What Happens in Amsterdam

Chapter Seventeen

Seventeen

Breakfast the next morning is sheer perfection. The Belgian waffles are a toasty bronze and gloriously fluffy, their deep squares filled with syrup. It’s possible I go overboard on the toppings: strawberries and blueberries and fresh cream, a dusting of powdered sugar, a dollop of Nutella. Truly, the Platonic ideal of a waffle. No notes.

The sugar rush is enough to lift my mood a little, along with the anticipation of some Bruges tourism, since we arrived too late last night to see any of the city.

Wouter, however, has barely touched his waffles. I can understand why—he opted for a bit of butter as his sole topping. He’s wearing a slate-gray collared shirt with thin white stripes, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and the furrow between his brows has made a reappearance. He was already showered and dressed when I woke up at seven o’clock, so clearly he’s still barely sleeping.

“I have a dinner with some colleagues after the conference,” he says. “It might go late. You’re sure you’ll be fine on your own?”

I take a sip of orange juice. “No problem at all.”

Already this trip is undoing our progress. Turning us into friendly strangers.

“Wouter van Leeuwen!” calls an Irish-accented voice, belonging to a bald man dropping his breakfast tray on the other end of the table. “It’s been ages!”

Though Wouter gets to his feet and extends his hand for a shake, the other man pulls him into a hug.

“Rory McDonagh,” Wouter says, instantly seeming lighter. “Where are you working these days?”

“Went back home to Belfast for a while, but now I’m in Leiden. Got my own practice there. Fell hopelessly in love with a Dutch girl and now I fear I may never leave,” he says with an amiable shrug, his brogue making it sound all the more charming.

“Well done, on both counts.” Wouter turns to me. “Rory and I were in university together.” Then he swallows hard, his hand wavering as though unsure where he should place it. Nowhere, he ultimately decides. “This is my wife. Danika.”

The ring on my finger feels more like a lie than it ever has.

Rory gives me an enthusiastic handshake. “I didn’t know you’d gotten married! Hey, congrats.”

“Nice to meet you,” I say as the three of us sit back down. “You must have tons of great stories about the two of you from college.”

“Loads. Has he ever told you about the time we got absolutely jarred and decided to climb the tallest tower at school?” When I shake my head, Rory keeps going. “We made it halfway up. Stopped at a balcony…at which point this guy decided to take a nap.”

“That was where the university police found me the next day,” Wouter says. “Passed out with a Sharpie eye patch and mustache on my face to make me look like the world’s least-threatening pirate.”

I force a smile, wishing I could find this as endearing as it is.

Rory feigns innocence. “No idea how that got there, mate.” He gestures to me with a cup of coffee. “You’re not a physiotherapist too, are you?”

“No, I’m not. I’m…” I trail off, unsure what to call myself. A liar in a green-card marriage. A woman who has no idea what the fuck she’s doing.

When I still can’t decide how to end the sentence, Wouter speaks up. “She’s a UX designer at a startup in Amsterdam.”

“Very impressive! Must be an exciting environment,” Rory says, perfectly jovial.

The floor goes wobbly beneath me as I process Wouter’s words.

She’s a UX designer at a startup , he said, like he was worried I might tell the truth.

Like he was worried how unemployed might sound.

“Actually, I was a UX designer,” I correct, finally finding my voice. “But I’m in between jobs at the moment. Still looking for the right fit.”

Rory gives me a reassuring nod. I’m not sure he’s capable of anything but positivity. “We’ve all been there, haven’t we? I’m sure you’ll land back on your feet.”

I don’t register anything they talk about for the rest of breakfast. My waffles grow soggy, but I shove bite after bite into my mouth anyway, trying desperately to make eye contact with Wouter as he tries desperately not to.

I’ve never felt more seventeen, the girl without ambition he discarded all those years ago. It’s a staggering realization that he might feel this way about me. Still . After all the reassurances that I could take my time.

I want so badly to believe this wasn’t what he meant, and yet I can’t rationalize it any other way.

“Right on,” Rory says when we’re finished eating, completely unaware of how the energy has changed. Then to Wouter: “Ready to go?”

Wouter nods, still not meeting my gaze as we all rise to our feet. “See you tonight?”

