Chapter Fifteen #2
He sped up his cadence. Her pleasure crested.
And Audrey shattered.
Theo’s face melded into the twisting background of his room, the lights of New York in the distance refracting off the colors, the reds, blacks, whites, grays, golds, all of them blurring and breaking, crashing into one another and exploding behind her eyes like swirling galaxies colliding in an inexorable cosmic dance, all while her hips bucked.
She lost all awareness of her motions save for rolling, rippling, repeating waves of pleasure washing over her again and again, her throat burning as she gasped.
She was blind, suffocating, seizing and thrashing, dead and dying and reborn and living, over and over and over again, cycle after cycle, wave after wave.
It was agony.
It was bliss.
But just when she thought she was completely spent, something tingled along her skin, rough and comforting.
Audrey opened her eyes and looked into Theo’s, soft and warm as he drew himself up next to her.
He’d been running his hands soothingly over her body, his calluses dragging goose bumps out from their hiding places and into the light.
“Do you still want more?” he asked quietly, his eyes searching her face.
For all his confidence with his hands and his mouth, he seemed a little unsure now.
But she could feel how hard he was, even through her exhaustion. She lifted a hand and caressed his cheek.
“I want you. Please.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
She glanced down. He was every bit as big as she thought he’d be—even bigger now than he’d been earlier in the shower, perhaps, wide and erect and beautiful, but daunting in the lamplight—and she swallowed nervously. But when she gazed back up into his eyes, there was no question.
She wanted every part of him.
All of him.
Forever and always.
Audrey cradled his face and ran her thumb along his cheekbone. “You won’t. I know you won’t.”
He leaned forward and pressed his forehead to hers, bracing her neck with one hand while the other dropped between his legs.
He carefully rolled the condom over his length before slipping his left arm under her neck and propping them both up on their sides, drawing her close and parting her legs with one of his thighs.
They were so thick and wide, even just having one tangled between her legs spread her plenty.
“Like this?” she asked in confusion, though she was glad he was the one positioning her. Her body still felt like Jell-O. “I thought you’d be on top?”
“I did some…research,” Theo murmured, lowering his hand onto her back and tucking her into his chest. “A lot of it, all about how to do this as gently as possible for you. Your first time shouldn’t have to hurt, and I’m going to try my best not to let it.
From what I found, beginning in this side position seemed the most gentle. ”
“Of course you researched this, you nerd.” She finally had enough air back in her lungs to speak properly and chase it with a laugh, though her voice sounded oddly tattered to her own ears. But she still tried to bite back a smirk all the same. “Is that why you started where you did?”
It was his turn to chew on his bottom lip, but even that couldn’t hide his growing wicked grin.
“I would have done that regardless. It’s my favorite thing—and you taste incredible, by the way.
” He pressed his lips to hers, plush and red and swollen from his devotion.
When his tongue slipped into her mouth, she tasted for herself: sweet, with an interesting tang she hadn’t been expecting.
He pulled away with a crooked smile. “I could feast on you forever. But it turns out that it does help to start with an orgasm or two to loosen you up for…me.” His smile faded and his expression grew serious.
“You tell me if anything hurts or if you want me to stop, and I will. I’ll stop, okay?
” There was no room for argument in the look he gave her. “You promise to tell me?”
“Yes. I promise.” Audrey nodded. “I trust you.”
Theo pulled her even closer, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. His eyes never left her own, even when his trembling hand circled gently at her clit before grazing her entrance.
“I love you.” He whispered the words before he kissed her, long and deep, slowing it down and letting their lips meld and fall in sync.
Audrey relaxed into his warm embrace, melting into the heat of his skin surrounding her.
He ran so hot normally, but now? Now he was an inferno, the heat practically rolling off of him in waves.
She was so preoccupied with the feeling of being completely wrapped in Theo’s strong arms in a way she never had been before that she almost didn’t feel the tip of him notch at her entrance.
When he started to ease himself slowly inside, she gasped.
He’d been careful to stretch her with his fingers for a reason, but even two of them couldn’t compare to the girth of the real thing.
