19. Penelope #3
The hallway upstairs. More wall. His mouth finds the spot below my ear and I gasp and my fingers dig into his shoulders and he groans—low, vibrating against my neck.
“Still good?”
“More.”
My bedroom door. He pushes it open. Walks me backward through it. The door closes behind us with a click that sounds like a beginning.
He takes my face in both hands. Forehead to forehead. Breathing heavy. Both of us breathing heavy. “Tell me if you need me to stop. At any point. Any time. Say it and I stop.”
“I know.”
“I need you to know that. I need you to feel it. Not just hear it.”
“I feel it.”
He kisses me. The gentleness is there for the first three seconds.
Then the intensity arrives—rising like a tide, his hands moving from my face to my neck, my shoulders, pulling my shirt over my head.
I lift my arms. Help him. The collaboration of two people undressing each other with intent rather than urgency.
His eyes on my body. Not the hungry gaze from the closet—something more complex.
Reverence and want braided together. His hands tracing my collarbones, my ribs, the particular cartography of a body he’s touched before but never like this.
Never with permission given in advance. Never with the communication underneath the contact.
“You’re so fucking beautiful, Penny.” Not a command. A fact. I reach for his belt. He catches my hand. Looks at me. “We’re good?”
“Xander. We’re good. I’m telling you—I want this. I want you. The rough version. The dark voice. All of it. I’m giving you permission and I need you to take it.”
Something shifts behind his eyes. The permission registering fully.
The moment where a boy who has been holding himself back realizes he doesn’t have to—not because she can’t stop him, but because she’s choosing him.
All of him. The parts he’s ashamed of and the parts he’s proud of and the particular combination that is uniquely Xander Anderson.
His hand goes to my throat. The grip. The one that makes my body arch into him before my brain can intervene. He watches my face as he tightens—not choking, holding. Feeling my pulse. Counting my heartbeats with his thumb.
“You’re mine, Penelope.” The dark voice. The one from the closet. But different now—not stolen. Given. “Say it.”
“I’m yours.”
He walks me to the bed. Lowers me. His hand behind my head so it doesn’t hit the mattress—the tenderness that coexists with the intensity. Over me. Between my legs. His weight on his forearms. His mouth on my neck, my jaw, the sensitive place below my ear.
My hands on his back. Pulling him down. Wanting more of his weight, more of his pressure, more of the annihilation that happens when Xander Anderson’s body is on mine and the rest of the world ceases to exist.
Clothes. Coming off. Not ripped this time—removed with the efficiency of two people who have done this before and have learned from the doing.
His jeans. My leggings. The last barriers falling away until it’s just skin and heat and the vulnerability of two bodies that have nothing left to hide behind.
He looks at me. Full body. The lamplight painting gold across both of us. The friendship bracelet on my wrist. The bare strip on his. The symmetry of a girl who is wearing the proof of a promise and a boy who lost his and is lying here anyway.
“Still with me?”
“Always.”
His mouth moves down my body. Slow. Deliberate.
Each kiss a declaration, each touch a question asked and answered.
My collarbone. My sternum. The curve of my breast. The sensitive skin of my stomach.
Lower. His hands on my thighs, spreading them with that authority that makes my back arch and my hands grip the sheets.
His mouth finds me. The sound I make fills the bedroom and I don’t muffle it because the house is empty and there is nobody to hear except the boy between my thighs who wants to hear every sound I make.
“This is mine,” he says against me. The vibration of the words where they’ll do the most damage. “This sound. This taste. Mine.”
His tongue. His fingers. I grip his hair. Pull. He groans against me and the vibration pushes me closer to the edge. “X—I’m going to—”
“Yeah, you are. Come for me, Penny. Let me feel it.”
The climax hits. Full body. I cry out—his name, just his name, the word that has been on my tongue since I was old enough to speak it. He holds me through it. His mouth gentle now, easing me down, the tenderness of the aftermath.
He kisses back up my body. Finds my mouth. I can taste myself on his lips and the intimacy of it makes me shiver. He positions himself above me. Foreheads touching. His question in his eyes before he asks it with his mouth. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
He enters me slowly. With the care of a boy who is trying to feel everything instead of consuming everything. Watching my face. Reading my expressions. The check-in happening through his eyes, continuous, unbroken.
