47. Jenna
Jenna
He doesn’t put me down until we reach the bedroom.
He lets my legs slide down his waist, his grease-stained hands leaving dark smudges on the gray fleece of the hoodie.
I don’t care. I’ve spent my entire life keeping everything perfectly clean, perfectly managed, and right now, all I want is the beautiful, chaotic mess of him.
“I’m going to ruin the sheets,” Dominic murmurs, his chest heaving as he looks down at his hands, then at my face. “I need a shower.”
“We’ll get new sheets,” I say, reaching for the hem of the hoodie and pulling it over my head. I toss it to the floor, revealing the simple black cotton bra beneath it.
Dominic’s breath catches. His dark eyes tracing the lines of my body.
“Fuck, Jen.”
I reach out and grip the hem of his grease-stained T-shirt. “Lift your arms.”
He complies immediately, a silent, absolute surrender. I strip the shirt from him, letting it join the hoodie on the floor. His chest is a landscape of taut muscle and ink, his skin hot to the touch, his heart hammering violently against my palms as I flatten my hands over his tattooed pecs.
“Jenna,” he breathes, voice wrecked.
“Partner,” I correct softly, stepping into his space.
He lets out a sound that is half-laugh, half-groan, and then his mouth is on mine. There’s no strategy here. No angles to play. He backs me toward the edge of the mattress, his hands sliding down to grip my hips.
I surrender to this feeling—us—body and mind, every last barricade.
I want him to feel how much I want this to his marrow, how much I need this.
How all my strategy is just a paper shield shredding under the direct hit of his hands.
He lifts me up again and sets me on the edge of the bed, then kneels in front of me like he’s about to pray.
He kisses me with the patience of a man who’s lost everything and knows exactly what it costs to get it back.
He peels down my leggings, slow and unhurried, as if he needs to make sure I won’t vanish halfway through. His knuckles leave faint gray smudges on my thighs. When he looks up, his eyes are filled with hunger and awe.
“I don’t deserve you,” he says, voice barely even there.
I lace my fingers through his hair and yank, gentle but insistent. “That makes two of us. Get over it.”
He laughs, hoarse and real. His head tips forward—mouth against my knee, then my hip, then the waistband of my underwear. He buries his face there and groans, and it’s so good, so devastatingly him, that I actually forget to breathe for a second.
He doesn’t drag it out. He slides my panties down, then pushes my knees apart with hands that tremble just the slightest bit. I want to tease him, do something to draw this moment out, but then his mouth finds me and all sense of superiority is vaporized.
Dominic Cruz is unholy with his mouth. Strategic but greedy, no patience for wasted effort—every flick and pressure is thought out and perfect.
My hands claw at the sheets, my breath coming out in short, impossible bursts.
I try to keep my eyes open, to watch the way he looks up at me, but at a certain point the pleasure shorts out my vision and throws up a blue screen of absolute surrender.
When I come, it’s loud. His name and a string of inarticulate syllables I don’t recognize as my own. He keeps going, dragging it out, greedy for every shudder and curse I give him, and only then does he let go and climb up, caging me against the mattress.
“God, I missed having your come all over my face.”
I laugh—wrecked, irreverent, and so gloriously unguarded it hurts on the inhale. “I missed you, too,” I say, hot and honest, wrapping my arms around his neck to pull him in, tasting myself on his tongue.
He hums into the kiss, his hand fisting in my hair as his mouth moves in a languid reclamation of mine, tongue moving slow, his weight balanced above me, the world spinning on the axis of this bed and this room and the fact that we are here, together, after everything. Maybe because of it.
I want to keep kissing him, want to feel every molecule of regret burn off in the heat between us, but even more than that, I want to watch him fall apart by my mouth and hands.
I roll us with a twist of my hips and suddenly he’s on his back, sprawled in the wreck of sheets, mouth open with something halfway between a gasp and a growl.
There is a look on his face I’ve never seen before—eyes blown wide, war zone raw, every edge of his control eroded until just this wild, almost terrified certainty is left behind.
I slide down his body, planting slow, deliberate kisses along the ridged muscle of his chest, stopping to taste the salt at his collarbone, the sharp curve of his clavicle.
My hands trail south, mapping the familiar.
When I get to the waistband of his jeans, I sit back on my heels and just look at him for a beat—his breath coming hard, his abdomen flexing under my palm.
“Jen,” he rasps, and I’m not sure if he’s trying to warn me off or urge me on.
I pop the button and draw the zipper down, slow and smooth.
He watches me, not moving, just letting me do what I want.
He lifts his hips as I tug his jeans and boxers down his legs, then kicks free of both.
The moment I wrap my hand around his thick length, he makes this involuntary little sound—half relief, half shock.
“Jesus, Jenna,” he says, breath hitching as I lean in. I stroke him once, twice, loving the way his whole body tenses. The taste of him is as familiar as an old fight, as new as every concession we’ve made to get back here.
He fists the sheets above his head, not even touching me, and I realize with a jolt that he’s letting me absolutely wreck him. Usually, he’d be in control, directing the pace, but right now he’s giving it up. Letting go.
His hips cant up, just a little, demanding and desperate.
I take him in my mouth, slow and deep, hollowing out my cheeks and dragging my tongue along the sensitive underside just to watch what it does to him.
Dominic doesn’t disappoint. His thigh muscles go rigid, his entire body bracing like he’s waiting for an impact.
“Fuck. Jenna—sweetheart. I’m not gonna last long if you do this. Fuck—” I cut him off, swirling my tongue around the head, watching his eyes roll back.
His hand flies to my hair, curling against my scalp like I’m the only constant in a world spinning out of control.
