18. Adriana #2
Nobody has ever done this. William never did this. William took what he wanted and called it enough, and I told myself the emptiness afterward was normal, that intimacy was a thing other women felt and I simply wasn’t built for it.
Knox proves that wrong so thoroughly that my eyes sting.
His mouth moves lower. Down my sternum, across my ribs, and my hand finds his hair again because I need to hold on to a thing that’s real while the rest of me is coming apart. He pauses at my hip, his breath warm against my skin, and lifts his eyes to mine.
The eye contact is deliberate. He holds it, watching me, and the look on his face is the most honest thing I’ve ever seen on him. No mask, no charm, no quip loaded behind his teeth. Just a man looking at a woman he wants, making sure she knows it.
“Your ex,” he says, his voice rough at the edges, “never gave you this.”
It isn’t a question. He can feel it in my body, in the way I tense and brace and have to remind myself to breathe, the muscle memory of a woman who learned to expect nothing and protect herself from the disappointment of wanting more.
“I’m going to show you what you should have had.” His mouth presses to the inside of my hip, and his eyes never leave mine. “And you’re going to let me. Understood?”
I nod, because words have left me entirely.
He holds the eye contact as he moves lower, as his mouth finds the center of me, and the first real touch sends a sound out of my throat that I’ve never made in my life.
My hand tightens in his hair and my back lifts off the bed, and he stays with me, reading every sound and shift, adjusting, learning, relentless in the specific way of a man who has decided that my pleasure is his only project tonight and he intends to be thorough about it.
The world narrows. There is nothing but his mouth and his hands and the steady, patient, devastating attention of a man who is very, very good at this and is choosing to use every bit of it on me.
The tension builds in waves, each one higher than the last, and I stop trying to control the sounds or the trembling or the way my hips move against him.
“Look at me,” he says against my skin, and I do, and the eye contact at this distance, with this much happening to my body, is the most intimate thing I’ve ever experienced.
More than any kiss, more than any touch.
He sees me. Fully. Without armor, without pretense, without the version of myself I’ve been showing the world for thirty years.
When I break, it’s with his name in my mouth and his eyes still on mine, and the release tears through me so completely that for several seconds I forget every wound I’ve been carrying, every scar this year has left, every version of myself that was too afraid to want this.
He rises over me, and when he kisses me I can taste myself on his mouth, and the intimacy of it goes straight through my chest and stays there. My hands find the buttons of his shirt and work them open, pulling it off his shoulders, and underneath he’s warm and solid and real.
“You’re sure?” He’s breathing hard, his forehead against mine.
I pull him to me by the back of his neck. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
He enters me slowly, his eyes on my face the entire time, watching for the moment my expression changes, and when it does he holds there, letting me adjust, his thumb stroking my cheekbone in a gesture so tender it nearly wrecks me.
Then he moves, and my nails dig into his back, and the sound I make is answer enough. He finds a rhythm that builds gradually, reading my body with the same focus he gave everything else, and when I pull him closer, deeper, he gives me exactly what I’m asking for without hesitation.
We move together in the low glow of his bedroom, and I feel present in my own body in a way I haven’t in years, anchored to every point of contact between us, his chest against mine, his hand tangled in my hair, his mouth finding mine between breaths.
The second time I come apart, he’s right there with me, his whole body tensing and then releasing, my name on his lips like a confession.
For a long time afterward, neither of us moves.
His forehead rests against my shoulder, both of us breathing hard, and I trace slow lines down his spine with my fingertips while my pulse settles back to normal.
The diamond stud catches the window light when he turns his head, and I press my mouth to his jaw, near the ear, because I can.
Because he’s here and he stayed and he made me feel wanted in a way I’d stopped believing was possible.
“Rosewood,” he says against my shoulder. Quiet. Almost careful.
“Don’t.” I close my eyes. “Don’t make it into a joke.”
A pause. His hand finds mine on his back, threads his fingers through, and holds.
“I wasn’t going to,” he says.
***
Morning arrives through the window in a long stripe of gold across the bed.
I wake first. Knox is on his stomach beside me, one arm flung out, his face turned toward me in sleep. The diamond is still in his ear. His shirt is still on my floor. The evidence of last night is everywhere, in the clothes, in the sheets, in the ache of muscles I forgot I had.
I lie still and let the reality settle.
This was real. Not a performance, not a move, not a calculated beat in the arrangement we built on a rooftop two months ago.
What happened in this bed was two people who wanted each other and stopped pretending they didn’t, and the wanting was so far outside the boundaries I drew that I can’t see the line from here.
The smart thing to do is get up, get dressed, and establish that this was a one-time lapse, an excess of champagne and celebration. Reassert the terms. Redraw the line. Return to the version of this that doesn’t terrify me.
Instead, I watch him sleep.
His face without the mask is younger, softer, stripped of the performance he runs for everyone else.
I reach out and trace the line of his jaw without touching, my finger hovering a centimeter above his skin, and the tenderness I feel toward this man is so far past the arrangement that the word itself has become a joke.
He stirs. His eyes open, finding me instantly, and for one unguarded second before consciousness fully arrives, he smiles at me. Not the grin, not the smirk, not the charming version. Just a warm, sleepy, completely honest smile that reaches his eyes and stays.
Then he wakes up all the way, and the awareness of what happened settles on his face, and the smile doesn’t leave but it changes, gaining a careful edge, waiting to see what I’ll do.
I should redraw the line.
“Good morning,” I say instead.
“Good morning.” His voice is rough from sleep. “You’re still here.”
“Your bed is comfortable. Don’t read into it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Neither of us names the thing between us. Neither of us moves to get up.
His hand finds mine under the sheets, and he holds it the way he held it last night, fingers threaded through, no excuse attached.
And I let him, because the line I drew is gone, and I’m not sure I want to find it again.