Chapter 6 #2
She turned back to him. He was standing in the doorway, watching her, his hands loose at his sides.
She stepped in front of him, reached for his buttons.
Her fingers were steady. She undid them one at a time, pulling the damp fabric away from his skin, and he let her.
He stood still and let her work, and when she pushed the shirt off his shoulders it clung to his arms. She offered a small smile, reaching down and tugging at the sleeves until the fabric fell to the tiles.
His chest was broad and hard and marked. A scar along his left side, maybe four inches, healed clean. Another one near his collarbone, smaller, older. She didn’t ask about them. She ran her fingers across the scar on his side and felt his stomach tighten under her hand.
She shrugged the robe off and let it drop.
The damp dress clung to her, and his eyes followed her hands as she reached behind her back for the zipper.
She pulled it down and let the dress fall, then hooked her thumbs in her panties, pushing them down her legs.
His eyes moved over her—slow, careful, and she could see the effort it took him not to reach for her.
She reached for his belt. Got it open. Got the zipper down and pushed the wet trousers and boxer briefs off his hips. He kicked them off along with his socks and shoes.
He was hard. Her gaze dropped, and a slow pull of heat settled low in her belly. She let herself look, and when her eyes came back to his, whatever he saw in her face made his jaw tighten.
She took his hand and stepped backward into the shower, pulling him with her.
The hot water hit them both, feeling just as good as it had the first time.
She kissed him under the spray, harder this time, and his hands found her waist and pulled her against him.
Skin against skin, nothing between them now.
His hands were splayed wide against her back, and when he slid one up into her wet hair and tilted her head back, the water ran down her throat, and he kissed the path it took.
He sank to his knees in front of her.
Her breath stopped. She looked down at him through the spray—this broad, scarred, beautiful man on his knees on the tile, water running over his shoulders, his hands sliding down her hips—and something cracked open in her chest that she wasn’t going to be able to close again.
The water ran down his back as he lifted her left thigh over his shoulder and pressed his mouth between her legs.
Her hand shot to the tile wall, bracing hard, and her other hand found his hair.
His tongue was slow and deliberate, tracing a line along her clit that made her hips jerk forward.
He steadied her with both hands gripping her thighs.
Three years. It had been three years since anyone had touched her. Three years of solitary beds in sublet apartments and borrowed rooms and cities she moved through without making a mark.
She’d shut this part of herself down so completely that she’d forgotten what it felt like to want someone’s hands on her. Now his tongue was on her, and his fingers were pressing into the soft skin of her inner thighs, and the sound she made bounced off the tile, and she didn’t care.
He listened. Every shift of her hips, every tightened grip in his hair, every sharp breath—he registered it and adjusted.
When she pressed into him, he gave her more.
When she pulled back, he slowed. The rhythm built and built until her thigh was shaking on his shoulder, and her fingers were locked in his hair, and she came with her back arched against the wet tile and his name in her mouth.
He held her through it. Both hands on her hips, his lips pressed against her inner thigh, his thumbs tracing slow circles on her skin while the tremors worked through her. The water ran over both of them. She stared at the ceiling and tried to remember how to breathe.
He stood up. Water streamed off his shoulders and his chest. His eyes were dark. His hands came up to frame her face and he kissed her, slow and deep, and she could taste herself on him. God, that was so sexy.
He was hard against her stomach. She wrapped her hand around him and felt his breath catch against her jaw. His forehead dropped to hers. His eyes closed.
“Fallon.”
Just her name. Just the sound of it in his voice, low and rough with the water running over them both.
She stroked him, and his hand caught her wrist. “Not here. Come to bed.”
He reached behind her and turned the water off.
Then he bent and lifted her—one arm under her knees, the other behind her back—and carried her out of the bathroom.
She looped her arms around his neck. Water dripped from both of them across the carpet.
He set her down on the edge of the bed and she pulled him over her as she lay back.
The sheets were cool and dry against her wet skin.
His body was hot above hers, heavy in a way that should have felt constraining but didn’t.
He braced himself on one forearm and kissed her throat, the hollow below her ear, the line of her collarbone.
His other hand moved down her body—her breast, her ribs, the dip of her waist—learning her with an attention that made something tight and desperate coil at the base of her throat.
