Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Stella
I wake up warm in the deep, impossible way that starts somewhere behind the ribs and spreads until it feels like your whole body has been gently rewritten.
For one suspended second, I don’t open my eyes.
I just lie there in the quiet glow of the room and listen.
The ocean below the cliff.
The low hiss of the fireplace, almost burned down.
The slow, even rhythm of Tristan breathing behind me.
His body is curled around mine like the shape was made for it. One arm draped low and possessive over my waist, the other tucked under the pillow, his mouth somewhere near the back of my shoulder, warm and sleepy and real.
Last night rushes back in fragments.
The dance.
The curtains.
The song.
His face when I told him the truth.
This room.
The firelight.
The tenderness.
The way he looked at me like I was not just wanted, but cherished.
My eyes sting before I even open them.
Ridiculous.
I smile into the pillow instead.
Behind me, Tristan stirs.
His hand flexes lightly against my stomach.
Then his voice, rough with sleep and still somehow devastating:
“You’re awake.”
“So are you.”
“Barely.”
That makes me laugh softly.
I turn carefully in his arms until I’m facing him, the sheet tangling low around us, morning light slipping silver-blue through the terrace doors. His hair is a little wrecked, his jaw shadowed, his face softened by sleep in a way that feels almost too intimate to survive.
He blinks at me once.
Then his mouth curves.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
He studies my face for a long second, not talking, and I know that look now. It’s his looking-too-hard look. The one that says he still can’t quite believe I’m here.
I smooth my hand over his cheek.
His eyes close for half a beat.
When they open again, they’re darker.
“Why are you smiling like that?” he murmurs.
“Like what?”
“Like you know something I don’t.”
I laugh under my breath.
“This is going to sound insane.”
His brows lift.
“Try me.”
I trace the sheet where it cuts across his chest, buying myself one last second before I just say it.
“Why did last night feel like a wedding night?”
He goes still.
Not frozen.
Not thrown.
Just very, very still in the way he gets when something matters enough to hit all the way through him.
Then his expression changes.
Softens.
Deepens.
Breaks me.
“Because it wasn’t about finally having you,” he says quietly. “It was about finally keeping you.”
My throat tightens so hard I can’t speak for a second, then I lean in and kiss him, slow and smiling and helplessly in love with the fact that he is exactly this boy, this man, this impossible combination of heat and devotion and self-control that makes everything in me feel safer and more alive at once.
When I pull back, I whisper, “How are we supposed to top that?”
He grins, lazy and beautiful and still not fully awake.
“We don’t.”
I blink.
He shifts closer, his nose brushing mine.
“We just keep going.”
That line lands in me like warmth.
Like future.
Like the first time I can actually imagine one.
I smile and lightly punch his shoulder.
He catches my wrist before I can pull away and kisses the inside of it.
“Violent this early?” he asks.
“Maybe.”
“Good. I was worried you’d gone soft on me.”
I snort.
“Never.”
His hand slides low over my waist under the sheet, slow and absent and completely catastrophic. Not pushing. Not asking. Just there. Warm. Familiar now in a way that makes my whole body melt all over again.
I inhale sharply.
His eyes flick to my mouth.
“Still okay?” he asks quietly.
The question undoes me every single time.
“Yes.”
His thumb strokes once at my side.
Then he glances toward the glass doors, toward the terrace beyond, and one side of his mouth lifts.
“What?”
He looks back at me.
“We never went in the hot tub.”
I stare at him for one beat.
Then it hits me too.
And I laugh.
A full, startled laugh that makes him grin harder.
“We spent all that time staring at it yesterday like it was some great forbidden thing—”
“And then got distracted.”
“That is one word for it.”
His smile goes low and dangerous. “Want to fix that?”
I should say no.
It’s cold outside.
We have brunch later.
I am deeply comfortable under these sheets in a room that still smells faintly like firelight and ocean and us.
Instead I hear myself giggle—actually giggle—as I say, “We’d be like bad teenagers.”
His brows rise.
“Teenagers with a five-star suite and a private terrace.”
“That’s not helping.”
“Wasn’t trying to.”
He rolls out of bed in one liquid, unfairly athletic movement, and I stop breathing for half a second because apparently a man crossing a hotel room in morning light can be just as dangerous as a tuxedo.
He turns back toward me and holds out his hand.
“Come on, Stells.”
I sit up, sheet gathering around me, and just look at him.
