50. Sage #2
I feel him.
Oh.
Oh.
He’s hard. Impossibly, alarmingly hard. And even through the fabric of his jeans, I can tell that Knox is built like everything else about him. Excessive. Overwhelming. Huge.
I rock against him again, and he groans into my mouth—the deepest sound I’ve ever heard a human make, like tectonic plates shifting. His fingers press harder, holding me still. Not pushing me away. Just . . . controlling the pace. Keeping me from going somewhere he’s decided we can’t go yet.
“Sage.” His voice comes out low, strained, almost pained. It makes my heart crack open.
“I know,” I whisper. “I feel you. I want you.”
“You can’t.” His jaw works, a muscle jumping in his cheek. “I’ll break you.”
I kiss him, hard, wanting to prove him wrong—wanting to feel exactly how it would break me.
Wanting to know the difference between breaking the way you do when a man holds you down and tries to rip you apart, and the breaking that comes from letting someone inside so deep they threaten to make a home there.
Knox’s mouth moves down my jaw, licking fire across the skin under my ear.
My nipples are tight through my shirt and I want to rip the cotton off, let him see every mark the others left last night and paint over it in his own colors.
I want him to fuck me. I want him inside.
I want everything, right now, all at once, punching a hole in the numbness that’s haunted me for so long my body forgot how to want anything else.
He holds me perfectly still, both hands bands of steel above my ass.
The whole length of his cock is hard, straining up between us.
“Please, Knox. You won’t break me,” I say. “I’m tougher than I look.”
“I know you’re tough, fury.” His thumb traces the ridge of my hip bone. “But tough isn’t the same as ready. I’m too big for you.”
I want to argue with him. Tell him I can handle anything, that I want to handle it, that my insides have been hollowed out by worse things than sex with a man built out of indestructible matter.
But Knox’s eyes are so earnest, so pleading, it stalls my protest.
“I’m not saying no.” His forehead rests against mine, his breath rough and uneven. “I’m saying not yet.”
For one second, the heat in me stutters into something softer. He wants me. I can feel exactly how badly he wants me. And he is still choosing not to take.
“Okay,” I breathe. “Okay.”
I kiss him again, softer this time. His hand slides up my back, fingers spread wide, holding me against his chest. I can feel his heart hammering through his shirt—fast and hard, completely at odds with the calm exterior. Proof that underneath all that granite, Knox is just as desperate as I am.
I rock against him again—not on purpose, not at first. Just my body chasing the hard ridge of him through denim. Knox makes a sound deep in his chest, a rumble that vibrates through both of us, and his hands flex on my hips.
“Fuck, fury. Take it.”
I roll my hips again, slower, deliberate now, his hardness dragging along my clit in a way that makes my breath hitch. His forehead drops to my shoulder, his exhale hot through the cotton of Holden’s shirt, and I feel the restraint in him like a wire pulled so tight it hums.
“Is this okay?” I whisper.
“Fuck, yes. Take what you need from me.” His hands guide me.
Gentle pressure on my hips, setting a rhythm—slow, grinding, deep.
He knows exactly how to angle me so every roll catches the thick length of him right where the ache is sharpest. It’s maddening.
It’s not enough and it’s too much and I never want it to stop.
I bury my face in his neck, breathing him in as my lips find the pulse point below his ear and his whole body shudders.
Knox. Shuddering. Because of me.
The power of that—the sheer, dizzying knowledge that I can make this mountain of a man tremble—unravels something low in my belly.
I grind down harder, chasing it, and he lets me.
His hands are still on my hips but they’re not controlling anymore.
They’re holding on. Like I’m the storm and he’s just trying to stay standing.
“That’s it,” he murmurs against my hair, and I almost lose it right there because his voice is pure sex and warning and want, all tangled together. “You can come like this, can’t you? Take it. Show me.”
My hands fist in his shirt, and I ride down, rubbing the ache raw and ragged until my pulse starts to drown out everything else. I know I’m close—so close it hurts.
“Oh God. I’m gonna—” I gasp, unable to finish, but Knox knows. He tightens his hold and tilts me so the pressure is perfect, and in two more circles of my hips I shatter, silent and wrenching, every muscle gone rigid.
The orgasm isn’t gentle, and it doesn’t make me float.
It hits sharp and bright, pleasure tearing through me until I press my mouth to his neck to muffle the sound, and he holds me through all of it.
Both arms wrapped around me now, hands flat against my back, holding me together while I fall apart.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t grind up into me, doesn’t chase his own release. He just holds me close enough that I can feel his heartbeat, his breath, and the enveloping strength of him.
When the aftershocks fade, I go boneless against his chest, limp. A rag doll made of bliss and shaky limbs and the kind of exhaustion that only comes from letting go of something you’ve been gripping too tightly for too long.
Knox shifts me in his arms, rearranging me like I weigh nothing—because to him, I probably don’t—until I’m curled sideways in his lap, my head tucked under his chin, my legs draped across his thighs.
One of his hands settles on my back, rubbing slow circles between my shoulder blades.
The other cradles the back of my head, fingers threaded into my hair.
I press my cheek to his chest and listen to his heart.
It’s still fast. Still hammering. He’s still hard beneath me—I can feel it against my hip, insistent and ignored—but he makes no move to do anything about it.
He just holds me. Steady. Patient. Like this is enough.
Like having me curled up against him in the dark is the entire point and everything else is optional.
My eyes sting.
I don’t know why. Nothing hurts. Nothing is wrong. If anything, everything is so painfully right that my body doesn’t know how to process it and has defaulted to tears, which is just fantastic. Really great. Very cool and normal response, Sage.
But the thing is—no one has ever held me like this. Not after. Not with his body still hard under mine, not asking for anything, not filling the bright, exposed aftermath with words I’m supposed to answer.
Knox isn’t scrambling. He’s settling in.
His chin rests on top of my head. His thumb traces my spine at the base of my neck, back and forth, back and forth, a rhythm as steady as breathing.
The apartment is quiet around us—Milo’s muffled snoring from the bedroom, the hum of the fridge.
Small, ordinary sounds that make this feel domestic in a way that feels just . . . perfect.
“Hey, Knox?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you want me to . . .” I press my hip gently against the evidence.
He groans. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Knox.”
“It’ll sort itself out.” A pause. “Or it won’t. Either way.”
A laugh slips out of me—watery and small, but real. Of course Knox would treat his own unsatisfied arousal like a low-priority logistics problem.
“I could—”
“No.” Gentle. Final. “This is what I wanted.”
I tilt my head up to look at him. In the blue-gray dark, his face is softer than I’ve ever seen it. The hard line of his jaw has eased. His eyes, usually so flat and watchful, are warm. Not open, exactly—Knox will never be an open book—but the cover is cracked, just a little, just for me.
“This?” I whisper. “Sitting on a couch at three a.m. with a half-naked woman having a feelings crisis in your lap?”
“This,” he confirms. And his arms tighten around me, just slightly, like punctuation on a sentence he’ll never say out loud.
I close my eyes.
I should go back to bed. Milo will wake up and wonder where I went.
Holden will surface from whatever efficient REM cycle he runs and notice my absence.
Amy could finally decide to come home and walk in to find me wrapped around this man who keeps pulling himself back from me, while two more sleep naked down the hall.
But I don’t want to move. Not now. Maybe not for a long time.
So I stay.