Chapter 14 #3
I hold still, buried to the hilt, and let her feel the full weight and size of me. Her body pulses around mine, adjusting, and I watch her face while she does because the way Kenna looks when she's full of me is something I need to memorize.
Then I move.
I set a rhythm that's slow and deliberate and deep, pulling almost all the way out before driving back in, and every stroke lands with my hips flush against hers. She wraps her legs around my waist and locks her ankles at the small of my back, and the angle change makes both of us groan.
"Kenna." I say her name against her jaw, her neck, the shell of her ear. The same name she always gave me, but it means something different now that I know what comes after it. Repeated like a claim, like a brand, like something I'm searing into both of us.
She moves with me, matching my rhythm, her hips rising to meet each thrust. Her hands roam my back, my shoulders, the muscles that flex along my spine, and her nails drag lines down my skin that sting in the best way.
I increase the pace. She wants it harder.
I know because her heels dig into the backs of my thighs, pulling me deeper, and the sounds she's making have shifted from breathless to urgent, sharp little cries that break from her throat on every downstroke.
I fist my hand in her hair and pull her head back, exposing her throat. I drag my mouth down the tendon there while I drive into her with a force that shoves her up the mattress.
She grabs the headboard with one hand and braces, and the sound that tears from her mouth is raw and wrecked and so loud it probably carries through the motel walls.
"Tell me," I say, my voice low and rough and barely recognizable. "Tell me this is real."
"This is real." She can barely get the words out. Her body is trembling, her thighs shaking against my hips. "This is real, Colt. This is the realest thing I've ever—"
The sentence dies because I shift the angle and hit the spot that makes her spine bow and her mouth fall open on a silent scream.
I hold the angle and work her there, relentless, my thumb finding her clit and circling in tight, slick strokes while I drive into her at a pace that has the headboard knocking against the wall.
She comes apart.
The orgasm tears through her like something with teeth.
Her whole body locks, her back arching off the mattress, her inner walls clamping down around me so hard I see white.
The sound she makes starts as my name and shatters into something wordless and animal, and her nails rake down my back hard enough that I feel skin break.
I don't stop. I fuck her through it, every pulse and clench, my forehead pressed against hers, my eyes on hers, watching every second of her unraveling.
Her body jerks with aftershocks. The oversensitivity makes her whimper, and the sound of Kenna whimpering with my cock still inside her destroys what's left of my control.
The orgasm hits me like a freight train. It starts at the base of my spine and detonates outward. I bury myself deep and lock there, coming with a groan that I muffle against her neck because the sound of it would've been loud enough to bring someone to the door.
My hips jerk in hard, involuntary thrusts. She holds me through it, her legs tight around my waist, her hands in my hair, her body milking every last pulse until I'm empty and shaking and collapsed on top of her with my face buried in her neck.
After, I don't pull out. I stay buried inside her, my weight on my forearms, my mouth against the curve of her throat.
Her pulse hammers beneath my lips, fast and hard and gradually slowing.
Her hands trace the muscles of my back with the slow, dazed movements of someone coming back from a long distance, and when her fingers find the scratches she left, she presses them gently and I shudder.
"Colt." She says my name into my hair, quiet and wrecked and tender, and the tenderness undoes me more completely than the sex did.
I shift onto my side and pull her against me, her back to my chest, my arm locked around her waist. I'm still half-hard inside her, and the intimacy of staying connected while we come down is something I didn't know I needed until this second.
"Grant would kill me," I say into her hair.
"Grant would say it's about time somebody loved you who could keep up."
I press my mouth to the curve of her shoulder. Her skin is damp with sweat and tastes like salt and heat and the desert night coming through the gap in the curtains.
"I'm not going to say it yet," I tell her. "The word. I'm not there. I'm close, and you probably already know it, and I'm not ready."
"I'm not asking you to be ready." She laces her fingers through mine where my hand rests on her stomach. "I'm asking you to be here. Which you are."
"Which I am."
The room settles around us. The hum of the air conditioning is low and constant, and through the gap in the curtains, the lights of the parking lot cast a faint amber glow against the ceiling. The Sonoran Desert stretches beyond the motel in every direction, dark and patient.
I hold Kenna, and for the first time since Grant died, the wanting doesn't have teeth.
It has roots.