Chapter 13
MATEO
The hallway is quiet by midnight - doors closed, voices muffled, everyone trying to wind down after the noise of the game.
The walls are thin.
I can hear someone’s TV two rooms over. Low murmur of sportscasters. The sound of a door opening somewhere, then closing.
I pick up my phone.
Nothing.
Of course, nothing. What did I expect?
I set the phone down.
But suddenly it buzzes.
Room 412.
ELIDA
I shouldn’t have sent it.
I knew it the second my thumb hit send, and I’ve known it every second since - through the shower I took that didn’t help, through the pajamas I changed into. I told myself I should text again and take it back.
But I didn’t.
And now there’s a knock at the door. Soft. One knuckle, barely audible.
I open it.
He’s standing in the hallway in sweatpants and a grey t-shirt, barefoot, his hair damp from his own shower. He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me, and whatever he sees on my face makes his expression flip from cautious to something else entirely.
I step back and he steps in.
I close the door behind him and the lock clicks into place. Suddenly the room seems very small and very full of him.
“Elida.” His voice is low.
“Don’t,” I whisper. “If you’re going to talk me out of this-”
“I’m not.”
“You should.”
“Probably.” He doesn’t move closer. He stands there, letting me set the pace, letting me decide. “Do you want me to leave?”
His face in the low light from the window. The line of his jaw. His hands at his sides, relaxed. Waiting for whatever I say next.
“No,” I say.
He exhales. His shoulders relax.
“Okay.”
I close the distance between us.
I don’t kiss him. Not yet. I put my hands on his chest and I feel his heart under my hand, and I look up at him. “We have to be quiet.”
“I know.”
“Calloway is next door. If anyone hears-”
“They won’t.”
His hands find my waist. Light at first, asking, and when I don’t pull away they settle there, thumbs tracing the fabric of my shirt. I feel the heat of him through the thin cotton.
“Elida.” My name again, softer this time, and I kiss him before he can say anything else.
My back is against the door and his body presses me into it. His mouth opens mine and I pull at his shirt.
He breaks the kiss long enough to yank it over his head, and then I’m looking at him - the breadth of his shoulders and the cut of his chest. The dark hair trailing down below his waistband. He’s athletic and beautiful. I put my hands on his bare skin and feel him shiver.
“You’re cold,” I say.
“Not anymore.”
He kisses me again, deeper this time, one hand sliding into my hair, the other pressing flat against the door beside my head. I arch into him and feel exactly how much he wants this - he’s hard against my hip through his sweatpants, and I make a sound before I can stop myself.
His hand covers my mouth.
“Quiet, remember?” he whispers against my ear.
I bite his palm lightly and his eyes darken.
MATEO
I want to take my time.
I want to learn every sound she makes, map every place her breath catches, draw this out until neither of us can think straight. But the way she’s moving against me - the small, desperate sounds she keeps making even when she’s trying not to - is dismantling my self-control.
I pull her away from the door and toward the bed.
She goes willingly, her hands everywhere, pushing at my sweatpants until they’re around my ankles and I’m kicking them off. She’s laughing silently at my urgency. The sound of it - barely there, breath through her nose - makes me harder than anything has in a long time.
“Scoot up,” I murmur.
She does, crawling backward on the bed until her head hits the pillows, and I follow her, bracketing her body with mine. The soft light catches her face and the hollow of her throat. Her hair is spread across the pillow.
“You’re staring,” she whispers.
“Yeah. I can’t help it.”
She pulls me down by the back of my neck and kisses me hard.
I slide my hand up under her shirt - the thin pajama top she’s wearing, no bra underneath - and she gasps into my mouth when my thumb finds her nipple.
It’s already peaked, already aching for it, and I roll it slowly between my fingers while she bites her lip.
“I want to feel you,” she breathes.
“Patience.”
“I don’t have any.”
I almost laugh. “Me neither.”
I pull her top up and off, and then she’s bare beneath me. I stop for a second to look at her - the pale curves of her breasts, the way she’s watching me watch her, the flush spreading down her chest.
“Mateo.”
“Yeah.”
I put my mouth on her.
She arches off the bed and claps her hand over her own mouth, remembering at the last second, and I smile against her skin before I close my lips around her nipple and suck.
She tastes like soap and something else - just her, underneath everything - and I taste her slowly, tongue and teeth.
I use the flat of my palm on her other breast, until she’s trembling underneath me and making sounds she can’t quite muffle.
“Please,” she whispers. “Please, I need-”
“I know what you need.”
