Chapter Twenty-Three #2
“Everything is a competition, and you know it,” I joked.
I turned my head to look at him. He was already watching me—too focused to be casual, as if he’d been paying attention longer than I realized.
He’d looked at me a thousand times before—annoyed, unimpressed, angry.
Never like this. His gaze lingered—steady and deliberate—committing this moment to memory.
As if he’d discovered how well we fit. As if that realization had caught him off-guard.
As if part of him wondered whether this—whatever this was—had been inevitable all along. I reached for him. “Come here.”
A shift flickered across his face. The careful patience didn’t disappear—it cracked.
Just enough to show me what lay beneath it—like he wasn’t about to miss a single part of me.
His shoulders eased just a fraction, like a decision had been made.
His gaze locked onto mine and then drifted, slow and intentional over me.
My breath caught. There was nothing restrained about it now. No careful distance. Just heat. Focus. Certainty. And the unmistakable sense that whatever had been holding him back—wasn’t anymore
He didn’t move.
I closed my eyes, debating whether to scream or jump him. Until I felt the bed shift and heard the rustle of clothes. “So help me, Marc. If you’re not undressing right this very fucking second, I’m leaving.”
We both knew I was bluffing.
He undressed with more speed and less finesse, then retrieved a condom from the nightstand and ripped it open.
“Stop!”
His hand jerked at my sudden shout, almost throwing the condom across the room.
“You got to look your fill at the sight of me. Let me admire you.” Now it was my turn to demand what I wanted. I gently slid the vibrator off and out of me. I shuddered from the aftershocks that sparked up my spine as I dropped it onto the bed.
“Delaney,” he warned. “What happens to brats?”
“What I want to happen,” I answered boldly. “Your cock in my mouth.”
He closed his eyes.
His cock bobbed in front of my face. It was long and perfectly thick, the head flared wide.
I couldn’t wait to get my mouth on it, but first I wrapped my hand around the tip, spreading the leaking precum over my palm.
It was thrilling to finally be the one to take control.
He grunted as I slid my hand down over the head to rest beneath it as my thumb rubbed across the slit.
His hands landed on top of my head as I leaned forward and licked him from root to tip. I put my other hand on his thigh and pulled him closer before wrapping my lips around the head and sucking. His muscles beneath my fingers flexed as he moaned, his head falling back.
I let the saliva build in my mouth before I slid forward, working him deeper, running my tongue along the underside. I swallowed him further, then pulled back and sucked on the tip.
“Fuck, your mouth feels so fucking good.” He ran his hand over my hair, twined his fingers at the base of my skull, and without warning pulled, forcing my mouth to release his cock with a pop.
I frowned, already reaching for him—then stopped. The look on his face made me pause. “Later,” he said, his voice tight with need as he sheathed his cock with the condom.
I barely had time to say anything before he covered me with his body and settled himself between my legs. When he pushed against my entrance, I already knew what was coming. He was going to be devastatingly, infuriatingly, tenderly slow about it.
I pressed my heels into the back of his thighs.
“Not yet,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow. “I have cooperated with everything you asked tonight.” I slid my hands to his hips. “I have been so very good. Don’t be gentle with me.”
“I didn’t plan to be,” he growled.
“I can take it,” I whispered just in case he second-guessed himself.
He held my gaze for one long second. His jaw tightened. “Yeah,” he said, low, like the word had weight. “I know you can.”
And then he drove into me in one long stroke, and I stopped being capable of complete sentences. Instead the word yes echoed over and over in whatever part of my brain that was still operating.
He paused, his breath coming out in short, sharp pants.
“More. I need more.” My hips pulsed and circled.
He dropped his head to the crook of my neck, pulled out almost all the way, and then slammed back inside.
He set a pace that was not gentle or slow, and I met each thrust. His mouth pressed to my throat, and I tipped my head sideways to give him better access. Because whatever he wanted, I wanted it too.
My nails found his back. He groaned against my skin as I dug in.
“You’re so damn addictive,” he said, his voice rough and unsteady in a way I’d never heard before, and in that moment I was determined to make it happen as often as possible.
He shifted his angle—deliberate, precise, entirely on purpose—and hit exactly the right spot, and I lost what little was left of my composure.
His hips pistoned faster. His thrusts went deeper. His balls slapped my ass. Then he hit that spot one more time, and my vision blurred around the edges.
I shuddered beneath him, barely able to speak in single-word sentences. “Close. Close. God. Yes!” I came again, clutching him, gasping his name. It hit all at once—too much, too fast—pulling me taut until everything gave way, and I shattered around him.
“Fuck, Delaney. The way you’re squeezing my cock.” He grunted, low and deep. “I don’t think I can hold off much longer.”
“Then don’t,” I whimpered.