“Yep.” I give the p a hard pop before clearing my throat. “Enjoy the conference.”

All I hear is Rory saying, “Seems like a lovely girl!” before the two of them disappear into the hall.

Bruges is the most charming place, with Gothic houses and cobbled streets that make me feel as though I’ve traveled hundreds of years into the past. And the city’s defining feature: the canals are full of swans. I’ve never seen this many all in one place, dozens and dozens of the elegant, long-necked birds.

I take a boat tour to get even closer, sending a few photos to Iulia with the caption Promise I’m not cheating on you , and she responds right away: Bruges is magical so I forgive you ;)

While I love the freedom of wandering a new city by myself, the conversation with Rory sits like a brick in my stomach. Amsterdam was supposed to be my second chance, but I’m no closer to figuring out what I want to do than I was when I got off that plane. In fact, I may be even further from it, since I don’t have a steady paycheck.

Wouter and I promised nothing about our day-to-day lives was going to change, and yet there’s been a massive seismic shift. Every day contains only more pretending, more mystery about how I’m supposed to act around him.

His simple presence in my life makes it dramatically different, and not just because we’re married. I could feel all his disappointment when he mentioned my job, and I’m no longer merely sad about the shifting dynamic between us. I’m angry with him, and the emotion is such a strange, unexpected relief.

I know exactly how to be angry with him.

My day ends with a torturous climb up all 366 steps of the Belfry, Bruges’s imposing thirteenth-century bell tower. I hear my parents’ voices, warning me about my lungs and how unsafe these cracked stairs are, and how it’s okay if I can’t handle this.

“How many more steps?” the people around me ask other tourists on their way down, those who’ve successfully made the trek and lived to tell the tale.

“Almost there!” they promise. “It’s worth it!”

But I pace myself. I take breaks, drink water, let others pass. It probably takes me longer than almost anyone else, and when I finally get to the top—

There’s the city spread out beneath me, those tiny historic buildings and a Sunday market, orange roofs extending far into the distance.

I stay up there for a long time, not minding the wind that blows my hair around my face or the tourists who ask if I’ll take photos of their families.

Because there’s that wanderlust again, that itch at the back of my throat that quietly pleads: more .

—

I’m pretending to be asleep when Wouter gets back to the room that night, the duvet wrapped tight around me. I haven’t decided yet if I want to confront him or ignore him.

But he’s being so fucking considerate as he quietly goes through the room, toeing his shoes off and carefully unzipping his suitcase, tooth by agonizing tooth, and it’s downright infuriating. How dare he be polite about this when he was so quick to speak for me, when he made it clear that who I really am isn’t someone he’s confident introducing as his wife.

The rage wins out.

I throw off the duvet with such force that it startles him.

“Jesus,” he says, holding a hand to his chest. “Didn’t realize you were still awake.”

He looks so soft in this nighttime lighting, the cathedral reflected in his glasses. That’s infuriating, too, that I am all sharp edges and he has the audacity to look this touchable.

“How was dinner with Rory?” I say flatly, not caring about how pillow-warped my hair must look or the fact that I’m braless in a T-shirt and tiny shorts. “The one who just had to know that I was a UX designer. Because god forbid someone thinks you have a wife who’s unemployed.”

He gives me a bewildered look. “Danika,” he says as he approaches the bed, holding up his hands. “Slow down, okay? Let’s talk.” The top two buttons of his shirt are undone. Another infuriating detail.

“You had to introduce me that way—why? So that I wouldn’t jump in and tell him the truth? So I wouldn’t…embarrass you?”

“ No ,” he says, finally seeming to understand what I’m saying. “Because I didn’t want you to feel pressured to explain yourself when you’re still figuring it out. I don’t care if my colleagues know you’re not working right now.”

I’m still too riled to be touched by this gesture, even if it was semi-thoughtful. I push my fingertips into my eyes, heave out a breath. “It’s not just that. I’m just—I never really learned how to navigate the aftermath of getting yourself off while your fake husband does the same thing in the next room. My mistake.” My face flames with the memory as red attacks his cheeks. “So we’re back in this place where we don’t actually talk about anything that matters, and you know what? I really hate it.”

