Chapter 18 #2
He parked outside her building and walked her to the door.
"Your father's terrifying," he said.
"He's five-foot-nine. You tower over him.”
"Height is irrelevant. That man could end me with a look."
She laughed. His blue eyes were close, warm. Charlotte stopped laughing and kissed him. She kissed him with both hands on his face, her thumbs on his jaw.
Dominic’s hands went to her waist, her hips, pulling her against him. His heart hammered through his shirt, the composure he'd held for two hours finally breaking open against her mouth.
She pulled back. His breathing was ragged. His hands were still on her hips, fingers pressing into the fabric of her jeans.
“Come upstairs," she said.
Dominic went still. And then the longing and desire he’d been holding back cracked wide open.
He followed her up. The stairwell was narrow and smelled like someone's laundry and the curry from 2B. She unlocked her door. The apartment was dark except for the light she always left on in the hallway.
Charlotte turned to face him. He was standing just inside the door, hands at his sides, looking at her apartment: the sage walls, the secondhand bookshelf, the quilt on the bed visible through the open bedroom door. Her life. The one she'd built without him.
"I like your apartment," he said.
"It's tiny."
"It's yours."
She crossed the space between them and put her hands on his chest. She felt his heartbeat under her palms. Fast, harder than she expected.
He wasn't calm. He wasn't composed. The man who'd sat through her father's interrogation without flinching was standing in her apartment with his heart hammering.
His hands came up. One to her waist, one to her face. His thumb traced her cheekbone, down to the corner of her mouth. He was looking at her with so much want that it made her knees feel unreliable.
He kissed her. A slow, deliberate, full-body kiss.
Charlotte’s hands slid up his chest to his neck, his fingers threaded into her hair, his mouth opening against hers with a groan that she felt in her spine.
She pressed herself against him, his arm tightened around her waist, pulling her closer, his hand spread wide across her lower back.
They moved toward the bedroom, mouths still connected, hands finding buttons and hems. She pulled his shirt free from his waistband and slid her hands up his bare stomach, feeling the muscles tense under her palms. He broke the kiss long enough to pull the shirt over his head, and then he was looking at her in the half-light of the hallway lamp, breathing hard, his chest rising and falling.
"Charlie." Her name in his mouth, low and rough. "If you want to stop—"
"I don't want to stop."
She pulled her blouse over her head. His eyes dropped, then came back to her face, and the effort of maintaining eye contact while she stood in front of him in her bra was visible. She reached behind her and unclasped it. Let it fall. Watched his expression come apart.
"God," he breathed. "You're so beautiful, Char.”
He kissed her throat. The soft hollow beneath her ear, down the side of her neck, across her collarbone.
His mouth was warm and thorough, cataloging every inch of skin he'd never paid attention to before.
His lips traced the line of her shoulder, the curve of her breast, the place where her ribs expanded with each breath.
He was learning her body the way he'd spent weeks learning her life: attentively, with focus.
They fell onto the bed. His hands found the button of her jeans and she lifted her hips. He pulled the jeans down, pressed his mouth to her hip bone, and the sound she made filled the bedroom and surprised them both.
"Don't be quiet," he said against her skin. "I want to hear you."
She wasn't quiet. She'd been quiet during their engagement — careful, performative, managing her own pleasure the way she'd managed everything else in his world.
Watching his reactions to make sure she was doing it right, responding the way she should.
She'd handled intimacy the same way she'd performed the fork placement: studying the script, hitting the marks, never quite believing she belonged in the scene.
She wasn't doing that now.
His mouth moved lower. His hands gripped her thighs, pulling her to the edge of the bed, and when his tongue found her center she arched off the mattress, grabbed a fistful of the quilt and said his name in a voice she didn't recognize.
He stayed there, patient, focused, reading her body with an attention he'd never given it before.
When she guided his hand, he followed. When she shifted her hips, he adjusted.
When she said there he didn't move, didn't change, just stayed exactly where she needed him until the tension in her body crested, broke and she came with a sound that was half his name and half something wordless.
He kissed his way back up. She was shaking.
He was shaking. She reached for his belt and he helped her, and then there was nothing between them.
Skin against skin, the full length of him against the full length of her.
The contact was so complete, so overwhelming, that she pressed her face into his neck and just breathed.
"Look at me," he said.
She opened her eyes. His face was inches away. Blue eyes, dark with want, open, unguarded and present. Just him.
"I see you," he whispered.
He entered her slowly. She gasped from the fullness of him, from the way his eyes stayed on hers the entire time, from the way he paused when he was all the way inside, pressing his forehead to hers and breathed her name.
“Charlie. I love you so much, sweetheart.”
They moved together. Slowly at first, finding each other's rhythm the way you find a song you used to know, the melody familiar but the arrangement changed.
His hand was braced beside her head, the other on her hip.
She wrapped her legs around him, pulled him deeper and watched his composure dissolve.
The Dominic who controlled everything — his face, his voice, his empire — was coming undone above her, and the undoing was the most intimate thing she'd ever witnessed.
She ran her hands down his back. His muscles tensed and released.
A shudder ran through him when she whispered his name.
He dropped his head to her shoulder, his breathing went ragged, and she held him there — her hands in his hair, her mouth against his temple — and thought: This is what it's supposed to feel like. This is what I was waiting for.
"I'm close," she gasped.
He growled and shifted his angle, his hand sliding between them, and the added pressure made her cry out.
She was looking at him when she came — eyes open, unguarded, letting him see every uncontrolled thing that moved across her face.
He watched her, holding her gaze through every second of it, and then his own control broke and he followed her, his body shuddering, her name on his lips like a vow.
Afterward, they lay tangled together. The neighbor's music played through the wall: something slow, with horns, the same one she'd listened to her first night in this apartment.
His arm was draped across her waist. Heavy, unconscious, close. She'd missed this… the physical fact of him beside her. But it was different now. Before, his arm had felt like an anchor. Now it felt like a choice.