I pull back long enough to get her pajama bottoms down her legs, and she lifts her hips to help me, impatient, and then we’re both naked – she’s spread out beneath me.
“Condom?”
“Nightstand. Left drawer.”
I fumble for it, tear the foil with my teeth, and roll it on while she watches me. Then I’m over her again, the head of my cock pressing against her, and she’s so wet.
Then I’m inside her.
Her eyes go wide. My forehead drops to hers.
“Fuck,” I groan.
“Quiet,” she whispers back, and the laugh in her voice makes me want to ruin her.
I push in deeper.
ELIDA
He fills me completely. He’s perfect.
I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him deeper, and he groans into my shoulder.
“Shh,” I say, and I feel his smile against my skin.
“Then stop doing that.”
“Stop what?”
“Being-” He thrusts, shallow, experimental. “That.”
I bite my lip and tilt my hips, and he gets the message. He starts moving - slow at first, controlled, the same discipline he’s been learning on the ice translated into something else entirely. But I don’t want controlled. I want desperate.
“Faster,” I whisper.
“Elida-”
“Russo.” I put my hands on his hips and guide him. “I won’t break.”
His restraint fractures.
He fucks me harder.
His forearm is beside my head, his hips slamming into mine, and I can hear the headboard tapping the wall, and I don’t care, I don’t care, I just need more.
“Come for me,” he says against my ear.
“I’m close-”
I can feel myself tightening around him, the orgasm building low in my belly, spreading outward. I dig my nails into his back and he shudders and his rhythm stutters and-
He pulls out.
“No-” I start.
“I’m close.” His voice is strained. “I don’t want to - not yet.”
He flips me.
It’s so fast I gasp - one moment I’m on my back, the next I’m face-down on the pillows with his hands on my hips, pulling me up onto my knees.
I hear the condom come off, the tear of a new wrapper, and then he’s inside me again from behind, deeper this time, and I have to press my face into the pillow to keep from crying out.
“Like this,” he says, and his voice is wrecked. “I want to watch you.”
He fucks me slow and deep, one hand on my hip, the other braced on the headboard. The angle is - god, the angle is - I can’t think, I can’t breathe, I can only feel him sliding into me again and again slowly, hitting a spot that makes stars burst behind my eyes.
“Mateo-”
“I’ve got you.”
His thumb finds my clit from behind, circling in time with his thrusts, and I come apart.
It’s not quiet.
The sound tears out of me before I can stop it - a sharp, broken cry that I barely recognize as my own. His hand slaps over my mouth a second too late, but he doesn’t stop moving, doesn’t stop touching me, and I ride out the wave against his palm, shaking, whimpering, completely undone.
He waits until I finish.
Then he pulls out, turns me over, and lowers his head between my legs.
“Mateo-”
His mouth is on me before I can finish the thought.
Hot and wet and knowing, his tongue finding exactly where I need it, and I’m so sensitive from the first orgasm that I nearly scream when he licks me.
I grab his hair hard and he groans against me, the vibration sending another shockwave through my body.
“You taste-” His eyes are dark. “Fuck, Elida.”
He says my name like it’s sacred.
Then he puts his mouth back on me and I stop thinking entirely.
MATEO
We’ve done this before, when we got interrupted.
But I want to be the reason she falls apart on my tongue.
The way she moves, the sounds she makes, the way her thighs tighten around my head when I find the right rhythm - none of it is performative. She’s not trying to be sexy. She’s feeling and letting go. The trust in that undoes something in my chest.
I curl my tongue and suck her clit into my mouth and she comes, her body twisting. I work her through it until she goes limp.
Then I crawl up her body and kiss her softly. She tastes herself on my lips and makes a small, surprised sound.
“You’re so good at that,” she whispers.
I raise an eyebrow. “Surprised?”
“A little.”
“Should I be offended?”
“No.” She touches my face, her fingers light on my jaw. “You know… I wasn’t expecting…”
“Expecting what?”
“Someone who pays attention,” she says finally.
I don’t know what to do with that. The implication that she’s been with people who didn’t bother, who took what they wanted and left her to clean up after. Something hot and protective moves through me and I kiss her again, deeper this time, trying to say things I don’t have words for.
ELIDA
Afterward, we lie in the dark and he pulls me in without making anything of it, arranging us, his arm around me, my head on his chest, like it’s something we’ve done before.
For a while we stay like that, his hand moving slowly up and down my arm in an absent, easy way that makes my eyes heavy.
“Tell me something,” he says, into the dark.