Now he looks properly confused. “I didn’t even drink tonight and I’m still lost. Where is all this coming from?”

“Are you serious? It can’t be a mystery.”

“Enlighten me, then. Please.”

It’s too good to see him pleading, even if it brings back that vision of me at the edge of the counter, completely bare to him, his face between my legs.

I want this man on his knees either way—whether he’s begging forgiveness or making me cry out his name.

“Enlighten you. Sure. Let’s talk about the real problem, then,” I say, thrusting aside the duvet so I can get to my feet, anger thrumming all the way down to my toes. “Thirteen years ago. The fact that we had a plan . We made it together . And then you went home and changed your mind. Decided I wasn’t ‘ambitious’ enough for you and didn’t even give us a chance to talk about it.” I stomp over to where he’s standing, wishing I were about three feet taller and wearing at least 30 percent more clothes. Still, it’s an adrenaline rush, finally having the courage to say all of this to his face. “So what the fuck really happened, Wouter?”

I’m not expecting the words to hit him like a blow to the chest. He staggers backward, runs a hand down his face, jostles his glasses. He’s less soft now. More wrecked.

“Oh my god…” He shakes his head as the reality sinks in. “That message. That stupid message. I had no idea you were still thinking about it. It—it haunted me for so long.”

“Better to be haunted than dating a girl with zero ambition, right?”

He gives me this hollow, tortured look. “It was callous. I know. But there was a life waiting for me in Amsterdam I didn’t think I could just turn my back on. I thought I was supposed to be this person with a clear path, even though I know now that I was too young to have any of it set in stone.”

The room is too small and there isn’t enough air. I snatch up one of the swan towels, ruining someone’s hard work as I clutch it tight in my fist. “And I didn’t fit into that life.”

“Some part of me thought so. Yes. I’m not proud of it, but I don’t want to lie to you,” he says. “But there was more. I thought if I gave you a reason, if I told you I wanted to be with someone more ambitious…then maybe you’d hate me. And that would make it easier. The truth is, any reality where I wasn’t with you sounded only marginally better than the pain of trying to make it work with all that distance between us.”

I choke out a laugh. “So you told me ‘bye, thanks for everything’ to spare my feelings?”

“Because I didn’t think I’d be able to get over you otherwise! Is that so hard to imagine?” His eyes are blazing, chest rapidly rising and falling. “If we’re really talking about this, what about you? You sure didn’t wait long before you moved on.”

“I—what?”

“I saw on your social media. You were dating some football player a few weeks later. Soccer, whatever. I figured the breakup didn’t even affect you if you already had a new boyfriend that fast. You just swapped me out for the next guy, someone more convenient.”

I’m struck by this. He seems actually, genuinely hurt in a way I never anticipated. “Wouter—that wasn’t anything real. It barely lasted a month. I was missing you, and I thought seeing someone else might help me get over you faster.”

“Did it?”

“No.”

What he said that first evening comes back to me, about the relationship not being what either of us thought it was.

“You knew I was all in with you,” I say quietly, my teenage aching steeped in those words. “You knew I loved you. That didn’t just change overnight.”

He’s walked to the edge of the room, and now he turns back and presses his lips together, as though trying to lock the emotion inside. The way he’s been doing since I arrived. “That was what I thought, too, but I saw those posts and figured…maybe it was for the best. You’d go have the beautiful life that you deserved without someone on the other side of the world holding you back. I couldn’t bear the thought of you holing up in a dorm room somewhere waiting for me. And I couldn’t—” A deep, anguished breath. “I couldn’t bear the thought of having a relationship with you where I couldn’t see you all the time. Hold you all the time. Touch you.” His voice breaks a little, and he shakes his head as he cuts his gaze to the floor. “A long-distance relationship would have made us miserable in the end. I thought I was sparing us both.”

All of this rushes through me in fragments. A tidal wave of understanding, of finally being able to put the pieces together in a way my younger self never could.

“I wanted to talk to you all the time,” he continues, voice still a little hoarse. I wish it didn’t affect me the way it does, making itself at home inside my chest. “I wrote and deleted a hundred other messages. When I got into university. When my dad had his first stroke. When he passed away and I realized all the hard work didn’t fucking matter if it was taking time away from the people I loved. Even stupid shit, like seeing a sunset I thought you’d really like. I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll send her this photo and take it all back.’ But you were so far away that everything that happened with you felt like a dream.”

