18. Full Contact
Chapter eighteen
Full Contact
Emma
H ere’s what nobody tells you about getting the thing you’ve wanted since you were sixteen years old: it doesn’t feel like winning.
It feels like falling and flying. Like standing at the top of a slope you’ve been climbing forever and realizing the view is bigger, more terrifying, more beautiful than anything you imagined from below.
Luke Anderson is shirtless above me.
I’ve seen him shirtless before at pool parties, beach trips, that summer he stayed with us and walked around in basketball shorts like he wasn’t single-handedly ruining my adolescent brain.
But this is different. This is his body in the context of mine .
The broad shoulders I’ve been staring at since forever, the scar above his left eyebrow that I’ve wanted to trace with my fingertip since I first saw it at age fifteen.
The line of muscle that runs from his hip into his jeans that I am aggressively removing from his body because I’ve waited long enough and patience has never been my defining virtue.
He helps. Kicks them off. And then it’s just us. Just skin and breath and the warm half-light of his bedroom and the whole enormous weight of what we’re about to do pressing down like gravity.
And I’m nervous .
Not about the sex. I’ve had sex. I’ve had perfectly adequate, technically proficient, checking-a-box sex with boys who knew the mechanics and missed the point entirely.
Drew was good in bed the way he was good at hockey—technically skilled, strategically sound, entirely capable of getting me to escape for a while.
I’m nervous because this is Luke . And Luke isn’t a box to check or an escape or a substitute for the thing I really want. Luke is the thing I really want. Has been for seven years. And if this doesn’t live up to—
He kisses me, and the thought evaporates like water on hot ice.
His weight settles over me carefully. Controlled.
An awareness of his own size that he carries on and off the ice.
One forearm braced beside my head. The other hand tracing down my side, over the tattoo, down my thigh, hitching my leg around his hip in a motion so fluid it feels choreographed by years of imagining exactly this.
“You’re thinking,” he murmurs against my mouth.
“I’m not—”
“Em.” He leans back to look at me with those blue-gray eyes. They’re dark and steady and so full of something that my chest can’t expand properly. “Whatever you’re worried about. Don’t be.”
“I’m not worried.”
“You’re biting your lip.”
Damn him and his observational skills.
“Maybe I’m biting my lip because you’re lying on top of me naked and it’s a lot to process.”
Because we could wait.
I just orgasmed. Don’t need another one.
But we’ve got twenty-four hours without any other plans. Without practice. Without distractions and brothers and nosey roommates.
Twenty-four hours to be just us. And I’ll be damned if I waste the opportunity.
Like Luke is reading my mind, he whispers, “Too much? Because if you’re not ready for this we can—”
“Luke Anderson, don’t you dare finish that sentence. I waited years for this. We’re doing it.”
He’s laughing as his mouth hovers over mine. “Glad we’re on the same page about something.”
Then his lips are on mine, tongue dancing with mine, his hand sliding between us. Down. Further. Spreading me open.
And he groans. Low. Guttural .
“Damn, Em. Still so wet for me, baby.” Said against my jaw in voice I want to record and playback every night while I’m alone thinking of him.
“That’s what happens when you—” I have to catch my breath as his fingers circle slowly. “When you spend thirty minutes between someone’s— God —between someone’s legs.”
That smirk returns. The one that makes my entire body go liquid. “Felt like ten to me.”
“I hate when you get all smug.”
“You love it.”
“I love you .” The words leave my mouth before I can filter them. Raw and unplanned and hanging in the warm air like something newly born.
His hand stills. His forehead drops to mine. Because despite him saying it that night in his truck, we haven’t brought it back up. Haven’t truly said it out loud to one another.
“Say that again.”
“I love you.” Easier the second time. Like a muscle being stretched. “I’ve loved you since—”
“I know since when. I saw the proof on your hip.” He kisses me. Deep and slow and aching.
Then his hand is back on me, working me again. And God, the things this man can do with his hands. So much better than fantasy-Luke.
“Ready?”
One word.
One question.
Only one answer.
“Always.”
He smiles as he reaches for the nightstand. Drawer. Condom.
Some irrational part of my brain registers that he has condoms. That he bought them. Wonders if he purchased them just for me or if—
“I haven’t slept with anyone in over a year, Em.
” He can definitely read my mind . “And, yeah, I’d take you bare if you let me.
” He rolls it on, eyes never leaving mine as he does.
“But I’m gonna need the extra time right now.
