Chapter 24 #3
It stops being only heat. It becomes trust with teeth. Want with a pulse. The private truth of two men who have spent too long learning to survive, finally choosing contact without armor.
He pushes in the rest of the way.
I make a sound I don’t recognize.
Halston goes still, buried deep, arms tense, breathing hard through his nose. He looks wrecked. Not lost. Wrecked by the effort of not moving until I’m ready.
The power of that nearly breaks me.
I reach up and pull him down.
His mouth comes to mine, and I kiss him hard, not to rush him, not to hide, but because I need him to know I am here. I am with him. I'm not just letting this happen.
I chose it.
I chose him.
He groans into my mouth, and his hips move once.
Slow.
Deep.
My whole body opens around the feeling.
“Again,” I whisper.
His eyes burn into mine.
Then he does.
Halston moves once, slow and deep, and my body pulls him in with a startled, helpless tug that makes both of us stop breathing for half a second.
When he’s fully inside me, he freezes.
Not because he’s unsure. Not because he doesn’t want this.
Because he wants it too much, and I can feel the fight in him.
It’s in the tremor that runs through his arms, the rigid line of his shoulders, and the way his fingers curl into the sheet beside my hip instead of grabbing me the way I know he wants to.
Halston is holding himself back with everything he has.
For me.
That thought hits harder than the stretch.
We’re so close our noses bump. Our chests brush with every breath.
The room is hot now, the air gone damp between us, noon light turning the sweat on his skin silver at the edges.
I can hear the city below us, muffled and distant, but it has nothing to do with this bed.
Nothing exists past his body over mine, his cock buried in me, his mouth parted like he’s in pain from not moving.
He looks at me.
Really looks.
I hate it for a second.
Then I need it.
There is too much in his eyes. Fear. Want. Care so fierce it almost reads as anger. Something bigger than the moment, bigger than sex, bigger than the two of us pretending we know how to survive loving one woman across an ocean and loving each other in a room no one gets to see.
“Creed,” he says, voice raw.
My name breaks in his mouth.
I lift my hand to his face because I don’t know what else to do. My palm lands against his cheek, and he turns into it as if the contact costs him.
“You’re fucking incredible,” he says.
I almost joke.
It is right there, familiar and easy. Something about his low standards or post-Cup sentimentality or the alarming lack of peer review on that claim.
I can’t.
His face won’t let me.
“Move,” I whisper.
Then he kisses me and pulls out a little.
The first thrust back in ruins whatever answer I had.
It’s slow enough that I feel every inch. The burn is still there, a deep pulse, but it shifts under the pleasure until I can’t separate discomfort from need. My body opens for him in stages, reluctant only because the sensation is enormous. Full. Hot. Too much and exactly right.
I moan before I can stop it.
Halston groans in answer, low and rough against my mouth, and the sound goes straight through me.
He moves again.
Still slow.
Still holding back.
That should frustrate me. It doesn’t. There is something almost unbearable about this version of him—the careful restraint, the control that has nothing to do with distance and everything to do with not hurting me.
Halston, who can go lethal in a heartbeat if someone touches what he considers his, is above me, his entire body shaking because he refuses to take more than I give.
So I give him more.
I hook one leg higher around his hip.
His breath catches.
“There,” I say, and my voice sounds nothing like mine. “Like that.”
He closes his eyes for one second, as if he has to survive hearing me ask.
Then he gives it to me.
The next thrust goes deeper, and I grab his shoulder, nails digging in. My body jolts beneath him. He stops immediately, but I tighten my leg around him before he can retreat.
“No,” I gasp. “Don’t stop.”
His eyes open.
That look again.
He lowers his forehead to mine.
“Stay with me,” he says.
I laugh once, breathless. “I’m literally pinned under you.”
“Not what I meant.”
“I know.”
My throat burns with it.
I do know.
He means don’t leave the moment. Don’t disappear into sarcasm. Don’t become the version of myself who can skate through pain, the smile for cameras, make everyone else comfortable, then fall apart only where no one can document it.
He wants me here.
All of me.
That should feel impossible.
With him inside me, his hand sliding up to lace our fingers together beside my head, it doesn’t.
It feels terrifyingly simple.
I squeeze his hand.
He moves again, and this time the rhythm starts to build.
Not fast. Not frantic. Deep. Patient. Devastating. Every thrust feels like he is asking the same question with his body.
Can I have this?
Can I keep this?
Can you let me love you where it hurts?
I answer by lifting into him. By letting the sounds come.
By keeping my eyes open even when the pleasure gets too intimate to face.
His mouth finds mine, then my cheek, then the corner of my jaw.
He keeps touching me like he can’t decide which part of me needs him most. Face.
Hip. Hand. The back of my thigh. My ribs, where I’m bruised. My hair, damp at the temples.
He kisses me there.
At my temple.
Like I’m precious after being used so hard by the season.
That almost takes me out.
“Don’t,” I mutter.
Halston slows but doesn’t stop. “Don’t what?”
“Be sweet right now.”
His mouth brushes my cheek. “No.”
I turn my face toward him. “No?”
“No.”
The answer is quiet. Certain. Very Halston.
Then he thrusts into me again, and I lose whatever argument I was building.
My body is no longer mine in any meaningful way. It belongs to the rhythm. To the heat. To the intense fullness of him. To the way his hand grips mine, tighter now, as if he thinks I might slip out of this bed and back into the version of myself that knows how to win but not how to receive.
I won’t.
Not now.
Maybe not ever.
The thought scares me.
It also frees something in me.
I reach between us, but Halston catches my wrist gently and pins it beside my head.
“I’ve got you,” he says.
My pulse kicks. “Hal.”
“I’ve got you.”
Then his other hand wraps around my cock.
The pleasure crashes through me so hard that my vision whites at the edges.
I curse into his mouth. He strokes me in rhythm with his hips, and the combined sensation is obscene, tender, too much.
I try to breathe through it, try to hold on, but he knows my body too well now.
He knows the angle, the pressure, the exact pace that makes me shake.
“Fuck,” I choke out. “I’m close.”
His forehead presses to mine. “Good.”
The word is simple.
It breaks me.
My orgasm comes fast and sudden, ripping through me before I can brace for it. My body clamps down around him, and I squeeze his hand so hard he hisses. Heat spills across my stomach. My back arches. The sound that leaves me is rough and helpless, and I don’t recognize myself in it.
Halston does.
He looks at me like he has been waiting for that version of me all day.
The sight of his face sends me through another surge of pleasure, and I say his name. Not loud. Not pretty. Just broken enough that he loses the fight.
His hips stutter.