Chapter 28 #2
“Mac.” I wasn’t surprised at the need in my voice. “I want… I need…”
He lifted his head. His eyes were dark and serious, searching mine. “Tell me.”
“I want you inside me.”
The words hung in the air of the bedroom. Mac’s body went still against mine, every muscle tensing, not with resistance but with the focused, total attention he gave to everything that mattered. His eyes held mine, blue and steady, reading me. “I’ve never done this, Arek.”
“I know. I’ll talk you through it. But, Mac…” I held his gaze. “I need you to understand what I’m asking. I’m asking to let go. Completely. I need to let you…”
My throat tightened. The words were tangled up with everything that had happened on Monday, everything I’d been learning all week about holding on too tightly and never letting anyone carry me. “I need to not be in control. I need you to take care of me.”
Mac’s expression changed. The desire was still there, hot and present, but underneath it, an understanding shifted into place, a recognition of what I was truly asking. He lowered his forehead to mine. “I’ve got you,” he promised, and I believed him with my whole heart.
“I brought lube. Do we…? Do we need condoms? I haven’t been sexually active in quite some time, and I was negative at my last test.”
He let out a half-snort, a very un-Mac sound. “I haven’t been with anyone since Fay. Sex was about the last thing on my mind, so…”
I couldn’t help the smile that spread across my face. “So no condoms?”
“No condoms.”
“Good. Lube is in my bag. Side pocket.”
He rolled off me and found the bag, and I lay on my back and breathed.
My heart hammered and my body thrummed with want, nerves, and the vulnerability of what I’d asked for.
I’d done this before with men whose names I barely remembered, in encounters that were efficient and anonymous and left no mark.
This was different. This was Mac. This was the man I loved, the man I wanted a future with.
Mac came back with the lube and sat on the bed beside me. The look on his face—focused, intent, slightly terrified, utterly determined—was so perfectly Mac that a laugh escaped me.
“What?” he said.
“You look like you’re about to defuse a bomb.”
“I’m about to do something I’ve never done with the man I love. That’s more pressure than a bomb.”
The laugh dissolved into something warmer. I pulled him down and kissed him, deep and slow, and felt his body relax against mine. “It’s just us,” I said against his mouth. “No pressure. We’ll figure it out. It’s not rocket science.”
He kissed me. “I know.”
He kissed me again, and this time his hand moved down my body with purpose—my chest, my stomach, the cut of my hip.
His fingers wrapped around my cock and stroked, slow and sure, the grip he’d learned over the weeks, the one that made my back arch and my hands fist in the sheets.
He stroked me until I was panting, until the nerves dissolved into pure want, until my hips were moving with his hand and the only word left in my vocabulary was his name.
Then he added some lube, his hand moved lower, and I spread my legs for him.
He was tentative at first. Careful. His slicked fingers were exploring territory that was new to him, and I talked him through it. “There, yes, slow, that’s good.”
I was barely holding it together, the physician in me providing clinical guidance while the rest of me shattered under his touch. One finger, gentle, testing, and the sensation after so long without this was so intense that my vision whited out at the edges.
“Okay?” Mac’s voice was strained, his jaw tight with the effort of control, his eyes fixed on my face, reading every reaction.
“God yes. More.”
He gave me more. A second finger, and the stretch was a burn that bloomed into something deeper, something that radiated outward from the center of me and made my legs shake.
Mac watched me with that devastating focus, noting every response, learning this with the patient precision of a man who refused to do anything less than well.
When he curled his fingers and found the right spot, I let out a raw, broken cry that Mac caught with his mouth, kissing me hard, swallowing the sound.
His fingers were still moving, still pressing, and I was coming apart.
The controlled, competent, performing version of me disappeared, changing into something primal and honest and completely without armor. “Now. I need you now. Mac, please.”
He withdrew his fingers. He squirted some more lube on his cock and slicked himself. He hesitated for a moment, staring at his hand.
“We’ll change the sheets,” I said.
He nodded and wiped his hand off on the sheet.
And then he was over me, between my legs, the blunt head of his cock pressing against me. Our eyes locked. His hand cupped my face, neither of us breathing. “I’ve got you,” he said again.
He had me.
He pushed in, so slow I could feel every inch of him, the stretch and the fullness and the overwhelming intimacy of being entered by someone you loved.
My body resisted, then yielded, then opened, and the surrender of it—the literal act of letting someone inside me—mirrored the surrender I’d been learning all week so precisely that tears leaked from the corners of my eyes.
Mac froze. “Arek…”
“Don’t stop.” I gripped his arms, my fingers digging into the muscle. “Please don’t stop. It’s good. It’s so good. I’m just… I’m feeling everything.”
He pressed deeper. Inch by inch, watching my face, his own face taut with restraint, the effort of moving slowly when every line of his body screamed for more.
When he was fully inside me, he stopped and dropped his forehead to mine, and we breathed together.
His body shook against mine as we connected in the most fundamental way two people could.
“Arek.” His voice was destroyed. “You feel…”
“I know.”
“I can’t… I don’t have words.”
“You don’t need words. Just move.”
He moved.
The first thrust was tentative, Mac learning the angle, the depth, the rhythm.
The second was surer. By the third, he’d found it.
His hips rolled, and I gasped, my legs tightening around him.
He did it again, deeper, and the sound that came out of me was not quiet and not controlled.
I didn’t care. The boys weren’t here, and no one could hear us.
I let go.
Of the performance. Of the control. Of the need to manage, orchestrate, and direct. I lay under Mac, allowing him to move inside me, and I let the pleasure build without trying to shape it, without calculating reciprocity, without thinking about what I should be doing or giving or providing.
I just felt.
It was perfection.