I bob my head, slow at first, letting him feel every tight drag and velvet squeeze.
When I bottom out, he swears under his breath—loud, reverent, as if prayer is the only language left to him.
I look up, wanting to see the ruin on his face, and he’s looking at me with a focus so raw and unfiltered it makes my spine shiver. I pick up the pace, sucking harder, twisting with my hand, swallowing around him until his thighs tremble and his voice is nothing but jagged syllables and empty air.
“Holy fuck, Jenna, I—” He loses the thread, fists both hands in my hair, and I let him push, let him set the depth and the pace.
I suck him hard, slick and messy, and when I press my tongue under the rim he shouts, a broken exhale, and the sound of it sends a jolt of heat between my legs so sharp I nearly come a second time, just from the power of it.
He comes fast, thick and hot, hips surging up, and I swallow him down, greedy for every drop. I don’t look away. I want him to see me take it, want him to know he’s mine, what I choose, what I crave.
When he finally drops back to the mattress, sweating and stunned, I crawl up and press my cheek to his chest. His heart is a jackhammer.
I rest my hand over it, fingers splayed, and just let the feeling linger—connection, communion, whatever it is that makes two broken people fit together for a minute or a hundred years.
After a few long, shattered breaths, he hauls me up and kisses me, slow and so fucking deep. I taste him, taste myself, and he doesn’t shy away from it. He never does.
“God, Jen. Your mouth.” With his hand wrapped around the back of my neck, he sweeps his tongue along mine, building the heat one teasing stroke at a time.
It’s not long before he flips us and pins me beneath him, his grease-smudged hands framing my face as he plants desperate, grateful kisses along my jaw and down my neck.
He shoves my bra aside with zero patience and takes a nipple in his mouth, biting just shy of too much, and I gasp, arching into him.
By the time he settles between my thighs, he’s hard again against me. He mouths at my breasts, marking me, and I twist under him, needing him inside, now.
“Still want the shower?” I murmur, breathing it into his hair.
He laughs, breath hot against my ribs, and leans up, eyes dark with intent. “Not if it means waiting to fuck you.”
I open my legs wide for him and guide him in, the first push making me gasp, the second stealing the air. He’s huge, and maybe it’s the ten days of not touching, or maybe it’s the emotional pileup in my chest, but I swear it’s the thickest, hardest he’s ever felt.
He buries to the hilt and pauses, forehead on mine, letting us both breathe.
“I love you,” he whispers. “I love you, Jen. So fucking much.”
“God, Dominic,” I gasp as he starts moving inside me. “I love you too. I love you. I love you.”
He rocks into me, slow at first. His hand knots in my hair, the other on my waist, greedy even as he’s gentle. The friction is almost unbearable, too much after so long without, but I don’t want mercy. I want him to take every last piece of me and admit he needs it the same as I do.
He kisses me, open-mouthed and messy as he picks up the pace.
I meet him thrust for thrust, locking my ankles above the small of his back.
Sweat slicking our skin, the residual grease on his fingers smearing black along my ass and thigh as he fucks me harder, faster, the rhythm so relentless I have to bite into his shoulder just to stay braced in the world.
“Oh, fuck—Jenna, I’m—” He breaks, cutting off his own warning with a snarl.
“Do it,” I whisper, clawing his back. “Don’t you dare hold back—”
He comes with a sound that might be my name or a curse, filling me deep.
It pulls my own orgasm out, raw and unplanned, my body clamping down around him so hard he gasps, damn near collapses.
We both dissolve, all the tension in our bodies erupting and then draining out, leaving nothing but tangled limbs and a soul-deep sense of belonging.
We don’t move for a long time. He rolls off, pulling me with him and tucking me against his chest, both of us sticky and marked up and absolutely right.
There’s a warm, easy silence. I run my fingers through the sweat at his hairline, tracing the angle of his stubbled jaw, the arch of his eyebrow.
The sharp, tinny taste of blood and oil still lingers, and I savor it.
The mess of us, the fact that—after all that calculated distance—we’ve chosen to stay in the dark, messy middle.
“Jenna,” he rasps. “Are you gonna hate it if I say I want to wake up with you every day for the rest of my life?”
I consider it. The million ways vulnerability used to land like an AMBER ALERT in my system. And then I look up at him.
“No,” I whisper. “I think I’d hate the alternative.”
He laughs, and it seeps through my bones, warm and dangerous. I want to keep it. I want to keep all of it. Him.
I rest my chin on his chest and brush my thumb over the two gold bands on his left hand—the ones I slid back into place downstairs.
Not the worst thing.
A little over two months ago, I thought the only safe future was one I could model in advance. Now I’m lying in a ruined bed, covered in sweat and literal grease, with no idea what the next sixty years will look like beyond the man holding me.
For the first time, the uncertainty feels like freedom, and I really like the way that feels.
I shift upward, pressing my lips to the steady, thumping pulse at the base of his throat.
“Just in case I didn’t make myself clear, I’m not going back to Queens,” I murmur against his skin, the finality of it settling perfectly in the quiet room.
“Except to visit Ma. And maybe to retrieve my actual luggage, since your packing job, while wonderfully carried out, was possibly a little pre-emptive.”
His chest rumbles with a deep, rich laugh, his arms tightening around me like a vise. “I’ll hire a service. Or I’ll drive the cargo van myself. Whatever you want, partner.”
Partner. The word settles somewhere deep, no longer a negotiation but a home we’re choosing together.
This marriage may have started on a whim and a dare. But the rest of our lives is a decision we’re making on purpose.
Of all the deals ever closed in this city, ours is the one I’m never walking away from again.