass as he fucks me with purpose.
The entire time, our eyes remain locked, our noses nearly touching, and my heart is lodged in my throat. Because never in my life have I been so laid bare and so seen.
I moan. Loud. Unfiltered.
He grits his teeth. “Touch yourself.”
I do. I wrap my hand around my cock and stroke fast, matching his pace.
“Tell me what you need,” he says, voice rough.
“To come,” I rasp.
“Then come for me.”
His hips snap hard. Once. Twice. He hits that spot again and I explode.
Pleasure rips through me, white-hot and blinding, my come striping my chest in thick ropes. I clench around him, and with a low groan, he follows—buries deep and jerks as he empties himself inside the condom.
We freeze, both shaking. Him with exertion, me with the aftershocks of the seismic shift he caused in my psyche.
When he finally pulls out, he’s gentle. Moves like a man afraid of waking the past. He slips away, comes back with a warm cloth, and wipes me clean with the kind of care that shouldn’t be erotic but is. Because it’s intimate. Because it says: You’re worth tending to.
He lies back down beside me, quiet. Fingers brushing along my ribs, lips along my shoulder—like he’s trying to remind me that I’m still here.
That I made it back.
Eventually, his breathing slows. Deepens. His hand goes still on my chest.
Wyatt sleeps.
I don’t.
I stay there for a while, watching the ceiling, letting his warmth seep into the parts of me still cold. And when I can breathe again, I ease out of bed.
Dress quietly.
Pull the takeout inside.
Slip out the door without a sound. Leaving no note. No goodbye. Only the ghost of his breath still clinging to my skin, and the part of me I left behind.