Chapter 25 Adela #2
It’s slow enough to make me lose my mind. Deep and unhurried and devastatingly precise, like he's taking me apart one careful inch at a time and enjoying every second of watching it happen. I roll my hips, trying to rush him, and he makes a low sound against my ear that I feel in my spine.
I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper, and his breath stutters against my throat, and I feel a rush of something almost like power — that I can do that to him, that he's not as composed as he pretends to be, that underneath all that careful control, he wants this just as badly as I do.
I moan, “Please.”
"Please, what?" His voice is low against my ear, rough at the edges in a way that tells me the control is costing him something.
"More," I breathe. "Stop being so—" Another slow stroke and my thoughts scatter. "Stop."
He doesn't stop. He does the same thing again, and I feel it everywhere — in my thighs, my stomach, the base of my spine — this unbearable, building tension that he's winding tighter and tighter with every measured movement.
His mouth finds my jaw, my throat, the soft skin below my ear. "I've got you," he murmurs.
I believe him. Right now, in this moment, I believe every single thing about him without question, which should probably terrify me.
His hand slides between our bodies and finds where I need him most, and I gasp as my whole body jolts.
He keeps moving inside me, deep and slow, while his fingers work a completely different rhythm, and the combination is devastating.
I can feel myself coming apart at the seams, everything tightening low in my stomach, my thighs trembling on either side of him.
"Right there," I manage. "Don't stop. Don't—"
He doesn't.
He picks up the pace, finally, and the relief of it pulls a moan out of me that I don't bother swallowing.
His hips meet mine with a force that makes the headboard shift, and I rake my nails down his back and feel him shudder against me, his rhythm stuttering for just a second before he finds it again.
I orgasm with my face pressed to his shoulder and his name on my lips, my whole body clenching around him, wave after wave of it rolling through me.
At the same time, he keeps moving, drawing it out, not letting me come down until I'm shaking and oversensitive and clinging to him like he's the only solid thing in the room.
He follows me seconds later — his forehead dropping to mine, a low groan against my mouth, his hips stuttering deep, and his whole body going taut before he lets go.
I feel it. I feel all of it. And something about that — the intimacy of it, the specific vulnerability of that moment — does more damage to me than any of the rest of it.
We stay like that for a moment. Both of us are breathing hard. His weight on me, which I don't mind. His face is on my neck.
Then he rolls to the side and pulls me with him, and his hand finds my hair, and his breathing starts to slow.
Mine doesn't.
This is the part I don't know how to manage — the after. When the warmth of him is still everywhere, and my brain slowly comes back and starts asking questions I don't want to answer.
Like, why does he never stay past a certain hour unless he accidentally falls asleep?
Like why he'll pull me closer the moment I seem uncertain, but goes quiet every time I try to say something that matters.
Like why I feel closer to him than I've felt to anyone since I got here, and he somehow seems the same distance away as the day we met.
I said I didn't want another relationship. I meant it when I said it.
I'm not sure what to call what we’re doing here.
I turn my head and look at his face in the dark. Unguarded in sleep in a way he never quite is when he's awake. There's something almost unfair about it — the tension he carries everywhere just gone, just a person, just warm and breathing and here.
I look back at the ceiling.
My mind drifts, and I expect it to land on Cody — the hospital, the videos, Judge Ravenshaw, all the threads I keep pulling. But it doesn't go there.
It goes to Theo.
The library. The book dropping onto my desk. You're looking in the wrong place. The boy who looked like danger and sin.
I don't know why I keep thinking about him.
I don't know why it feels like it means something.
Beckett shifts beside me in his sleep, turns toward me, his arm finding my waist automatically, like even unconscious, he knows where I am.
I let him pull me in.
But I don't sleep for a long time.
Sunday afternoon, I head to the library to study.
I pull out my green Reformation sweater. It’s my favorite cashmere, and I spray my favorite candy-like perfume all over it. Then I run a brush through my hair, making sure every knot is free. I glide my favorite lip gloss across my lips and pop them a few times.
I grab my books and go.
The walk across campus is cold enough that I pull my sleeves over my hands. I focus on the bite of the air instead of the third floor of the library and whether or not a particular study carrel will be occupied when I get there.
It probably won't be.
I turn the corner onto the third floor, and my eyes go immediately to the study carrels by the window.
He's not there.
The disappointment that moves through me is instant, disproportionate, and deeply annoying. I stand there for a second longer than I should, looking at the empty space, and then I sit down at my usual spot, open my laptop, and tell myself to get it together.
I pull out my books and open my Comparative Government notes. I reach for The Prince — his book, the one he left without explanation — and find the page I was on.
I read the same paragraph four times.
I'm aware of the stairwell door every time it opens.
Aware of footsteps at the end of the aisle.
Aware of every shadow that moves in my peripheral vision in a way that has nothing to do with studying and everything to do with the fact that I dragged myself here today for a person who may not even show up.
I force myself to actually read. I make notes. I highlight something. I am a person who came to the library to study, and that is exactly what I'm doing.
Then footsteps. Slow. Unhurried.
I stop reading mid-sentence.
I don't turn around. I look at my page and keep my eyes reading, even though my brain isn’t.
"Back for more corruption theory?"
I look up.
He's got the kind of face that makes you forget what you were doing — strong jaw, straight nose, eyes so dark they look almost cruel. Dark hoodie, hands in his pockets, hair slightly disheveled like he came straight from somewhere and didn't think twice about it.
"Seems like it found me," I say.
His eyes move over the books spread across my desk, reading the spines. Then they come back to me. He pulls out the chair across from me without asking, sits, leans back, and looks at me like he’s taking me apart very slowly.
It's unnerving.
It's also the most interesting I've felt in weeks. Not the warm, easy comfort of Beckett. Something different. Something with more edges. Like standing at the top of something tall and feeling your stomach drop, not entirely out of fear.
"Making progress?" he asks.
"Slowly."
He nods, like that's the answer he expected. His eyes stay on mine a beat too long, and I resist the urge to look away first, which I'm realizing is becoming a pattern between us — this quiet, low-stakes standoff where neither of us wants to be the first to flinch.
I came here to study.
I've known since I put on the green sweater that it was a lie.