“I thought—I thought you regretted it. Like I was some dirty secret you left behind in America.” There’s a fragile catharsis in finally being able to say these things. I’m unsteady on my feet, like one more truth from him could knock me over. “You broke my fucking heart, but maybe the worst of it was that I was convinced you thought I was some aimless loser, and over a decade later, that’s still exactly who I am.”

“ No . I could never. Not then, and not now.” With a cautious kind of strength, he strides closer. “I am so sorry, Dani. I really screwed up. What I told you when you first moved in, about this being one of my biggest regrets—I meant it.” He’s been worrying at the sleeves of his shirt, at his neckline, and the whole thing has become a wrinkled mess. I’ve never seen a man look more disheveled, and it’s sexier than it has any right to be. Like he’s been tortured keeping all this in, and now that he’s letting it out, he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. “Your family had even talked about coming to visit, and I let all of them down. I held on to the guilt for so many years. I never thought I’d have a chance to make it up to you. And then you show up here, a hundred times more gorgeous than I remember, and I think: ‘I am so fucked.’?”

Despite everything, this makes me bite back a smile. Because I believe him—I do.

“You could have offered me a room in your house and asked me to marry you,” I say as I drop the towel to the floor, and he fails to hide a smile too. I’m still stuck on the knowledge that I am the one who made him look this wrecked. I never thought I had the power to take someone apart like that, and it makes me wonder how else I could do it. Whether he’d let me. “God. This would have been so much easier if you told me all of this at the beginning.”

He folds his arms across his chest and quirks one eyebrow. “?‘Hi, great to see you again. By the way, I liked you too much when we were teenagers to have any semblance of rational thought, so I broke up with you over text like a coward’?”

“So we were just idiots who didn’t know how to communicate.”

“Maybe we still are. I know I am. And I’m sorry,” he repeats. “I’m so sorry you ever thought it meant you didn’t matter. When I was in LA, you were just…everything to me.”

Those words hang between us, so visceral that I almost believe I could pluck them from the air and tuck them away for safekeeping.

“And now?” I ask, my voice wavering, almost afraid of the answer.

Maybe the question is too bold. Maybe he won’t give me a real reply.

But slowly, slowly, I sense something in the room start to shift. My adrenaline has dropped to a low simmer even as my heart hammers. This time, though, it’s with anticipation. He moves closer, until there’s a couple feet of space between us, and with that wrinkled shirt and fierce longing in his eyes—how did I not see it before?

“You have to know I can’t stop thinking about you. Every spare moment,” he says, voice rough. “Tell me you haven’t thought about it, too. When we kissed in the kitchen, and—and what happened after.”

“I’ve thought about it a lot.” A hard swallow. A step toward him. “Probably too much.”

“No such thing.” His gaze tracks my bare legs. Pauses at my hips before going higher, back up to my face. He lifts his hand at the same time as he lifts his eyebrows, as though asking for permission to touch me. Dazed, I give him a nod, his fingertips landing on the curve of my biceps.

“You said you wanted to stop. That night we were drunk,” I say. “And yesterday, you wanted to forget about it.”

“I didn’t want us to make such a big decision when we weren’t sober. And then you were avoiding me, and…I got scared. That you didn’t feel the same way.” He drags his finger down my forearm, taking his time before he speaks again. As though realizing we’re on the precipice of something dangerous, and whatever he says next might seal our fate. For better or for worse. Till death do us part. “When we were in the kitchen…it had been so long. I didn’t want to ruin it by not being able to remember every single detail.” That fingertip sweeps upward, beneath the sleeve of my T-shirt, curving around my shoulder. “I didn’t want to kiss you if my senses were the slightest bit impaired. Being around you already does enough of that.”

“Oh,” I say softly. Half relief, half awe.

