Chapter Thirty-Nine
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Crew
The elevator ride down from the rooftop takes approximately seven thousand years.
Emmie is pressed against me, her back to my chest, my arms wrapped around her waist. I can feel her heartbeat through her shirt—or maybe that’s mine. I can’t tell anymore.
The doors open. We stumble down the hallway, stopping twice because I can’t make it ten feet without kissing her. She laughs against my mouth when I fumble with the keys.
The door finally opens. Murphy greets us with an indignant meow, but I barely register him. All I can see is Emmie, backlit by the lamp she left on, looking at me like she wants this as badly as I do.
She takes my hand and walks backward toward my bedroom, pulling me with her. I follow because I’d follow her anywhere.
My bedroom is dark, just the faint glow of city lights through the window. She stops at the foot of my bed and turns to face me.
“Whatever happens tonight,” she says softly, “it’s not just physical for me. I need you to know that.”
“It’s not for me either.” The words come out rougher than I intend.
“Emmie, I haven’t—it’s been a long time since, uh.
And never really, uh, done this with someone I actually—” I stop, frustrated with my own inability to articulate.
“Someone who matters. You matter. This matters. And I don’t want to mess it up. ”
She takes my hands in hers. They’re shaking. I didn’t realize they were shaking.
“We go slow,” she says. “We check in. If something doesn’t feel right, we stop.”
“Okay.”
“And Crew?” She presses my palm flat against her chest, right over her heart. “I trust you.”
Something cracks open inside me.
I kiss her.
Her hands slide up my chest and start working the buttons of my shirt. When she pushes it off my shoulders, her palms flatten against my bare skin and I shudder.
“God, you’re—” She traces a scar along my ribs, then another near my collarbone. “You’re so beautiful, Crew. You know that?”
“I’m not—”
“You are.” She presses a kiss to the center of my chest. “You are and you don’t even see it.”
I don’t know what to do with that. So I reach for the hem of her tank top instead, pulling it over her head. Simple black bra. Nothing fancy. Still perfect.
She reaches back and unhooks the clasp herself, letting it fall.
“Emmie.” Her name comes out strangled. “You’re—I don’t—” I’m staring like an idiot, like I’ve never seen a woman before, and maybe I haven’t. Not like this. Not one who looks at me the way she’s looking at me.
“Touch me,” she whispers. “Please.”
She sighs, arching into me, and I explore her with my hands, my mouth, mapping the terrain of her.
“That’s—yes—” She gasps when my mouth moves over her breast.
“Yeah? You like that?” I do it again, and she whimpers. “You’re so responsive. So perfect. I could touch you forever and it still wouldn’t be enough.”
I’m talking too much. I know I’m talking too much. But I can’t seem to stop, and she doesn’t seem to mind. Every word pulls another sound from her, another shiver, another sign that she’s right here with me.
We tumble onto the bed. I settle over her, and we’re both still half-dressed, and that needs to change immediately.
I work at her leggings while she attacks my belt, and there’s an awkward moment where we’re both struggling with fabric and laughing breathlessly, and it’s not smooth or suave but it’s us.
And then we’re naked.
And she’s looking at me.
All of me.
“Oh.” Her eyes widen slightly. “Um. Wow.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just—” She bites her lip, and there’s something almost nervous in her expression. “Of course you’re big. You’re so thorough about everything.” She pauses, mouth lifting in a slight grin “Even your junk is overachieving.”
“Uh.” My brain short-circuits. “Is that a problem?”
“It’s the opposite of a problem.” She reaches for me, wrapping her hand around my length, and my hips jerk involuntarily. “It’s just going to take some… adjustment.”
“We can go slow. We can—fuck—” She strokes me, and my thoughts scatter. “Emmie, if you keep doing that, this is going to be over embarrassingly fast.”
“We can’t have that.” But she doesn’t stop. Just slows down, which transforms the pleasure into something torturous. “I like seeing you like this.”
“Like what?”
“Undone.” She twists her wrist, and I groan. “You’re always so controlled. So precise. But right now you’re just—”
“Losing my mind?”
“Yeah.” She smiles up at me. “I like it.”
I need to get control back. I need to focus on her, not on the way her hand is making me forget my own name.
“Lie back,” I manage.
She does, releasing me, and I take a moment to just look at her. Spread out on my bed. In my space. Waiting for me. I lower myself over her, kissing my way down her body. Her neck. Her collarbone. The soft swell of her breasts. Her stomach, where she squirms and tries to suck in.
“Don’t,” I murmur against her skin. “Don’t hide from me. You’re perfect. Every inch of you.”
“Crew—”
I kiss lower. And lower. Until I’m settled between her thighs, and she’s looking down at me with wide eyes.
“Can I?”
“Yes. Please, yes.”
I taste her, and she cries out, her hands flying to my hair. I learn her like this too—what makes her gasp, what makes her moan, what makes her thighs clamp around my head like she’s trying to keep me there forever.
