Chapter 16 #2
The weight of him was a revelation. Not heavy.
Grounding. The feeling of a body over hers that she'd asked for, that she wanted, that she'd chosen with every faculty she possessed.
His mouth found the hollow of her throat and Emily arched into him and heard a sound come out of her that she didn't recognize, low and raw and uncontrolled, the kind of sound she'd never made because she'd never let herself be in a place where control wasn't the point.
"Don't hold back," Jake said against her skin. "Not tonight. Not with me."
She stopped holding back.
The rest of their clothes came off in a tangle of reaching and breath and increments where one of them laughed and the other caught the laughter with their mouth.
Emily explored the terrain of him, the flat planes of his stomach, the scar on his left side she'd find the story for later, the muscles along his back that shifted under her fingers when he moved.
He was mapped with history she hadn't read yet, and she wanted to read every page.
Jake's mouth traveled south. Her collarbone.
The space between her breasts. The soft skin below her navel where his breath made her hips lift off the bed.
He took his time. Devastating, patient, thorough time, and Emily's hands found the sheets and gripped and released and gripped again because her body was doing things her mind had no authority over and she was discovering that the loss of authority was the point.
When his mouth found her she stopped thinking entirely.
The world reduced to sensation and breath and the sound of her own voice saying his name in ways she'd never said anyone's name, and Jake Walsh took her apart with the same focused, unhurried precision he brought to everything, reading her responses like field intelligence, adjusting, attending, finding the frequency that made her back arch and her hands find his hair and hold on.
She came undone with his name on her lips and her hand pressed over her own mouth because the sound she was making was too loud for eleven o'clock on a Friday night in a building with shared walls, and Jake lifted his head and looked at her with an expression of such naked wonder that Emily felt tears burn behind her eyes.
"Come here," she said. "Come here, come here."
He did. Rising over her, settling between her thighs, one hand braced beside her head, the other tracing her jawline.
Emily reached between them and guided him and felt the instant he entered her with a clarity that obliterated everything she'd ever believed about keeping herself separate from another person.
He stilled. Forehead against hers. Breathing her air.
"Hi," he whispered.
"Hi." She was laughing. Maybe crying. Maybe both at the same time, her hands on his face, the absurdity and perfection of the word colliding. Hi. As if they were meeting for the first time. As if this was the introduction and everything before had been preamble.
"You okay?"
"I'm so far past okay." She kissed him. Soft and wet and tasting like salt. "Move."
He moved.
Slow at first. Finding the rhythm that was theirs, not borrowed from anywhere, not performing, not approximating what intimacy was supposed to look like.
This was two people who had been falling toward each other for two weeks finally discovering what it felt like to stop falling and land.
Emily's legs wrapped around him and pulled him deeper and felt the groan it drew from him vibrate through her sternum and into the fabric of who she was.
It was different than before. Before, it was competent, adequate, physically satisfying sex with men who checked the right boxes and held her at the distance she maintained and left her feeling afterward like she'd completed a task rather than shared something special.
This was not that. This was Jake's hand in her hair and his mouth against her neck and the way he whispered her name like a prayer he'd been rehearsing in silence, and Emily understood with devastating finality that she had never been made love to before.
Not once. Not ever. That everything preceding this moment had been a reasonable facsimile of connection executed by a woman who hadn't known what the real thing felt like.
The rhythm built. Emily stopped thinking in words.
Her body moved with his, finding the places where they fit, the angles that made her breath catch, when his control slipped and she felt the full force of what he was holding in check and wanted more of it.
She wanted all of it. Wanted the substance and the need and the raw unfiltered version of Jake Walsh that nobody had ever seen because nobody had ever been allowed this close.
"Let go," she said against his ear. "You told me not to hold back. I'm telling you the same thing."
Jake's rhythm changed. Harder. Deeper. His hand slid beneath her hips and tilted her and Emily's vision went white at the edges and she heard herself making sounds she'd never catalog and didn't want to, sounds that belonged to this room and this man and this version of herself she was meeting for the first time.
They came together. Not simultaneously, close enough that one crest fed the other, Emily first with a cry she buried in his shoulder, Jake seconds later with a sound that was both broken and reverent, his face pressed against her neck, his whole body shuddering against hers.
Stillness.
The room came back in pieces. The white sheets tangled around them. The window throwing city light across the ceiling. Jake's weight, heavy now, settling over her. His breath ragged against her collarbone. Her fingers in his hair, moving without instruction.
He started to shift his weight off her. Emily's legs tightened.
"Don't."
"I'm crushing you."
"I don't care." Her voice sounded wrecked. Soft and hoarse and nothing like the voice she used in courtrooms or conference rooms or any of the rooms where she'd spent her life being the version of herself that performed competence instead of feeling joy. "Stay."
Jake eased back against her. His hand found her hip. Drew slow circles on her skin with his thumb, the same absent pattern he'd traced on her back in the elevator, and Emily felt each circle like a sentence in a language she was learning to speak.
"Em."
"Yeah."
"That word you said. Four nights ago. When you were falling asleep."
Her heart stopped. Then restarted at a tempo that had nothing to do with recovery.
"You heard that," she said.
"I heard the beginning of it. You trailed off." His thumb kept drawing circles. Patient. "I've been carrying it around for four days like a live wire I couldn't put down."
Emily stared at the ceiling. The city light made patterns that meant nothing. She felt warm and her mind was the clearest it had been in years and the word he was asking about were sitting on the tip of her tongue like a bird ready to fly and she could feel it pressing against her lips.
"I love you," she said.
Not trailed off. Not caught between sleep and waking. Not whispered into a pillow she thought was empty. Said with her eyes open and his body still inside her and what those words meant from a woman who had never said them to anyone.
Jake lifted his head. Looked at her. His eyes were bright and his face was open and what she saw there was not surprise. It was recognition. The look of a man hearing what he'd already known confirmed by the only voice that could confirm it.
"I love you," he said. "I’m pretty sure I have since you looked at me in Ray's office.
I have loved you since you laughed at the Range Rover story and I realized I'd do anything to hear that sound again.
I have loved you since the night I tucked you in and stood in your doorway and almost said it and didn't because I was terrified it was too soon and I'd lose you. "
"You couldn't lose me." Emily touched his face. The place where his smile started before it reached the rest of him. "You couldn't lose me if you tried."
Jake kissed her. Slow and deep and tasting like everything they'd said and everything they hadn't needed to.
Then he shifted, rolling onto his back, pulling her with him, settling her against his chest the way he'd done on his couch except now there were no clothes and no pretense and no distance of any kind.
Emily lay against Jake Walsh in a bed she'd slept alone in for a year and listened to his heartbeat slow and felt his hand trace a path up and down her spine and understood that the word she'd been afraid of her entire adult life was the easiest word she'd ever said.
"Jake."
"Hmm."
"I'm going to need you to stay tonight."
"I’m not going anywhere." His arm tightened around her.
She pressed her face against his body and smiled and the smile was the real one, the one she'd been learning to wear since the night he'd called her Em, and outside the window Tampa hummed and the night held them and Emily Callahan fell asleep in Jake Walsh's arms knowing exactly where she was and exactly who she'd chosen to be there with.
She didn't dream. She didn't need to. The best thing she could imagine was already happening.