Chapter 29
I was wearing one of his t-shirts—black, threadbare, probably from some law school conference in D.C.—and nothing else. My hair was wet, my skin smelled like lavender oil and Fitz’s shampoo, and I had no idea how to walk back into my normal life ever again.
Fitz was drying off behind me, a towel low on his hips, damp hair curling around his ears like he wasn’t actively unraveling my nervous system just by existing.
“Where are we sleeping, Whitmore?” I asked, half-joking, half-praying for him to say with me. Always with me.
“Your room,” he said without hesitation. “Because if Jack barges into my room and finds his sister in my bed, World War III will ensue.”
“Fair.” I hesitated. The air between us was soft again, but full of loaded echoes—things we’d said in the bath, things I couldn’t unsay now if I tried.
“I should’ve asked…” I fiddled with the hem of his shirt. “Do you want your own space? I mean—bath time has been pe rfect. But if you want to sleep in your room, that’s totally okay.”
His towel hit the floor, forgotten. “Fuck no, that’s not what I want,” he said, voice rough and immediate. “Unless that’s what you want.”
I looked up. He was running a hand through his hair, suddenly unsure again, like this meant more than sex and he didn’t know how to hold it without breaking it. “I’ve had oceans of space from you for years,” he went on. “And I don’t want any more space. Not even one small sliver.”
My throat caught. He looked at me, eyes sharp but bare, hands open at his sides like he was offering them— take it or leave it. “I would have you permanently glued in my arms—” he stopped mid-thought, winced, and ran a hand down his face. “Sorry. I’m sounding like a fucking weirdo.”
I grinned, walking over slowly until I was close enough to feel the heat radiating off his chest. My fingers hooked into the waistband of the dry briefs he’d just pulled on, the soft cotton tugging lightly against his hips.
“You’re not a weirdo,” I said. “You’re just tragically romantic with a superiority complex and an oral fixation. You know. Classic Darcy.”
He laughed, breathless, and let his forehead rest against mine. “Darcy? Damn, Whitmore, you act like I’m a stick in the mud.”
“Well…” I raised my brows pointedly, “You certainly can be buttoned up. But I was going more for back half Darcy where he is the most perfect romantic lead ever written. The one everyone else just tries to imitate.”
“Oh, well, when you put it that way…” He leaned in and kissed me softly. “Let’s go the fuck to bed.”
“Okay,” I whispered. “My room it is.”
I woke up naked, my legs entangled with his. One bare sheet was covering us from the waist up, the duvet kicked off in the middle of the night with Fitz as a heater against my back.
His breath was warm against the back of my neck, slow and steady. Our legs were stuck together with sleep-sweat. I felt a little sore, deliciously so—the soft kind of ache that whispered you’d been wanted .
I blinked, smiled, and stretched carefully so I didn’t wake him—except I didn’t need to.
His voice rumbled against my shoulder. “I’m in Charlie Winslow’s bed.”
“Mmhmm,” I murmured, twisting just enough to see him. “Indeed you are.”
He smiled, eyes barely open, hair a complete mess.
He looked like sin and comfort and every fantasy I’d ever shoved under a rug and sworn I’d outgrow.
We lay there for a long time—just...watching each other.
Letting the silence say all the things that hadn’t needed saying last night because our hands had said them first.
Eventually, I broke the quiet. “Can I ask you something?”
“Always.”
I traced a line across his collarbone with my fingertip. “How do you like it?”
His brows lifted slightly. “It?”
“In bed.”
That made him go still. Just for a moment. Not in discomfort—just surprise.“No one’s really asked me that before,” he said finally, blinking up at the ceiling like he was trying to figure out how to be honest without dirtying something sacred. “Not in a genuine way.”
I let my hand settle over his chest, feeling the steady beat beneath my palm.
“I mean, sure,” he added, “some girls have asked in the heat of the moment, but I didn’t care enough about them to answer honestly.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to.
“With them, I liked control,” he said quietly. “Being in charge. Hands on their hips, mouth on their neck, fucking them hard until they stopped thinking and just felt .”
I didn’t move. Just listened.
“But with you?” His eyes flicked to mine, hungry and soft all at once. “I want it all. I am at your mercy. I want to be yours. ”
I felt my breath hitch.
“You can have anything you want from me,” he murmured. “Fast, slow. You on top. Me on my knees. Fucking in the kitchen. Holding you in the shower. Just...everything. I want to touch every version of you. See what you like. Learn how to give it.”
I leaned in and kissed him—just his jaw, light and quick. He rolled to face me fully, hand sliding down to my hip.
“If we’re having sex three times today,” he said, tone suddenly playful again, “I want one time fast and filthy. One time slow and sweet. And one time where we surprise each other with something new.”
“Three huh?” I teased, already flushed.
“Four if you keep looking at me like that.”
I laughed into his neck. “Well. Let’s start now.”
He didn’t answer. He just kissed me—slow and full, tongue lazy, mouth warm, hand dragging over my bare thigh like he was already making plans. He shifted on top of me, the sheet falling away as his hips slotted between mine. No rush. No pressure. Just heat blooming, steady and good .