He found her nipple and her back arched off the bed. He took his time. Slow pressure, his tongue circling, his teeth grazing just enough to make her gasp. His hand slid between her thighs and his fingers found her clit again, still swollen and sensitive, and the sound she made was raw. He paused.
“Don’t stop,” she said.
He didn’t stop. His fingers moved inside her while his thumb worked her clit, and he traveled from her breast to her ribs to the flat plane of her stomach, and she was dissolving.
Three years of discipline and distance and carefully maintained walls, and he was taking them apart with his hands and the kind of focus that left no room for performance. He wasn’t trying to impress her. He was paying attention to her, and the difference between those two things was devastating.
He pulled away for a moment, and she let out a sound of protest. He smiled, then crossed to the bathroom and came back with his wallet, pulling a condom from it.
The wrapper tore under his teeth. She watched him roll it on and something in her chest clenched at the sight of him: kneeling on the bed, wet hair pushed back from his face, his body lean and hard and marked with scars he hadn’t explained, his eyes on her like she was the only thing in the world that mattered.
He settled between her thighs. His hand slid under her knee, lifting her leg against his hip, and when he pushed inside her she exhaled a sound that was half relief and half something she couldn’t name.
He moved slowly. Deep, deliberate strokes that she felt in her entire body. His forehead pressed against hers. His breath was ragged against her mouth. She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him deeper and he groaned—a low, unguarded sound that went straight through her.
His hand curved around her hip, holding her exactly where he wanted her, adjusting the angle until she gasped and dug her nails into his shoulders.
“There,” she breathed. “Yes. Please, yes.”
He stayed there. Kept the angle, kept the pace, each stroke landing with a precision that was doing something to her she couldn’t think her way out of. His thumb traced the bone of her hip. His face was against her throat, and she could feel the vibration of every sound he made against her skin.
The second orgasm built slower than the first. A deep, rolling pressure that started low in her belly and spread outward, and she could feel it coming for a long time before it hit.
He felt it too. She knew because his rhythm shifted—not faster, but more focused, meeting her exactly where she needed him.
When it broke, it broke hard. She buried her face against his neck and held on to him with both hands and let it take her. He followed her a few seconds later, his whole body going taut above her, his breath catching against her shoulder in a sound that was more surrender than anything else.
They stayed like that for a long time. His weight on top of her, his face in the curve of her neck, their breathing slowing together. The room was quiet. The harbor lights threw pale reflections across the ceiling.
He rolled off her eventually, dealt with the condom and came back. Pulled the covers over them both. His arm settled across her waist, heavy and certain, and he pressed his lips against her shoulder.
“Stay,” he murmured.
“Okay,” she said. The word was out before she could catch it.
His breathing evened out within minutes. His arm got heavier across her waist. His chest rose and fell against her back in the slow, deep rhythm of real sleep.
Fallon didn’t sleep.
She lay still and listened to him breathe and stared at the harbor lights and felt the specific, surgical pain of a mistake she wasn’t sorry for.
She couldn’t stay.
She waited twenty minutes. Then she lifted his arm off her waist, carefully, an inch at a time. He shifted but didn’t wake. She slid out of the bed, her feet finding the carpet without sound.
Her dress and panties were in the bathroom, still damp. She put them on anyway. Found her shoes by the doorframe. Left the robe on the bathroom floor where it had fallen. She didn’t look in the mirror. She didn’t want to see the face that was about to do this.
She walked back to the bedroom doorway.
He was on his side, one arm stretched across the space where she’d been.
The sheets were tangled around his waist. The light from the harbor caught the scar on his side, the line of his jaw, the easy sprawl of a man who’d fallen asleep trusting that the woman beside him would still be there when he woke up.
She stood there for three seconds. Four. Five.
She wanted to stay. The wanting was specific and physical—an ache behind her ribs that had nothing to do with her joints or her condition or any of the hundred pains she cataloged and managed every day.
This one was new. This one was just for him.
She turned and crossed the room, quiet and precise. Her knee sent a sharp complaint on the second step and she absorbed it without breaking stride.
She didn’t look back. If she did, she might cave. Might get back in bed with a charming, sexy man who was a luxury she couldn’t afford.
The hallway was empty. The elevator was waiting. The lobby was quiet, staffed by a single concierge who glanced up and then away, professional and incurious. Outside, the air was cold against her damp dress and her bare arms, and she walked three blocks before she let herself feel anything at all.
Then she felt everything, and she walked faster.