“Oh my god, Penny.” Breathless. Wrecked. “You feel—fuck.”
I wrap my legs around him. Pull him deeper. The sound we both make—simultaneous, involuntary—fills the room.
The pace builds. His hands find my hip—the grip, the claiming pressure that leaves fingerprints. I told him I wanted this. He’s giving it. His other hand on my throat. The squeeze. My head tips back.
“Harder,” I say. Because I can say it now. Because communication is the bridge between the closet and this bed and I am walking across it with my whole voice.
He listens. The pace shifts. Deeper. More urgent. His mouth at my ear: “You feel so fucking perfect wrapped around me, Penny. You were made for this. Made for me.”
The dark voice. The possessive words. The particular language that lights my body up from the inside out—not because I’m broken, not because the trauma made me this way.
Because I like it. Because my body responds to dominance the same way it responds to music: completely, without reservation, from a place that predates damage and will outlast it.
He flips me. Hands on my hips. My face in the pillow. The position from before—but this time, he pauses. “This okay?”
“God, yes.”
His hand comes down. The slap on my skin echoes. The sting converting to warmth converting to want. I push back against him. The demand of a body that is done being patient and wants more and is telling him so with its hips instead of its words.
He gives me more. His pace relentless now, the controlled discipline of a trained fighter applied to the sport of making a girl come apart.
His hand in my hair. Pulling. Not rough enough to hurt—rough enough to make me feel owned.
And the feeling of being owned by Xander Anderson—by choice, by desire, by the active decision of a girl who is telling him yes with every sound and every movement—is the single most alive I have ever felt.
He turns me back over. His forehead against mine. His eyes open. Both of our eyes open—that intimacy of watching each other fall apart at the same time.
“I love you, Penny.” Said inside me. Said with his body doing the thing his words are describing. “I have always loved you. From the fucking maternity ward. From the bracelets. From every terrible thing and every beautiful thing and right now, right here, in this bed—I love you.”
The climax arrives. Not one—two. His and mine.
Simultaneous. The particular rarity of two bodies synchronized so completely that they reach the peak at the same moment and fall over it together.
I cry out. He groans. His body shudders above me and mine shudders beneath him and for three, five, seven seconds the world is just us and the sound we make together and the frequency we’ve been broadcasting on since before we had a name for it.
He collapses. Not on me—beside me. Rolling. Pulling me with him. My head on his chest. His arm around me. Both of us breathing like we’ve sprinted a mile. Both of us wet with sweat and the evidence of what we just did.
Xander gets up, and goes to the bathroom. He brings back a warm cloth then cleans me up—gentle, careful, the tenderness that follows. But this time, no guilt on his face. No panic. No retreat behind the mask.
Peace. He has that expression of a boy who just had sex with the girl he loves and discovered that the act, done with communication and consent and the particular combination of rough and respectful, doesn’t make him a monster. It makes him the man he’s been trying to become.
He climbs back in. Pulls me against him. My head on his chest. The heartbeat. The anchor.
“Xander.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you for checking in.”
“Thank you for telling me what you need. That’s the bravest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
I trace the pale strip on his wrist. The bare skin where the bracelet lived. “We need to make new ones. Same colors. Teal and yellow.”
“The ocean and the sun.”
“The ocean is stronger than anything.”
“The sun never gives up.”
“Forever, Xander.”
“Forever, Penny.”
We fall asleep. His heartbeat in my ear.
My bracelet against his bare wrist. The porch light on outside the window.
Two kids from the same street who destroyed each other and rebuilt each other and are lying in the aftermath of something that was neither destruction nor construction but both—the architecture of a love that requires both hands: one to hold and one to mark.
This is not the ending. This is the beginning of the part where we learn to love each other in the light as well as the dark. Where the rough comes with check-ins and the claiming comes with consent and the bruises are chosen rather than inflicted.
It will take work. It will take Darla and my parents and our friends and chosen families and the program and the patience of two people who are learning to deserve each other one day at a time.
But the foundation is here. In this bed. In this heartbeat. In the bracelet I’m wearing and the one we’ll make tomorrow.
It’s always been you, Xander. From the maternity ward to the treehouse to the closet to this bed. Always.