“Tell me you think we’re better off just friends,” he says, and from the focused way his eyes hold mine to the determined tone of his voice, I can tell something’s changed in him. He’s finally giving in to the side of himself he’s been so desperate to hide. “Is that better than me kissing you until neither of us can see straight? Because there are so many places I want to kiss you, Dani. So many .” He moves his hand to the side of my neck, thumb stroking along my skin. “You’re so pretty right here.” Up to my jaw. “And here.” He grazes my hip bone with his other hand. “Here, too. Your hips. Your waist. Your perfect tits.”

My throat is dry, the ache between my legs almost painful. Every place he’s touched me feels singed. Electric. I take a final step, my toes aligned with his, wondering if the weight of his thumb is all that’s holding me up. Just to be sure, I grip his arm. Savor the swell of solid muscle.

“Tell me right now if you’d rather ignore all of this,” he continues. “Because all I’ve been able to think about, ever since you were on that table in my office, is ripping off those sweet little panties so I can feel how wet you are.”

A whimper slips out. “ Please .”

“Please what? Tell me, Dani.” Now his hand is at the juncture of my thighs. He gives me the smallest amount of pressure, enough to have me gasping as he massages me through my shorts. “Tell me platonic is better than me getting on my knees and fucking you with my mouth all night long.”

My chest is already heaving with the effort of holding back. There’s nothing else. No more reasons not to do this.

So I press myself to him just as his lips crash down on mine.

His kisses are greedier than I remember them. They’re reckless and unashamed, infused with the kind of urgency that makes it clear we’ve both been denying ourselves for far too long. He clutches me tight, his hands tangled in my hair, his tongue parting my lips so I can open for him.

I’m on my tiptoes, his hands traveling down my shoulders until he realizes the height difference doesn’t make this particularly easy. So he picks me up in one effortless motion, my legs wrapping around his waist while he trails his mouth down my neck. This. This is perfect. Tongue and teeth. Sighs and gasps. I cling to the solid heat of him, fingertips in his hair. When he hoists me higher to kiss my breasts through the fabric of my T-shirt, I shudder against him, my head thrown back. His mouth finds my hardened nipples—and oh . It’s almost too good when he gives them a few exploratory flicks with his tongue, making damp spots on the thin cotton.

Every touch feels like a small miracle.

He pauses for only a moment to look at me with wild eyes, breathing hard, glasses askew. “You’re sure about this?”

“We’re already married,” I say, and suddenly it’s so funny that I have to bite back a laugh. “Wait, wait, wait.” I give his chest a pat. “Are you—? I have an IUD, and I was tested before I left the US.”

“I got tested, too.” The blush across his face deepens as his thumbs trace circles on my back. “Right after that night in the kitchen, actually.”

He leans close to kiss me again, but I pull back with a grin. Hearing that is hotter than I can imagine—that he was preparing for something we swore we wouldn’t do. “You wanted to be ready for me.” I nip at his throat, kiss all of that warm, citrus-tinged skin, and beneath it an earthy scent that’s wholly him . One that’s been locked in time, stowed away in some kind of olfactory memory box for the way it ignites something in me.

“ Fuck , Dani. It feels like I’ve been ready for years.”

He uses my nickname, like he’s so hungry for me that he can’t bother with the extra syllable.

I grab his crooked glasses and place them on the nightstand as he lowers us to the bed, mouth fused to mine again. These kisses are somehow both frantic and sweet—because we have so much time to make up for.

When he pulls away, it’s only to yank my shirt off just as I’m fumbling with his buttons, eager to get my hands on all of him. The broad expanse of his chest. The tattoo on his left shoulder, though I’m in too much of a rush to linger on it. He slides off my pajama shorts in one quick movement. In my dazed state, it takes an actual eon to undo his jeans, but finally they’re tossed onto the floor and he’s staring at me in panties and no bra.

I don’t cover myself the way I might with other new partners. Obviously I look different than I did at seventeen, my stomach softer, my face rounder. But I let him take an extended moment to drink me in, the same way I look at him, at the angles of his chest and the tent in his boxer briefs and the trail of hair I mapped weeks ago. His mouth kicks into an awed, lovely smile that he tries to bite back before letting it go.

“Beautiful,” he says as I tug him on top of me, savoring the weight as he presses me into the mattress. “Absolutely beautiful.”

He buries his lips between my breasts, a thumb sweeping along one nipple. Slowly, slowly, back and forth until I’m aching for more. A gentle pinch. A little harder.

