Chapter 10 Charlotte #2
"Condom," I say.
"Bag. Side pocket."
I lean over and dig through the bag. Find the strip. Tear one off with my teeth and his eyes track the movement of my mouth and I see his cock twitch against his stomach, untouched, just from watching me use my teeth on a wrapper.
I roll the condom onto him. Slow. Teasing. My fingers travel the length of him, smoothing the latex, and he hisses through his teeth and grabs my wrist.
"You're killing me."
"You'll survive."
I position myself over him. The tip of his cock presses against my entrance and I hold there. One second. Two. I'm wet. Soaked, actually, and I can feel it on the insides of my thighs and against the head of his cock, and his jaw clenches when he feels it too.
"Look at me," I say.
He does.
I sink down.
Slow. Inch by inch. Taking him inside me with a patience I don't feel but need to perform, because this is mine.
This pace, this angle, this moment. His cock stretches me open and the fullness is intense, almost too much, the kind of pressure that borders on pain and lands on the right side of it.
My hands are on his chest. His hands are on my hips.
Our eyes are locked and neither of us blinks.
I bottom out. Take all of him. Feel him pressed so deep inside me that I can feel my own pulse around him.
I hold still. Breathe. His chest is heaving under my palms, and his fingers are dug into my hips hard enough to leave marks and I want them.
I want the bruises. I want to look at my body tomorrow and see proof of this, proof that I chose this, proof that someone touched me because I said yes.
"Fuck, principessa, you feel so good.” His voice is a groan and my pussy clenches as he speaks.
"Mmmm, yes, fuck." I roll my hips. A slow figure-eight that drags him against every nerve inside me, and we both groan. "Don't move."
"Charlotte, I need to—"
"Don't. Move."
He holds still. The effort is visible, his abs clenched, his thighs trembling beneath me, his jaw so tight I can hear his teeth grinding.
He's giving me this. Complete control. A man who controls everything, who runs operations and disassembles threats and manages every variable in his environment, lying still beneath me because I told him to.
I start to ride him.
Slow at first. Long rolls of my hips, lifting until just the tip is inside me and then sinking back down, taking him deep.
The sensation is enormous. Every stroke lights up a line from my clit to my spine, and I chase the angle that hits the spot inside me that makes my vision blur.
I find it. The slight forward tilt that drags the head of his cock against my front wall, and the noise I make is loud and sharp and I don't try to muffle it.
"There," I gasp. "Fuck. Right there."
His hips twitch. Instinct. He wants to thrust up into me, I can feel the effort it takes him not to, the way his muscles bunch and release, bunch and release. I put my hand on his stomach and press down.
"I said don't move."
"You're going to fucking kill me."
"You'll die happy."
I ride him harder. Faster. Bracing my hands on his chest, using his body as leverage, my hips working in a rhythm that's building heat in my stomach and pulling sounds out of both of us.
The bed creaks. The headboard taps the wall.
The cabin fills with the wet sounds of our bodies meeting and separating and meeting again.
His hand slides between us. Thumb finding my clit. I jolt, my rhythm breaking, and he circles me with a pressure that's exactly right, firm and focused, matching the pace of my hips.
"I thought I said don't move," I manage.
"My hips aren't moving. My hand is." He circles again. Presses. My thighs shake. "There's a difference."
"Asshole."
"You like it."
I do. God, I do. His thumb works my clit while I ride him and the dual sensation is overwhelming, building on itself, layer on layer, the stretch of him inside me and the pressure on my clit and the friction of the angle that hits the spot that makes sparks across my vision.
My breathing goes ragged. My hips stutter.
"Let go," he says. "I've got you."
"I know." My voice rasps on the second word. "I know you do."
The orgasm builds slow and hits hard. It starts in my belly, a coiling heat that tightens and tightens until I can't breathe, and then it snaps.
My whole body seizes. I cry out, his name and something wordless, and I feel myself clench around him in waves, pulsing, gripping, my nails digging into his chest hard enough to leave crescents in his skin.
My back arches and my eyes squeeze shut, and I ride it out, hips still moving, grinding down on him through every aftershock.
"Fuck." His voice is shredded. "Charlotte. I need to move. Please."
"Move."
His hands grip my hips, and he thrusts up into me and the force of it punches the air out of my lungs.
He fucks me from below, hard and deep, his hips snapping up to meet mine with a ferocity he's been leashing for the last ten minutes.
The angle is brutal. Perfect. I'm still pulsing from the orgasm, and every thrust sends another wave through me, smaller, sharper, stacking on each other.
"Come for me," I say. "I want to feel your cock twitch inside me."
He drives into me three more times, each one harder than the last, and then he breaks.
His body locks. His fingers dig into my hips.
He says my name like it's being ripped out of him, rough and guttural and desperate, and I feel him pulse inside me, thick and hot even through the condom, and the sensation pushes me into a second orgasm I wasn't expecting.
Smaller. Deeper. A tremor that rolls through me and leaves me gasping and shaking on top of him.
I collapse against his chest.
His arms wrap around me. We're both breathing hard, both slicked with sweat, both twitching. His heart is hammering under my cheek, fast and wild, and mine is matching it. Two systems synced. Running the same frequency.
His hand finds the back of my neck. His fingers press against my vertebrae. One. Two. Three. The gesture I've been doing since the first night, the grounding, the checking. He does it for me. Counts for me. Finds my spine and confirms it's there.
My eyes burn.
"Don't," I whisper. "If you're going to be sweet, I'm going to cry, and I don't want to cry."
His fingers keep pressing. Four. Five.
"Okay," I say. "Fine."
The tears come. Not many. Not the heaving kind.
The quiet kind. The kind that leak out of the corners of your eyes and roll down your cheeks and drip onto the chest of a man who counts your vertebrae like he's been doing it his whole life.
A sound comes out of me that I don't recognize, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, muffled against his skin.
He holds me tighter. Doesn't speak. Doesn't ask if I'm okay. Just holds me and presses his fingers against my spine and lets me leak all over him like a pipe that finally burst after years of pressure.
It lasts maybe thirty seconds. Then I'm done. I wipe my face against his shoulder.
"Sorry," I say. "Got snot on your chest."
"I've had worse things on my chest."
I laugh. Real and full and shaking my whole body, and his chest rumbles with his own laugh underneath mine, and we lie tangled together in a cabin in the woods and laugh like two people who have no business laughing.
"Claudio—" I hesitate.
"What."
"Thank you. For the exit today. For not asking why."
His hand moves from my neck to my hair. Fingers combing through it. Slow. The hands of a killer, gentle on my scalp.
"You never have to explain the exits," he says. "Not to me."
I close my eyes. Press my face into his neck. Breathe him in. Cedar and sweat and the warm smell of his skin after sex.
You're falling, Charlotte. You know that, right? You're falling and there's no parachute and the ground is coming fast.
Maybe. Probably.
But his fingers are in my hair, and his heart is under my cheek, and he pressed my vertebrae like a prayer, and I think maybe falling doesn't have to mean crashing. Maybe sometimes you fall and someone catches you. Not because they're required to. Not because you asked. Because they want to.
And for the first time in three years, that doesn't terrify me.
It just feels like landing.