He lined himself up, not quite entering, just dragging the tip along where I was already soaked for him. “Charlie,” he murmured, lips against my ear, “tell me how you want it.”
“Right now?” I whispered. “Slow. I want you inside me, quiet and deep. I want to feel every inch.”
His breath caught. And then he did exactly that. He pushed in slow—inch by inch, filling me until I gasped, arms wrapping around his shoulders as my hips tilted to take him deeper.
He didn’t thrust. He stayed . Buried. Held. Kissed me while we breathed in unison, bodies humming, nerves singing. His hand found mine and laced our fingers together above my head. He pressed his forehead to mine and whispered, “I’ve never done it like this before.”
“Like what?” I whispered back.
“Like it means something.”
And then he moved. A slow, sweet, divine, swivel of hips that had him grinding into me as a decadent, lazy kind of torment.
And it meant everything .
T he room smelled like morning sex and and fresh salt air since we’d cracked the window open. It was the kind of lazy stillness I could’ve lived in forever.
But the clock on my nightstand said 9:02, and forever had a way of not giving a fuck.
Fitz was tracing idle patterns along my thigh, but I could feel the tension building under his skin. It had been brewing since he pulled out, kissed my cheek, and tucked the sheet around me like I was something to be protected. And now he was quiet. Too quiet.
“So,” I said, rolling onto my side to look at him, “what happens now?”
He didn’t look surprised by the question. Just wary. “We figure it out,” he said. “Quietly. Carefully.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”
“It means we don’t tell anyone.”
I blinked. “Meaning Jack.”
He nodded. “Especially not Jack.”
I sat up. The sheet fell from my chest, but I didn’t care. “Fitz.”
“No.”
“ Fitz. ”
“I’m serious, Charlie.”
“Fuck that.” My voice went sharp. “We just had the most honest, real sex of our lives and now I’m supposed to sneak around like some scandalized teen with a hickey behind a 7-Eleven?”
He winced. “Jesus.”
“I get why Jack might’ve flipped when I was seventeen and still watching Gossip Girl, but I’m about to turn thirty. It’s not his business who I choose to fuck.”
He sat up too then, dragging a hand down his face. “It’s not about fucking, Charlie.”
I froze.
He looked at me, all open chest and wrecked hair and a kind of helpless sincerity that punched me right in the sternum. “It’s more than that,” he said. “You know it is.”
My mouth went dry.
He hesitated, then added quietly, “He’d make it his business if he knew I planned on marrying you.”
Boom.
I stared at him. “Fitz. ”
“I’m just saying?—”
“We kissed for the first time yesterday. ”
He gave me a sheepish look. “Time is fake.”
I couldn’t stop the laugh. “You can’t just drop a marriage bomb in bed like it’s some post-coital dessert course.”
“I mean,” he shrugged, trying and failing to look casual, “I’m not proposing, I’m just saying...hypothetically, if I were, he’d care. He’d lose his goddamn mind.”
“Hypothetically, you’re a maniac.”
He smiled at that, but it faded quickly. I let the moment settle, then asked, softer now, “Why would it be so bad, Fitz? Why would it hurt him so much?”
He exhaled slowly. Shifted back onto the pillows. “Because of the pact.”
I blinked. “The what ?”
“The pact,” he said. “We were sixteen. Summer before junior year. High on hormones and too many Coronas. We were talking about getting with girls – bases, boners, the whole enchilada, and then Lily came into the kitchen.”
“Your little sister,” I added in, getting the picture now.
“Yeah, I think she was eleven at the time. Skinned knee. Braces. Bopping around all innocent.”
He looked at me and continued. “Anyway, we stopped the fuckery while she was in the room, and when she left, Jack turned and said to me ‘ You ever think about my sister that way, I’ll kill you.’ ”
I curled against him, pulling the sheet up, letting his voice rumble through me. I felt something tighten in my chest.
“And I laughed and said ‘Jesus, Jack, she’s a child.’ And he goes, ‘She won’t be forever. And I know how you think.’ ”
I felt the weight in his words, the guilt built up over years, apparently—because he had been thinking about me that way. Not when I was a kid, but not just since I’ve been a grown woman either.
I looked at Fitz and nodded in understanding, and he continued. “And then I told him: ‘If I catch you looking at Lily wrong, I’ll castrate you, brother.’ ”
“We shook on it,” he said. “Like teenage blood brothers. No sisters—ever. You both were off-limits. Because we told each other everything—what we did, who we did it with, how it tasted, how it felt. No shame. But our sisters were the one line we’d never cross.”
“And now here we are.”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“And you’re the one who’s felt and tasted it all.” My eyebrows raised.
He groaned. “Charlie.”
“I’m just quoting you.”
We fell silent. The morning light spilled across the sheets like gold ribbon. His hand slid up to rest between my shoulder blades.
“I get it,” I said finally. “I do. But I’m not eleven. I’m not fragile. And I’m not ashamed.”
“I know.”
“Then what are we going to do?”
He looked at me like he was already breaking the rules, just by loving me. “We keep it ours,” he said. “At least for now.”
I nodded. Because I wanted him. And for now? That was enough.