“At some point,” I say, “you became impossible.”
His smile softens.
“At some point,” he says, “you decided you liked that.”
Unfortunately true.
The terrace air bites immediately.
I squeal and try to turn back, but Tristan catches me around the waist, laughing under his breath as steam curls up from the water in the tub and twinkling lights still glow faintly along the railing in the pale morning.
“It’s freezing!”
“It’s New England in late fall.”
“That is not a defense!”
“It is in Newport.”
The ocean below is steel-blue now, the beach wind-brushed and mostly empty except for a few bundled figures walking the Cliff Walk in the distance like the world is full of sensible people making healthy choices.
We are not those people.
And that makes it better.
Tristan steps down into the water first and lets out a low breath as the heat hits him. Then he turns, reaches up for me, and says, “Trust me.”
That phrase should not still work this well on me.
It does.
The terrace air bites immediately.
I squeal and try to turn back, but Tristan catches me around the waist, laughing under his breath as steam curls up from the water in the tub and twinkling lights still glow faintly along the railing in the pale morning.
“It’s freezing!”
I take his hands and step down carefully, the hot water swallowing me in one blissful wave that makes the cold air disappear instantly. I groan at the contrast.
“Better?”
“Infinitely.”
He settles onto the built-in bench and tugs me toward him until I’m standing between his knees with the water curling around us in warm, bubbling swirls.
The cold Atlantic wind kisses my face.
The steam wraps around us.
His hands slide up my hips.
Every inch of me goes alert.
In the daylight, with the ocean roaring below and people moving somewhere beyond the terrace and the whole absurd world still technically awake, this should feel less intimate than last night.
It doesn’t.
It feels wilder in a quieter way.
More daring.
More secret.
Like we’re getting away with something just by existing here together.
I glance toward the path in the distance where a couple bundled joggers pass, tiny against the sweep of cliff and sea.
“Tell me nobody can see us.”
His mouth brushes my stomach before he looks up at me.
“Nobody can see anything but steam and your paranoia.”
“That is not comforting.”
His hands tighten, guiding me the last inch until I’m straddling his lap, the water shifting to cradle us both. His arms wrap low around my waist, steady, reverent. My breath catches at how perfectly we fit—chest to chest, thighs cradling thighs, heat everywhere.
He doesn’t rush.
Neither do I.
We just look at each other for a long, suspended moment while steam rises between us like a private veil. His eyes are so soft they hurt.
“I love you,” he whispers, the words barely louder than the bubbles.
My heart stutters.
“I love you too.”
The confession feels new every time, even though we’ve said it now—years of almost, of waiting, of wanting crashing into this quiet truth.
His fingertips begin a slow journey up my spine, tracing the dip of my waist, the small of my back, learning me like he’s memorizing every vertebra he’s only imagined before.
I shiver—not from cold—and he smiles against my mouth as he kisses me, slow and drugging, lips parting gently, tongues sliding in lazy, savoring strokes that taste like years of restraint finally breaking open.
I let my own hands wander, finally free to explore what I’ve only glimpsed through his basketball jersey for so long: the hard, defined ridges of his abs contracting under my palms, the thick swell of his pecs, the corded strength of his shoulders that I used to watch flex from the bleachers.
My fingertips glide over warm, wet skin, feeling muscles shift and bunch beneath them, and something inside me melts at how real he is, how solid, how mine.
I cup the hard planes of his cheek—the same sharp jaw that used to clench in frustration on the court, that used to tic when he was holding back words he couldn’t say yet.
Now it’s soft under my thumb, relaxed, mine to stroke.
I lean in and kiss the corner of it, then the hinge, then trail my lips along the line of his jaw until he exhales a shaky breath against my ear.
His hair is damp from the steam; the short curls at the nape of his neck have tightened into soft, dark spirals I’ve never seen this close. I thread my fingers through them, tugging gently, and he groans low, the sound vibrating straight through me.
He shifts us slightly, lifting me higher in his lap so my breasts rise above the waterline.
His mouth follows—hot, open kisses across my collarbone, down the slope of one breast until he captures my nipple between his lips.
He sucks gently at first, tongue flicking slow circles, then draws harder, rolling the peak against the roof of his mouth until my back arches and a soft, helpless sound spills out of me.
He switches to the other, giving it the same reverent attention, while one hand cups the breast he’s not kissing, thumb brushing the sensitive underside.