“Right there—don’t stop—Crew, please, I’m—”
I don’t stop. I work her through it, gentling only when she starts to shake, when her fingers loosen in my hair and her breathing comes in ragged gasps.
“Holy shit,” she manages.
I press a slow, open-mouthed kiss to her inner thigh. “Good?”
“You killed me.” She huffs out a soft laugh. “Get up here.”
I crawl back up her body, and she pulls me into a kiss, tasting herself on my lips. The intimacy of it hits me somewhere deep.
“I want you,” she breathes. “Inside me. Now.”
“Emmie—”
“Now, Crew.”
I reach for the nightstand, fumbling for a condom. She takes it from me when my hands prove too unsteady, rolls it on herself, and the sight of her touching me, taking care of me, even in this small way, is somehow… sweet. Very her.
“Good?” I ask.
She nods, eyes heavy-lidded.
I push into her slowly, watching her face. Her eyes flutter closed. Her lips part. She’s tight, and I’m not small, and I pause to let her adjust. Pleasure rushes through me at the feeling of being joined with her. Fuck.
“Okay?”
“More than okay.” She wraps her legs around my waist, pulling me deeper. “You’re perfect.”
I go slow at first, savoring every sensation—the way she clenches around me, the sounds she makes, the dig of her nails into my shoulders.
“You feel incredible,” I tell her, because I can’t not tell her. “So tight. So warm. I’ve thought about this—about you—for so long. Wanted you so badly. Every time you walked past me in the apartment, every time you smiled at me, I wanted—”
“Crew.” Her voice is strained. “Less talking. More moving.”
I pick up the pace, and she matches me, her hips rising to meet each thrust. We find a rhythm together, and it’s good, it’s so good, but then—
“Wait.” She pushes at my chest. “I want—can we—”
“What? What do you need?”
“I want to be on top.”
All the blood in my body rushes south.
“Yeah.” My voice comes out hoarse. “Yeah, we can do that.”
We flip, and suddenly she’s straddling me, sinking down onto me, and I can see all of her—the flush spreading across her chest, the way she bites her lip as she starts to move.
I grip her hips, but I’m not guiding her. She doesn’t need guidance. She knows exactly what she wants, and she’s taking it. “Emmie, you’re—this is—I can’t—”
“Can’t what?”
“Think. I can’t think.” She rolls her hips, and I groan. “You’re so—damn—you’re so beautiful. Look at you. Taking what you want. You’re—uh—fuck—”
She smiles down at me, and there’s something powerful in her expression. Something knowing. She likes this—likes having me at her mercy, likes watching me fall apart.
“Tell me,” she says, planting her hands on my chest as she moves, “tell me how it feels.”
“Like everything.” The words spill out before I can stop them. “Like every good thing I’ve ever wanted. Like—Emmie. Fuck. I’m so in love with you.”
She freezes.
Shit. I said it. I just blurted it out like a complete—
“What did you say?”
“I—” I swallow hard. We’re still on our first date and I just admitted I’m in love with her. Total rookie move. “I said I’m in love with you. I know it’s probably too soon to say that, and we’re in the middle of—this isn’t how I planned to—I didn’t have a plan, actually, I just—”
She kisses me. Hard. Effectively shutting me up.
“I love you too,” she says against my lips.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She starts moving again, and my eyes roll back. “Now stop talking and let me finish what I started.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She rides me hard, chasing her release, and I love every second of it. When she comes, clenching around me, my name on her lips, I follow her over the edge. The orgasm hits me like a tidal wave—crashing, overwhelming, obliterating every thought except her, her, her.
We collapse together, sweaty and breathless.
“Wow,” she says eventually.
“Uh-huh.”
“That was—”
“Yeah.”
She laughs weakly, her head on my chest. “We should do that again.”
“Give me ten minutes.”
“Deal.”
Murphy jumps onto the bed, picks his way over our tangled limbs, and settles between our feet with a pointed meow.
“He’s judging us,” Emmie murmurs.
“He’s always judging us.”
“Fair point.”
I pull her closer, pressing a kiss to her forehead. We lie there in the darkness, wrapped around each other, and I feel something I haven’t felt in as long as I can remember.
Peace.
“Crew?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you mean it? What you said?”
“Which part?”
“The love part.”
I tilt her chin up so she’s looking at me. “I meant it. I’ve meant it for a while. I just didn’t know how to say it. Probably shouldn’t have blurted it out. Definitely should have been more romantic. Sorry, I know I don’t deserve you.”
Her expression softens. “You deserve me, Crew Jensen. You deserve good things. You deserve to be happy.” She kisses me softly. “And I’m going to spend however long it takes convincing you of that.”
“However long?”
“However long.” She snuggles back into my chest. “Now rest up. You promised me a round two, and I intend to collect.”
I smile into the darkness, my arms wrapped around the woman I love, and for the first time in thirty years, I don’t feel broken.
I feel whole.