His hips sped up, snapping into mine. The slick sound of our bodies meeting filled the room, broken only by our moans. His whole body tightened after another hard thrust.
Marc’s chest heaved as he shuddered. His cock pulsed as it spilled his cum and my pussy clenched around him as my release kept going at the feel of his.
We lay there afterward, not moving or talking, our breathing returning in stages.
He placed a sweet kiss on my lips and rested his forehead on mine. “That was—”
“Yeah,” I agreed softly. “It was.”
He pressed another kiss to my lips and got up to deal with the condom. When he came back, he opened the small mini-fridge tucked into his closet because, of course, he had a mini-fridge in his closet, and handed me a cold bottle of water.
I accepted it gratefully.
We sat against the headboard, shoulders touching, drinking water in the comfortable silence of two people who had just thoroughly exhausted each other.
I turned the water bottle in my hands. Thought about the evening. The couch, the movie, the dish soap I’d never found, his thumb rubbing along my arm. The lip balm on the nightstand. All of it accumulated into something I didn’t know what to name.
I didn’t have a category to place what we were.
And I was starting to think that was okay.
It was awhile before we said anything. The silence was peaceful as we came back into our bodies and just enjoyed each other’s company.
“Okay,” I said eventually. “Fine. Now you really win. Your way was so much better.”
“Still not a competition.” He laughed.
“You keep saying that like it changes things.” I reached past him to set my water bottle down. My body was already being ridiculous about him again, aware of the way his hand had come to rest on my hip like it belonged there.
I swung my leg over his lap.
He put his water bottle down and glanced at me. The control slipped. Just a fraction. The careful patience dropping back just far enough to show me what was underneath. A man who cared a great deal.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said back.
I kissed him slowly, my hands framing his face, and I waited for it—that familiar pull backward.
But it didn’t come. There was only quiet.
And him. I wasn’t in my head. There was no low-level narration running, no part of me hovering outside the moment taking notes and looking for exits.
Just this. Just the specific, present reality of choosing to be here.
This was nothing like my previous sexual relationships.
I held myself up, hovering over his cock. “I’m on the pill and clean,” I said.
He stared at me before giving me a short nod. “I am, too.” Then he chuckled. “Clean that is. If you want to see—”
I eased myself down onto his hard dick—taking him a half an inch at a time, watching his jaw go tight with the effort of holding still—and this time the pace was mine. All of it. I set it and held it, while I watched his face.
He kept his eyes open too.
We found a rhythm that alternated between slow and deep, then urgent, and then back to slow, following a pattern neither of us was consciously directing. His hands were at my hips, then in my hair, then my face, and I let him touch me wherever he desired because I wanted him to.
I was fully, gloriously, and completely present.
When I came, this time it was quiet—not the shattering kind, just a deep, spreading warmth that started where we were joined and moved outward until my whole body felt it. He soon followed, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, my name on his lips.
Afterward, I stayed where I was.
His arms wrapped around me. Neither of us moved to separate.
Eventually, we untangled ourselves, he cleaned me up, and we cuddled in the bed, tucked under the covers. The house settled. Chaos made a muffled sound down the hall, indignant about some travesty I was too tired to get up and investigate. I smiled into Marc’s shoulder.
“Your goat is very independent. Very opinionated.”
“He has lots of opinions.”
“So do I.” I tipped my head up to look at him. “For the record.”
“I’m aware.” He said it like he was fond of this fact. Then said with complete sincerity, “The coffee’s set for six.”
I lifted my head to look at him. “That’s—after everything that just happened—” I gestured to our entwined naked bodies. “Coffee is what you lead with?”
“You’re beautiful,” he said, like he was mentioning the weather and not acknowledging that he wasn’t making any sense. “Tonight—was a lot. In all the best ways. I still can’t get over how good everything is between us. How things are just falling into place.”
I stared at him.
“We’d already decided you were staying the night. I thought the coffee was the practical type of information you’d want.” He pressed his lips together. Losing his battle with a smirk.
“What kind?” I asked.
“The good kind.”
“And then you’ll go run eight hundred miles.”
“Only four. Maybe five.” His lips quirked into a half-smile.
“I’ll meditate,” I said. “In bed. With coffee.”
“That’s not meditating.”
“It’s my meditating after someone keeps me up all night.” I lay back against his chest. His arms came around me like they’d been doing it for years. “Don’t run too early. You’ll wake Chaos.”
“Chaos wakes me,” he grumbled.
“Then we’re both his victims,” I chuckled. “It’ll be a bonding experience between us.”
He shifted under my cheek—that almost silent laugh he kept mostly to himself. I felt it more than I heard it. My eyes shifted to the nightstand. The lip balm exactly where he’d left it, small and inconsequential, yet somehow the whole point. It settled something inside me.
I closed my eyes and realized I was exactly where I wanted to be.
Where I was meant to be.
If I allowed myself …