“During that massage in my office… god ,” he says on a hot breath. “I felt so fucking unprofessional, the thoughts I was having.”

“Tell me.”

“How incredible it felt to touch you again. How I couldn’t believe you were letting me work your body like that.” He sucks a nipple into his mouth while I grasp at his hair, and I let myself be loud about how much I love it. Then he releases me with a pop, blows cool air on my breasts before catching them with his lips again. “Every sound you made, I wondered if it was because of what I was doing to you.”

“It—it was. I wanted you on top of me. Inside me,” I admit as his teeth drag along my sensitive skin. “I locked myself in my room for an hour the next day, just…imagining.”

He groans, rolling his hips into mine, kissing up to my neck again. “You”—mouth on my throat—“think about me”—tongue on my pulse—“when you touch yourself.”

“Yes. Wouter. God .” And even though I know the answer: “Do you?”

Somehow, there’s a sheepishness in the way he bites down on his lip. Even though we’re sweaty and half-undressed, he can still be shy. “Last week…wasn’t the first time I’ve come with your name in my mouth.”

His confession turns me wild. Now I’m the one pinning him, kissing down his chest as he grabs my waist, my hips. I have to get my mouth on the muscles that knew exactly how to stretch my body. The forearms that flexed over me. He laughs, even when I plant little kisses on his hands, but that only makes me kiss him more.

He’s hard as steel beneath me, gripping my ass as I straddle him and rock against his erection, two agonizing layers of fabric separating us. Fuck , he feels good. My eyes fall shut at the sensation. I slide a hand between us to rub him over his boxers while he swallows a moan, growing harder in my palm.

“Not yet,” he manages, and though I want to watch him come undone until every last muscle stops protesting, I lift my hand away. “Please. I need to feel you.”

I have no objections to that. He kisses up the column of my neck, messy and open-mouthed, while he slips a hand into my panties.

“I’m not—I haven’t waxed or anything in a while,” I say. Jace always preferred it, almost as much as I hated doing it.

He gives me a bewildered look. “I want all of you. Exactly the way you are.” He finds the coarse hair between my thighs and almost seems to relish it, letting out a growl as he parts me with two fingers. “ Dani . You feel fucking amazing. Are you really this wet for me?”

All I can do is gasp in response. We never spoke like this back then—I’m certain we wouldn’t have known how—and it takes my brain a second to catch up to the fact that Wouter van Leeuwen now has a filthy mouth.

Achingly slow, he works off my panties. Drags his fingers up my bare legs, mouth on my knees, my calves, my ankles. I’m already breathing hard at the anticipation of him filling me, but he takes his time relearning me, reacting to each new sound. A knuckle brushed down along my pubic bone. Two slick fingers stroking my lips. He teases my clit for only a moment before he slides a finger inside me, deeper this time.

When I bite down on his ear, I can feel the way it affects him, a tremor of his shoulders that makes me do it again.

Somehow it manages to feel like the first time and also like we’ve charted these paths before, but he’s smoother now, more sure of his movements. Even after all these years, my body remembers how to bend for him, and yet still there’s a question in the way he touches me, waiting for my eager yes .

“Good?” he asks as he returns to my clit, this time with the heel of his hand, pulsing there while I shudder beneath him. There’s a thread of amusement in his voice, because he knows it is. “More pressure? Less? I’m a professional, as you know.”

“More. I—I like a lot of pressure.”

Instead of obliging, he keeps his eyes on me as he readjusts. He sits back on his knees, treating me to a spectacular view of his chest before he settles himself at my hips, tugging me upward until my head is on the pillow. He’s gentle at first, planting soft kisses on my thighs, playing connect-the-dots with the freckles I have there. A bite. Another lingering kiss.

“Please,” I croak out, because he’s rendered me incapable of keeping my begging to myself. “Now you’re just torturing me.”

A broken-off laugh. “Going slow is more for my benefit than for yours. As soon as I start licking you, I’m afraid I’m not going to last long.”

For a second, I’m convinced he’s used the wrong pronouns, that he means I won’t last long. But the moment he puts his mouth on me, I realize he was exactly right. His body tightens as he grasps my hips like an anchor, and the way he groans when I fist a hand in his hair is my new favorite thing about him.