It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it did pinch.
She was still too tight to accommodate him fully, and Audrey closed her eyes and clutched at him, digging her nails into his back with a whimper.
He paused, barely an inch inside.
“Relax for me, sweetheart,” he murmured, stroking her hair gently. His voice was strained.
“Can you talk to me?” she breathed. “I’m still nervous. It might help.”
“Talk about what?” He raised an eyebrow. “What…kind of talk?”
“Anything.” Audrey drew in a deep breath and tried to relax, unclenching her tense leg muscles.
He was barely inside and she didn’t want to stop now, not when she was so close to having him completely.
“Literally anything. But not dirty talk. I don’t think that’ll help me right now. I’m not used to it.”
“All right. I can try.” He seemed unsure.
“At least for a minute. No promises on sustained coherence, though.” Theo rubbed circles along her back, doing his best to soothe her while he looked her in the eyes.
His were liquid amber and melted chocolate in the soft lamplight of his room.
After a moment, he finally seemed to settle on something. “Okay. How about another confession?”
“Another one?”
He nodded. “Yep. I nearly had a panic attack when I first met you.”
“Well, that was obvious.” She twisted her fingers in his damp, curling hair, enjoying its silky feel.
The corner of Theo’s mouth twitched. “No. It wasn’t for the reasons I initially told you. It might have been the only time I’ve ever lied to you—not exactly, but I didn’t tell you the whole truth.”
This was good, talking like this. This was familiar. She relaxed, and he pushed a little deeper into her. He swallowed a grunt and blinked a little too long, but kept talking.
“I told you I was having trouble coming out in public again after my accident, and that was true. That was why I was going out to coffee shops. But the way I acted when I saw you?” He shook his head as if to clear it and thrust a little more, closing his eyes with a strained, strangled noise in his throat.
“I panicked because…because when you smiled at me as I stepped up to the register, I knew you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
And I immediately forgot every word I’d ever known related to coffee. Or otherwise.”
He slid even deeper and moaned. Not quite sheathed, but when she breathed in and relaxed, he began to rock his hips, pulling in and out ever so slightly, teasing her, testing her tolerance.
She nodded at him, and he kept going, his voice even more strained than it had been before.
“I’m…glad you didn’t see my house at that point.
It was a mess. I was a mess,” he ground out between slow, gentle thrusts, dragging his cock along her entrance and pressing in slightly deeper each time, stretching her and gradually filling her more and more.
“I hadn’t drawn in months, not since I—n-not since before I was in the hospital, but—” He drew in a shaking, gasping breath.
“I couldn’t get you out of my head, and it got worse every time I went back to the café.
I couldn’t stop seeing your face behind my eyes.
Every time I blinked, every time I tried to sleep, it was you I saw. It was your face I dreamed of.”
Breathing was difficult. She started to pant. But with every roll of his hips, she matched him, pressing in closer and drawing him in deeper.
“I felt terrible about it. I thought—ohhh, you feel so…so good, Audrey—I was going crazy. I felt like some creep. Sketches of you were littered everywhere in my house, shakily drawn and horribly composed. I tore them out of my sketchbook and threw them everywhere.” His biceps seized around her, and it was a wonder he could still talk, his voice was so clipped and strained.
“They weren’t you, they were awful, but I-I was…
uh…shit…I was d-drawing again for the first time when I—ohhh god, Audrey,” Theo groaned, closing his eyes and throwing his head back. “God.”
She moaned, loud and long.
“FUCK.”
With one last push and more than a slight pinch, he’d seated himself all the way inside her—sheathed to the hilt and buried deep, finally and fully.
Audrey had watched porn before. She’d even Googled plenty about what sex felt like, watched plenty of films, read plenty of romance novels, listened with rapt attention whenever Violet came back to their apartment with stories of her latest conquests and escapades.
She’d never been shy to ask questions, not since Violet knew about her inexperience, and her best friend was more than happy to describe the feelings and sensations and recount everything in great detail.
Songs, art, books, movies, porn, Violet—none of them had prepared her for the truth.
