Chapter 12 #2
I drop the bags. I close the distance, pull her into me, and find her mouth in the dark, no light switches, no tour, nothing that keeps her out of my arms one second longer.
#
Callie
He’s on me before I even get a breath, my startled gasp swallowed by his mouth, tongue plunging deep, teeth grazing my lower lip. I melt into him, my fingers clenched in the front of his shirt as if they’ve been waiting all week for this permission.
His rough hands slide down my back, palms gripping the backs of my thighs.
He lifts me like I have no weight, like I’m a feather, legs instinctively wrapping around his waist as he carries us backward through his front door, lips never leaving mine.
He steps around dark furniture by memory, pressing me harder with every stride; I can feel how hard he is against my body.
“I take it we’ll do the tour later,” I manage between kisses, chest heaving. He moans against my lips, and a sound rumbles up from my chest that I haven’t made in years.
“No tour. I’m too busy showing you how much you mean to me,” he says against my mouth, and the ridiculous thing is that I believe him. I, who haven’t let anyone carry anything of mine, literal or otherwise, in eight years.
The bedroom is all shadow and moonlight off the lake, silver bands across the floor.
He sets me on my feet at the edge of the bed with a gentleness completely at odds with his breathing, and for one suspended moment we just look at each other in the half-dark, finally out of interruptions.
No practice ending. No flashlights. No tarantula.
“Callie.” His voice is already wrecked, low, thumb tracing my jaw. “Tell me now if —”
“If you stop,” I say, “I will end you.”
The laugh that breaks out of him is real and brief, and then his mouth crashes back into mine and nothing is brief after that.
We undress each other badly. Hungrily. His t-shirt goes somewhere in the dark; a button of mine does not survive.
“Fuck…” he swears against my throat when my jeans fight him and I laugh into his chest, and the laugh dies in my throat when his hands finally find bare skin, spanning my waist like he’s measuring what’s his.
I stop him, palms flat against his chest, because it’s one thing to know professionally that this man’s body is a headline, and another to have it under my hands, hot and real and reacting to me.
He stands perfectly still, letting me trace every ridge of muscle: the six-pack hardened by dawn runs, the faint scar curving along his ribs, the sharp V of his pelvis.
When my finger dips under his waistband, feeling how hard he is, his breath shatters.
All those years building himself into an instrument for other people’s Sundays, and tonight the instrument shudders because I dragged my nails down it.
I was not prepared for that kind of power. I intend to abuse it.
“You’re staring, sugar.” But there’s no smirk left on him; his voice has gone to gravel.
“I’m appreciating. There’s a difference. I’m a trained observer.”
“My turn.”
And this is the part I braced for. Not out of shame, I run five mornings a week.
I’ve made peace with this body and most days I like it fine.
But there’s a difference between a body maintained by a woman with nineteen minutes to herself and a body maintained by an entire professional staff.
This man’s physique has a payroll. Nutritionists, trainers, a conditioning coach, all of it his actual job, and mine has two kids, a deadline habit, and whatever the school fundraiser was selling.
So yes, some small quartermaster in my head has been drafting comparisons all week.
He dismantles the whole file without saying a word.
He strips the last of my clothes away slowly, like unwrapping something he’s been patient about for weeks, and then he takes a full step back and looks at me in the moonlight the way he looked at that fourth-quarter field: total focus, total intent, like something worth everything he has.
“Christ, Callie.” It comes out reverent and starving at once.
“You have no idea, do you?” Before I can dodge his praise, he’s on his knees, mouth hot against the inside of my thigh.
His tongue traces up, brushing my wet slit, flicking at my clit.
A gasp rips free as every apology I’ve ever drafted for my body crumbles.
“Nate —” His name breaks in half on the way out, when he anchors his hands on my hips, lips crushing against the slick entrance of my pussy, patient and merciless.
He works me open with the same precision he gives every play call: mapping exactly what makes me arch, then hitting it harder, faster, until my fingers tangle in his hair and my knees buckle.
I cry out, the sound swallowed by the dark, no neighbors for miles, no audience but the lake.
He works me through it until I’m wrung out and shaking, then climbs back up and kisses me deep, letting me taste what he did to me, and whatever restraint either of us packed for this trip is officially lost luggage.
“I can slow down if you need a minute.” He groans against my lips, biting gently.
“I will be honestly impressed by the restraint if you do,” I tell him, pulling at him, graceless, greedy. “Nate. Don’t stop.” I’m still too sensitive, I don’t care, I want him, all of him.
“Thank God,” he groans. “I was trying to be a gentleman,” then fumbles at the nightstand.
There’s crinkling foil, a shared laugh at our trembling hands, and then he’s over me again, one arm braced on the mattress as his cock parts me.
He pushes in slow, inescapable, filling me completely.
We go silent. His forehead rests against mine; my nails rake down his shoulders.
The stretch of him inside me steals every word from my throat.
The low, guttural moan he makes is mine alone, never caught by cameras, never broadcast. I am keep it.
“Callie.” He says my name like a play call. “Look at me.”
I do, green on green in the silver dark, and he starts to move.
What follows is not careful. It’s weeks of almosts cashing out at once, shed lightning and hallway walls and parking-lot restraint, all of it converted into rhythm and heat and his hand sliding under my hips to change the angle until I’m gasping his name into his neck.
We’re terrible at pacing ourselves, both of us; we collide, we laugh once, and then we stop laughing entirely.
He drives into me like he’s making up a score deficit; I respond in kind, needing everything he can give me.
At some point I roll him, surprise him with it, a strength move he clearly doesn’t expect from a woman my size, and the view of Nate Rivers underneath me, jaw slack, hands gripping my hips like a drowning man, eyes wrecked and worshipful in the moonlight, is one I will be replaying at inappropriate moments for the rest of my natural life.
“You’re going to kill me,” he manages.
“You said you’ve got me.” I roll my hips and watch his eyes lose focus. “Prove it.”