Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LINCOLN
A few hours after the hottest thing I’d ever been lucky enough to witness, I lay next to Willa in the dark. Since falling apart on top of me, she’d been scarce. She’d scurried off my lap and immediately headed up to shower. Then she’d kept herself busy being anywhere but around me.
This was the first time in hours she’d been in my vicinity for more than thirty seconds. I was surprised her stubborn ass had crawled into bed instead of setting up camp outside just so she could avoid me a bit longer.
Apparently, though, the cloak of darkness was avoidance enough.
The lights were off, she’d put away her book, and she lay as still as a corpse beside me. The room had settled into the kind of quiet that usually put me to sleep in thirty seconds flat. But tonight? I couldn’t stop grinning.
I could still feel the imprint of her fingers digging into my shoulders, her breath hot against my lips, and the sounds she’d made when she’d shuddered and shaken above me, grinding her way to the kind of orgasm people wrote books about. All while we were both fully clothed.
So, yeah. I was pretty damn proud of myself.
“I can feel your smugness all the way over here,” she muttered, breaking the silence.
I smirked toward the ceiling. “That obvious?”
“You’re basically vibrating with it.”
“Can’t help it. I have a hell of a lot to be smug about.” I tucked the arm closest to her behind my head and turned my face in her direction. “You remember. You were there.”
There was a long, quiet pause. Then she muttered, “You don’t even know the half of it.”
I raised one brow, my interest piqued. “What’s that mean?”
“Nothing,” she said. Way too fast for it to actually be nothing.
“Oh, come on. I just watched you come all over me, and you felt me blow my load in my pants like I was fifteen—”
“Oh my god. Would you stop?”
“Nah. All the walls are down now, hellcat. Might as well tell me.”
“Why are you like this?”
“Charming and irresistible? Some of us are just born with it, I guess. Now, come on. Give me a hint.”
Willa blew out an irritated sigh. “Lincoln—”
“One word. I can guess with one word.”
“I swear to god, I’m going to—”
“How about just a syllable, then?”
“Fine, you giant man-child! God.” She huffed, slamming her arms down on the bed, clearly sick of my shit. “That was the first time that’s happened, all right?”
“Oh really,” I said, unable to tamp down just exactly how pleased that made me. The first time she’d come from a dry hump? Hell yeah, I’d take that honor all the way to the bank.
“You are the worst,” she snapped. “And, great, now that I’ve told you, I’m going to be forced out of my own home by your ego and your exceptionally large head.”
“Which one?” I asked, grinning into the darkness. “The one on my shoulders or the one you came all over?”
“Lincoln!” She tugged the pillow from beneath her head and hit me in the face with it.
“I’m kidding,” I said on a laugh. “So it’s the first time you’ve come from dry humping and the first time we’ve come together. I’m not mad about either one of those. And I definitely wouldn’t be at all mad if we did it again.”
She didn’t respond. Not even a huff of irritated breath.
“Hellcat?”
Still nothing. Was she even breathing? I had no idea.
“Willa? What’s—”
“Fine! I’ll tell you,” she snapped. “You don’t have to harass me about it.”
“I wasn’t—”
“It’s the first time I’ve come with someone else, all right?” she blurted, like she couldn’t hold the words back anymore. “Are you happy now?”
I blinked, sure I’d heard her wrong. I turned on my side to face her, able to just make out the shape of her in the darkness. “Wait… First time, like…this month?”
“Would I be freaking out if that were the case?” She heaved out a sigh that sounded like it carried the weight of the world. “I mean first time, like, ever.”
Those words hung in the air as the room fell silent and my brain short-circuited. A beat passed. Then another.
“You’re telling me no one else has ever made you come?”
She huffed, and I could practically hear her eye roll. “Could you not sound so damn pleased about it?”
“Oh, I absolutely could not.”
“Maybe it didn’t even have anything to do with you! Did you ever think of that?”
I barked out a laugh. “Nice try, but it was my cock you were grinding all over. Pretty sure it had a big something to do with me.”
“I should’ve kept my mouth shut,” she muttered.
“Too late now, wife.”
I grinned into the dark, something other than masculine pride sparking in my chest. Not smugness like she’d claimed—though I definitely felt a bit of that too. But this was something more like awe. Like I’d somehow stumbled onto something elusive and rare.
And she’d let me have it.
I was the first person to witness Willa Jameson fall apart—to watch those walls crumble as she shook and shuddered through release.
Willa. The same person who’d been holding herself out of reach since we were teenagers.
Who’d been looking at me for half our lives like I was the physical embodiment of a migraine.
Willa…who’d climbed into my lap like she was tired of resisting and then come so hard she’d undone both of us.
She was quiet, a heavy awkwardness hanging between us. It was the kind of silence filled with tension I didn’t want between us anymore.
So instead of letting it linger, I slid my arm around her waist, tugged her into my chest, and settled my chin on top of her head. “Since I’m batting a hundred right now, you wanna do it again?”
“I hate you.” She smacked my chest less forcefully than I was used to and muttered, “Jackass.”
“That’s not a no,” I said, smiling into her hair.
Even though I’d half expected her to push away or shove me to my side of the bed, she didn’t. Instead, she settled in, her forehead on my sternum, her nose brushing my chest, her hands folded together between us.
It wasn’t the first time we’d been close like this in bed. We’d somehow always managed to end up in this position at some point in the night, waking up closer than either of us had intended.
But this was the first time we intentionally started this way.