Theo looked back at her, his eyes wide and his chest heaving.
Nothing and no one had warned her.
No one had told Audrey it would feel like coming home.
A single tear escaped from her eye and rolled down her cheek.
Theo’s face immediately fell, but Audrey smiled and held him tighter, digging one hand into his hair and the other into the strong muscles of his broad back.
She wrapped a leg around his waist and rolled to the side and onto her back, letting him roll with her and settle his weight fully on top of her.
But her movement only seemed to alarm him further. “Did I hurt you?” he whispered frantically. “I was trying not to, but I can’t…Audrey, I—”
“I love you, Theo,” she whispered back, lifting her other leg and wrapping it around his waist to join the first. “I feel incredible.” It was true.
She’d never felt so full, so alive before.
She bucked her hips up and rolled them, encouraging him to match her cadence once more. “And I want you to keep going.”
He drew in a deep breath.
Dove down to kiss her like his life depended on it.
And really began to move.
He couldn’t seem to form words after that—nothing coherent, anyway.
So instead he spoke with his body, filling her so completely that every bit of her burned.
Pressure built in places she’d never known existed inside her, and Audrey surrendered to Theo, to the way his heat enveloped her, how his mouth devoured her, the feeling of his fingers digging frantically into her flesh as they melded together as one, two halves of a whole, lost and then found and then stitched together again, like binary stars in a dancing orbit drawn inevitably closer by forces greater than themselves, by the indelible laws of physics and of the universe, spinning and writhing wildly until they combusted, bursting into something different, something new.
The more he moved, the more she needed him to move, the urge for momentum primal and unyielding.
His heat became her own, and he held her so tightly that when Audrey closed her eyes, she wasn’t sure where her body ended and Theo’s began.
All she knew, all she could feel, all she could divine was raw sensation, building pressure, and stunning, ecstatic oblivion.
With every thrust, with every beat, her heart whispered, I love you.
With every kiss, with every breath, his whispered it back.
They were both beyond themselves. Theo’s lips formed words, but Audrey couldn’t hear them, couldn’t even discern them over the sound of their hearts beating in time.
And then, all of a sudden, she was gone.
The pressure reached a roaring crescendo, urged into being by Theo and his relentless rhythm while he dragged his length along all the most sacred, secret places within her, filling her so completely, the only thing she knew was that she’d forever feel empty without him there now.
She cried out—or at least, she thought she did.
She must have screamed.
Air tore at her throat, cool and harsh as she came.
And with it, her body melted away.
She dissolved into the orgasm he wrung from the furthest recesses of her being, losing all sense of self, all sense of other, all sense of anything aside from overwhelming, otherworldly union and pleasure.
But it was so different than any she’d ever felt before—so much stronger, so much more meaningful, earth-shattering and core-shaking.
Her vision filled with light, white and bright and bursting around the depths of Theo’s soft, soulful eyes.
And then all of a sudden, her hearing came back.
When he roared, the world rushed back around her, exploding once again into sound and color as he cried out her name.
He came just after she did, riding the wave of her orgasm right after her, every muscle in his body tensing and trembling, just as she tensed and trembled around him.
Tiny aftershocks danced along her skin, twitching across her fingers and toes, which curled into Theo’s soft sheets as she curled her fingers into his back, pressing half-moon nail indents between the constellations of moles lighting up the negative of the night sky etched there.
Theo slumped onto her, heavy and spent, his right hand shaking while he tried—and failed—to prop himself up.
Instead, all he managed to do was shift to the side slightly as he pulled out, letting the bulk of his weight fall onto his mattress while leaving their limbs tangled together.
He drew her close, nuzzling into her neck and pressing the tiniest, softest kisses into her still-damp hair while she cradled his head in her arms. They lay together in silence, catching their breath for long minutes, and Audrey marveled at the man still wrapped around her.
In the span of one evening, everything had changed—and yet, nothing had.
So that’s what this was.
This was what it was to love someone.
It was home.
No one had warned her.
But it turned out she hadn’t needed the warning.
She’d known it all along.