25. Addy
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Addy
I pull back just enough to look at him properly, and that's where I lose the last of my remaining common sense, because he’s not composed anymore.
Not in the way he usually is.
The control is still there, yes, but it’s thinner now, stretched tight over something warmer, more human. His eyes are darker, focused entirely on me like I’m the only variable in the room that matters.
Which is deeply unhelpful.
“Addy,” Ethan murmurs. “I want you.”
My laugh sticks in my throat as his hands ghost down my ribcage, then more greedily, and I burn under his gaze.
Ethan studies me with a devotion that feels almost foreign. It’s terrifying and exhilarating, and it makes my skin ignite in a way no amount of tequila shots ever could.
The muscles in his forearms ripple as he holds me up. His mouth is on my jaw, working its way down, tasting the salt and sweat, and he laughs when I squirm into him.
“Addy, I need you.”
I can’t form a sentence.
He watches me flounder, a wicked smile flickering at the edge of his mouth, and I’m certain that if I don’t answer, he’ll stop altogether, collect himself, and leave me a cold, trembling mess. I dig my nails into his biceps, anchor myself there.
“Don’t fucking stop,” I manage, so desperate I sound almost angry.
His mouth parts like he’s going to say something snide, but instead he kisses me again, slower this time, savoring.
Ethan lets me taste the shape of his restraint. The way his tongue finds mine, then recedes, then returns, until I’m chasing him, heat pooling in places I didn’t know I could ache.
Every measured movement's an examination, a calculation, and I think he’s running some kind of experiment, tracking my reactions, logging each gasp and twist as data points to help him proceed.
It makes me feel both small and enormous, laid out and dissected, but prioritized, the core of every rapidly spinning neuron in this maddening man’s brain.
He shifts, and the motion slides my ass hard against the lip of the table. I yelp, and he laughs, actually laughs, a sound that makes the hairs on my arms stand up.
“Damn, your body is screaming for me.”
I want to bite him. I want to throw him onto the floor and rip the buttons off his shirt with my teeth.
Instead, I wrap my legs around his hips and try to grind myself against him, but he’s already a step ahead.
Ethan pins me, his hands gliding back up my sides in between the dinner plates, thumbs brushing dangerously close to the bottom edge of my bra, and I shiver reflexively, needy and wrecked but somehow still dignified, at least in my own head.
I try for a witty comeback, but my mouth is useless, hijacked by the way he kneads the swell of my hips, mapping me, conquering me.
He drags his hands up and under my shirt, palms flat, then slides his thumbs beneath the wire of my bra and pulls until the elastic gives a little snap, teasing.
I want to make some indignant protest, but my voice betrays me, comes out plaintive and high, and he grins, cocky and delighted by his own effect.
Then he ducks his head, burying his face in the curve where my neck meets my shoulder, and bites, and a sound escapes me before I can stop it.
Ethan’s hand comes over my mouth immediately, half laughing, half wrecked himself.
“Quiet,” he murmurs against my throat, voice rough. “Oliver’s asleep.”
The plates rattle sharply against the wood, and both of us freeze for half a second.
Ethan exhales a curse under his breath.
“We need to be quieter,” he says, though the words dissolve when I drag him back down to kiss me.
I answer by curling my fingers in his hair, yanking him closer. There's no inch of me that isn’t awake, electric. My thighs are locked around his waist, and the contact's too much and not enough, and the entire axis of my body tilts towards his.
He grinds back, a low sound vibrating in his chest, and the friction is catastrophic. I arch into him, and a sharp and starry explosion explodes all the way up my spine.
“Oh,” I say, or maybe I just think it, because he’s kissing me again and my mouth is already otherwise occupied. “Fucking hell, Ethan, that feels so good.”
His hand is warm, then hot, then gently brutal on the outside of my thigh, and he doesn’t so much as peel my shorts down as demand them off, rucking them halfway to my knees before I can even pretend to protest.
The brutal exposure's intoxicating, the way air hits my skin, the way his stubble draws little fiery lines across my chest, my stomach, my everything.
My shirt’s somewhere around my elbows, but I couldn’t be bothered to care. He presses me back down and kisses me so hard it’s like he’s trying to drag the breath from my lungs.
He lifts me, adjusts, and moves me up the table with the precision of someone who’s never failed a physics exam in his life.
The plates and forks are gone, and I’m more or less naked except for my bra and the dignity he’s about to ravage from me.
He glances down for permission, and I’m so gone I barely nod before he’s got my thighs spread open and his mouth is everywhere, so gentle it verges on cruel.
I want to thank him and curse him and slap him for being so methodical.
I want to be devoured messily.
When he finally slides his tongue against me, it’s expert, greedy, and just uncoordinated enough to be honest. I feel my hips writhe without permission, my hands gripping the edge of the table, my whole body trying to outrun the nerves sparking under my skin.
He goes goddamn slow, and I wish I could be angry about it, like I might actually die if he doesn’t hurry up, but the truth is I love it, the torture, the way he puts me back together every time he tears me open.
I swear I can feel his smile against my thigh. He’s almost smug about how easy it is to get me to beg, and I want to claw at him, drag him up and kiss away the self-congratulation, but I just moan again, and he redoubles his efforts, determined now, relentless.
When I look down, Ethan’s face is tilted up to watch me unravel, dark eyes fixed on mine, locked in, like he’s challenging me, or maybe daring me to look away.
I can’t, not even when pleasure tightens in my chest, and I lose track of what my body is even doing.
It's humiliating and addictive to be watched with that kind of focus, as if every flicker in my face is a secret he’s dying to unlock.
A pressure builds, not just in my thighs but in my ribs, between my ears, in my lungs.
Ethan’s hands lock around my hips, holding me in place as if I might try to escape, but I have nowhere else to go. He’s made an anchor out of his palms, holding me down while the rest of me tries to vaporize.
