50. Jae #3
“Right here.” My voice is rough. I don’t recognize it.
I move lower. My mouth on her breast through the thin cotton of her sleep shirt, and she arches beneath me, a soft sound escaping her throat that I feel more than hear.
My hand slides under the hem, palm against the warm skin of her stomach, and she trembles—a full-body shiver that runs from her ribs to her thighs and back again.
I learn the places that make her breath hitch.
The spot just below her ribs where my thumb finds a dip in the muscle and her back comes off the mattress.
The curve of her hip where my fingers press and her leg shifts, opening for me without being asked.
The particular pressure that makes her fingers tighten in my hair to the point of pain, which I register distantly as useful information and file away for later.
She meets every touch with her own. Her nails drag down my back, leaving tracks that burn in the best way, and I hiss against her skin and she makes a sound that might be satisfaction.
Her legs wrap around my waist, pulling me closer, her hips rolling up to meet the press of my body against hers, and the friction is almost enough to make me lose whatever composure I’m pretending to have.
Her hand finds my waistband, fingers slipping beneath the elastic, and the contact is so direct, so deliberate, that I have to close my eyes and count backward from ten in a language I barely remember.
“Wait.” The word comes out strained.
I catch her wrist, gentle, and bring her hand to my mouth. Kiss her palm. Then her wrist. The inside of her elbow, where the skin is soft and the pulse is visible beneath the surface.
“Let me.”
She understands. I see it in the way her body relaxes beneath mine, the particular surrender of someone who has spent too long carrying everything and is finally, consciously setting it down.
Her hand moves to my face instead, palm against my cheek, thumb brushing my lower lip, and the tenderness in the gesture is so precise it hurts.
When I finally enter her, it is slow. So slow I can feel every fraction of an inch, the particular resistance and then the give, the way her body opens for me like something that has been waiting.
She gasps against my mouth—a sharp, broken sound that I catch with my lips, and her eyes flutter open, wide and dark and entirely focused on mine.
We hold there for a beat. Two. Her breath coming in short pulls against my chest, her thighs tight around my hips, her fingers curled into my shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
“Okay?” I murmur against her temple.
She answers by rolling her hips. Once. Deliberate. The movement drives me deeper, and the sound she makes is low and satisfied and entirely, devastatingly real.
“Okay,” she says, and her voice is wrecked already, and we haven’t even started.
We move together. The rhythm finds us in real time—not prescribed, not performed, just discovered through the particular calculus of two bodies figuring out what the other needs.
I adjust to the angle of her hips. She adjusts to the depth of each thrust, her back arching, her head tipping back against the pillow.
My hand finds the back of her thigh, pulling her leg higher around my waist, and the change in angle makes her cry out—a short, punched sound that she tries to muffle against my shoulder and fails.
“Don’t,” I say. My voice is rough. “I want to hear you.”
She looks at me then. Her eyes are dark, pupils blown, her lip caught between her teeth in a way that makes me want to put my mouth there and fix it.
The flush has spread across her chest, pink rising under brown skin, following the neckline of her sleep shirt where it’s rucked up around her ribs.
Her fingers are tight in my hair, pulling with each thrust in a rhythm that tells me exactly how close she is.
“You’re so beautiful,” I say. The words come out without rehearsal, without the particular careful measure I usually apply to language. They just fall out of my mouth, raw and honest and entirely beyond my control. “God, Amiyah, you’re—you’re perfect. You’re so fucking perfect.”
Her breath catches. Her eyes hold mine, and something shifts in them—something warm and bright and dangerously close to breaking—and then she’s coming, her body tightening around me, her back arching off the mattress, his name on her lips in a voice that doesn’t sound like hers at all.
“Jae—fuck—Jae—” Her hands clutch at me, fingers digging into my shoulders, her hips rolling against mine in short, desperate movements, like she’s trying to hold on to something that’s already moving too fast to catch.
I follow her over the edge. It hits me like a wave—hot and relentless, starting low in my spine and rolling outward until my vision blurs at the edges.
My face presses to the curve of her neck, my mouth against her pulse, and her name is the only coherent thing left in me.
I say it against her skin. Once. Twice. A third time, quieter, like I’m making sure she can hear it.