He pauses to touch his damp forehead to my inner thigh. “You taste even better than I remember.”

Then he takes the tip of his tongue to my clit and neither of us can speak. He licks me like he missed me, giving me all the pressure I need and more, until I feel that tension building at the base of my spine. My legs begin to shake, and he must be able to sense it because he quickens his pace. One hand keeps me spread to him while he flattens his tongue, flicking it against me in a firm, insistent rhythm that has me pulling at his hair, biting the back of my hand. Swearing his name.

Everything in me winds the tightest tight before my muscles go slack, a gasp yanked from my throat. The orgasm rolls through my body in waves of white-hot pleasure—thighs quivering, eyes shut, head thrown back. The neediest burst of relief.

Wouter holds his mouth to my forehead, brushing aside sweaty strands of hair as I come back to earth.

A laugh mixes with a sigh as I force my eyes back open. His hair is wild and a lovely scarlet spills across his cheeks, matching the marks on his neck where I left eager kisses, but it’s not enough. I want this man to look fucking debauched.

“Come here,” I say, tipping his mouth to mine and tasting myself on his lips.

Then I give my hand a long lick before I wrap it around him.

“You really thought you might come, just from going down on me?” I ask. “Before I could get my hands on you?”

He groans, buries his mouth in the side of my neck. With my thumb, I rub the head of his cock, spreading those drops of moisture along his shaft. And even though I’m desperate to go slow, to make this last as long as possible, I can’t resist pumping him harder. Faster.

“ Dani ,” he grits out. “I’m trying so hard not to embarrass myself here, but that’s—that’s so fucking good.”

God, he’s already about to fall apart in the palm of my hand, this gorgeous man who made me see stars. His fingertips travel up my back, inching upward, until he can spread them along my neck and up into my hair.

Just when I sense he’s moments from the edge, I release my hand. He lets out a heavy breath at the loss of my touch as I move up to his face, kissing him slowly. Sweetly. His eyes are shut, long lashes looking so delicate.

Then I reach for him and start again.

The expletives that tumble from his mouth are more than worth it, especially when I lean down to close my lips around him. He’s even harder now, heat and salt. I take him in slowly, swirling my tongue around the tip of his cock. Watching him watch me. I commit every single one of his reactions to memory: a fist gripping the bedsheets. Adam’s apple fluttering in his throat. Abdominal muscles trembling with the weight of all the times he’s held himself back.

“Oh fuck,” he pants. “Just like that, lief.”

The word slips out—I’m sure of it. He doesn’t have control over himself like this.

Suddenly his eyes go wide, and he gazes down at me as though making sure I know I don’t have to let him finish like this if I don’t want to. But god , I want to. I give him a fierce confirmation as I suck him deeper, and within an instant, he’s completely undone. Pushed over the edge with a brilliant moan and a rush of heat in my mouth, his fingertips still stroking the nape of my neck.

When our breathing calms down, he heads to the bathroom for a warm, damp towel, one of the ones that used to be shaped like a swan. I’m not sure why my heart squeezes when he cleans me up first—probably I’m not used to anyone taking care of me like that.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he says, “but I don’t think it was ever quite like that when we were seventeen?”

I laugh, nudging him with my elbow. “No, you’ve definitely picked up a few moves.”

“As have you.”

He props himself up on one arm to kiss me but hesitates, as though unsure how to navigate this new territory. I close the space between us and bring my mouth to his. I don’t know what we are or what this means—just that I don’t want to stop kissing him.

“How early is the train tomorrow?” I ask.

“Too early. I should probably set an alarm.”

After fiddling with his phone, he slides an arm around my back and pulls me to his chest. His hand rests at my hip, my face in the crook of his neck. It’s peaceful here, his pulse drumming against my cheek, probably the most peace I’ve had in months. The rhythm of it lulls me into a trance; my eyes are already starting to shut.

“We always wanted to sleep in the same bed together,” he says, his words thick like he’s already on the verge of it. “All those years ago.”

I let his legs tangle with mine and stop short of telling him I’m not sure I can fall asleep with someone wrapped around me like this.

Until I do.