And just when I think I might break apart, just when the sparks lining my nerves threaten combustion, his mouth lowers, his tongue flicks, and the air tunnels out of my lungs in a moan named only for him.
I come apart so hard, like my entire existence is buffering.
He stays with me through every seismic aftershock, holding me like a question he needs answered, and when I finally exhale, the room snaps back into definition, every edge sharp, every surface humming with the violence of what just happened.
He waits another beat before releasing me, but not before kissing the inside of my knee like a benediction, like he’s grateful. As if I’ve given him some kind of rare gift, when he just dissolved me and ate the evidence.
My hands find his hair, impossible to stop, and I drag him up, greedy for his mouth, for the taste of myself on his tongue, and he obliges, kisses me so deeply it’s obscene.
He’s hard under his jeans, and I see the cost of his restraint in the fine tension at his jaw, the little hiccup in his breathing.
“Fucking hell, Ethan. I want you now.”
There's no hesitation, no barrier, not even my dignity left to drag this out. I want to feel him, now, all the way to the bone. I reach for his fly with both hands, but I’m trembling, my own fingers stupid from aftershock and gratitude and need.
Ethan catches my wrists, pins them to the table, and kisses the crown of my head and my sticky forehead and then my mouth again, until I’m soft and whimpering, and only then does he let me go.
I fumble with his button, then zipper, and his laugh startles me. A joke we both know is on me, but I don’t care.
I want him.
I want him more than I want to breathe.
He steps between my knees, shoves his jeans down just far enough to free himself, and for a split, paralyzed second, I try to remember every permutation of what’s supposed to happen next:
How do you navigate the mechanics of this with a man this beautiful, merciless, impossible, oh, fuck… and my thought short-circuits and the world drops away so that the only thing in existence is Ethan, his hand, his cock, the table scraping under my back with every push.
The friction stretches time.
He’s thick and so fucking slow at first, like he doesn’t believe I can take it, even though at this point I’d take a battering ram if it got me there faster.
I grab at his shirt still clinging to his shoulders, nails dragging down his arms, feeling the muted stutter of muscle. He locks eyes with me, his face close enough that I can see the starburst pattern in his irises, the vulnerability stitched into the lines around his mouth.
The next thrust breaks us both. He gasps, I moan, and it’s as if the last membrane separating us from the rest of the world dissolves completely.
It’s janky and more frantic than I want to admit. I'm so unsure and so greedy, but he never looks away.
His face hovers right above mine, lips parted, brow pinched with that mixture of concentration and disbelief, and in the moment, I'm convinced that we are the only two people in the world who have ever fucked, have ever even tried to put two souls into such dangerous proximity.
My calves are hooked around his waist, toes digging into the small of his back, and each time he presses deeper I forget how to hold myself up, forget how to be the self-contained atom I’ve always been.
I start to say his name, but it comes out a strangled choke, and somewhere in the background a glass tips over and shatters, a miniature apocalypse blooming underneath us.
Neither of us moves to fix it. I’m not sure we can. The table rocks. The atmosphere is flooded with anticipation and static, and something only the two of us can breathe.
He shifts his angle, and it’s disastrous; my body’s so greedy for it that I buck up hard enough to stun even him.
His hands clamp my hips; I’m barely an object in his grasp, a science experiment, a live wire, an equation exploding mid-solution. Ethan’s mouth is on my collarbone, my jaw, my teeth, the desperate wet underside of my chin.
I can feel him smile, teeth scraping low, and then he’s pounding into me, and the friction is otherworldly; I feel every inch of him, every ridge and heat, and my body’s traitorously clutching, desperate for annihilation.
My head is flat on the table, hair spread everywhere, the world sideways. I see the overturned glass, the slow trickle of wine crawling across the floor, and I think that everything I am is leaking out too.
Ethan’s hand slips up the back of my neck, threading into my hair, bracing me as if he knows there’s no other way I’ll stay in this reality.
He’s losing it too. I can read it in the ragged edge of his breathing, the way his rhythm threatens to break apart completely.
Our bodies stutter together, then align, and the heat between my legs is nothing compared to the fire racing every circuit of my body. I want to die like this, my neurons shorting out, dying little perfect deaths with every hungry drag of his hips.
He growls my name, and the sound punches straight through every last defense I have. I bite his shoulder, without warning, and he makes a sound that’s half laugh, half threat, and fuck if that isn’t the hottest thing I’ve ever heard.
My brain picks right now to perform an emergency factory reset.
For a heartbeat, I think I might cry, or scream, or burn the world down, but my mouth is full of his name as I shatter, completely, every muscle igniting then dissolving, and there's nothing but stars.
He's right behind me. I can feel it: the tension, the trembling, the blind need to lose control.
He doesn’t fight it.
He never stops moving, not even as he falls apart above me, hips stuttering and hands digging into my shoulders, grounding himself even as he comes undone.
Our bodies lock together, fused at the points of greatest need, and when he collapses, breathless and shaking, I laugh in pure animal amazement.
My legs are trembling and refuse to uncurl. My spine feels like it’s been scooped out and replaced with light and static.
For a long moment, the only sound is our hearts frantically trying to reconcile the physics and chemistry of what we just did.
I feel found, and I feel ruined. I feel like someone took an entire life’s worth of loneliness and squeezed it out of me.
It’s too much. It’s not enough.
Somewhere along the edges of my vision, reality seeps in.
My pulse is finally calm enough for me to notice the long strokes of Ethan’s fingers along my thighs, the way he tries to soften the landing after the free fall.
He huffs against my collarbone, a laugh or a sigh, and holds me like a secret. I don’t know what to do with my hands.
All I know is that I don’t want to let go of him.