Or this might be over embarrassingly fast. And I’m not planning to come until you go again. Understood.”
Damn, why is even him saying that so freaking hot ?
“Yes, Coach.”
The smirk returns, heated and gorgeous and mine .
“Such a good girl.”
“I think I deserve a reward.”
“Oh, you absolutely do.” He settles between my thighs, the blunt pressure of him pressing against me. “Bare next time, baby.” He groans as he run his tip up the length of my cunt. “Next round. Promise.”
Thank God.
I run my gaze down his torso, watch as Luke glides his cock up and down my pussy. Dripping with pre-cum and coated in me.
I might get off from this alone.
“Like this view?” he teases.
“Yes.” I'm not in the mood to pretend otherwise.
“Good. Get used to it.”
He rolls on the condom, eyes locked with mine. Then pushes inside me.
The sound that leaves my body lives somewhere between relief and devastation. The kind of noise you make when something you’ve imagined for years finally becomes real and the reality is so much more that every fantasy you’ve ever had collapses under the weight of it.
He’s big. I knew he would be. Could feel it against my hip on Christmas Eve, have been thinking about it for an obscene percentage of my waking hours.
But knowing and feeling are different languages, and the stretch of him, the fullness, the way my body opens for him like it’s been waiting for this… ?
“ Fuck, Em. ” His voice. Broken open. His forehead against mine, eyes closed, and I realize he’s trying to hold still. Trying to give me time to adjust. Trying to be the careful, considerate, doing-this-right version of himself when every line of his body is screaming to move.
“Don’t hold back.” I roll my hips experimentally, and the low, ripped from somewhere primal sound he makes sends electricity down my spine. “Luke, I’m okay. Move.”
He moves.
And I stop thinking entirely.
Not because the sensation overwhelms thought.
I mean, it does. But that’s not what silences me.
It’s the way he moves. Slow at first, deep, pulling almost all the way out before pressing back in with a deliberation that makes every nerve ending fire in sequence.
Like he’s learning me. Like this is another kind of film study. Finding the right angle that—
“ There. ” My nails dig into his shoulders. “Right there.”
He does it again. The same angle. The same depth. Precise. Devastating .
“That’s my girl. Taking me so well, baby.”
My girl.
The words land in my bloodstream like a drug. My back lifts. My legs tighten around his hips. And something in my expression must betray exactly how much those two words affect me, because Luke’s eyes darken and the corner of his mouth lifts. Not quite a smile… More like a discovery.
“Yeah?” Lower now. Testing. “You like that?”
“Shut up and do it again.”
He slows. Deliberately. Torturously. Each thrust measured, unhurried, designed to make me desperate. “What else do you like?”
“I'd like you to fuck me like you’ve been thinking about for seven years.” I tighten around him and watch his jaw lock. “Stop being careful. Stop being controlled. Stop being my coach —”
He snaps.
I see it happen. The restraint breaking like a dam, the careful patience dissolving into something raw and consuming.
When he drives into me this time, it’s not measured.
It’s not strategic. It’s Luke . All of him, finally unleashed.
And the force of it pushes a groan out of me that I’m fairly certain his neighbors can hear.
“That what you want?” Rough. Commanding. His hand fisting in my hair and wrapping, tilting my head back, his mouth on my exposed throat. “Tell me.”
“Yes— God —harder—”
He gives me harder. Gives me the version I’ve been provoking since September, the one that lives behind the clipboard and the polo shirts and the jaw clenches.
The one I felt in his hands on Christmas Eve.
In the way he covered my mouth and ordered me to be quiet.
Except now there’s no door to be quiet behind.
No two-minute window. No brother down the hall.
Just his bed. His body. And the growing, tightening, consuming pressure building between my legs again that’s telling me I’m close… So close.
“I can feel you,” he murmurs, already reading my body the way he reads everything about me. His pace becomes faster, hitting that spot on every stroke, his thumb finding my clit with an accuracy that would be annoying if it weren’t currently destroying me.
“Don’t stop—”
“Not stopping. Not ever.” His mouth finds my ear. “Not coming until you do, baby. Need to feel you around me. ”
That does it.
Detonation that starts at the point where our bodies connect and radiates outward like shockwaves, tearing through muscle and nerve and bone until I’m shaking apart underneath him.
My face is pressed into his neck, his name leaving my lips in fragments— Luke, Luke, Luke —like a word stripped to its most essential meaning.