Chapter II #3
I come around him with a cry I don't recognize as my own, hips bucking up into him, back bowing clean off the bed.
Milk lets go in a hot rush against his tongue at the exact moment the orgasm slams through me, and there's no separating one from the other anymore, just pleasure on top of pleasure, white and blinding, my whole body clenching tight and greedy around his cock like it's trying to keep him there.
I'm shaking. I can't stop shaking. And the feel of me coming undone around him tears a groan out of his chest that sounds wrecked, almost pained, like he's the one being taken apart.
"Christ — Chelsea —" His hips stutter, lose their rhythm completely, and he drives in deep one last time, burying himself to the hilt as he comes, hard, shuddering, his whole body locking over mine like he's trying to fold himself into the same space I'm in.
I feel every pulse of it, the heat of him spilling deep inside me in long, heavy waves, his cock twitching with each one like he can't stop it even if he wanted to, and the sensation of him filling me up from the inside out has my body clenching down around him again, milking that out of him too, like I can't help but take every last bit he's got.
For a long moment neither of us moves. His mouth lingers at my breast, lazy now, milking the last of it in slow pulls that have my body twitching with aftershocks I can't control. His cock is still buried inside me, both of us trembling, his weight braced just enough not to crush me.
"Okay," he finally says, voice wrecked, mouth lifting from my skin to press against my collarbone instead. "Okay. That happened."
"That happened." I'm catching my breath. "You're crushing me."
"Mm." He doesn't move. "Worth it."
"You're also still hard, which is honestly a little concerning."
"Give me ten minutes." He says it against my collarbone, completely serious, and I'd laugh if I had the energy left for it.
I should laugh. I don't, not quite, because there's a tightness in my chest that has nothing to do with milk and everything to do with the way he's looking at me right now — soft around the edges in a way Jake Edmund has never once let himself be soft.
Like something cracked open in him too, and he's not entirely sure he wants to put it back.
"This is so far past complicated," I say.
"Yeah." He finally lifts his weight off me, easing out slow, both of us hissing at the drag of it, and pulls me into his side instead, like that's the obvious next thing to do. "I'm not sorry."
"I didn't ask you to be."
His arm tightens around me, and for a second — just a second — I let myself believe this is something we're allowed to have.
We don't talk for a long time after that.
He's still tucked against my side, one arm slung heavy across my stomach, his thumb tracing slow circles against my ribs like he doesn't know he's doing it.
My sheets are a wreck. So am I, honestly — sore in places I didn't know could get sore, my chest finally, blessedly empty for the first time in six months, and underneath all of it a strange, loose-limbed calm I don't have a name for.
"You're staring at the ceiling," Jake says eventually, voice rough with something that isn't quite sleep yet. "What are you thinking?"
"That I should probably regret this."
"Should you?"
I turn my head to look at him. He's watching me with an expression I've genuinely never seen on his face before — not the easy, lazy confidence he wears around campus, not the cold thing he used on me for weeks before any of this started.
Something quieter. Something that looks almost nervous, on a face that's never had a reason to be.
"No," I admit. "Annoyingly, no."
That gets a real smile out of him, the kind that makes him look about five years younger and a lot less like the boy who used to make a sport out of ignoring I existed. "Good. Because I wasn't planning on this being a one-time thing."
"You weren't planning any of this a week ago."
"No," he agrees, easy, unbothered. "Funny how that works out."
I should ask him what happens tomorrow. What happens when the sun's up and he's not pressed against me in the dark admitting things he'd probably never say with the lights on.
What happens to whatever careful arrangement we had before this blew it apart completely.
There's a version of tonight that ends with both of us pretending it didn't happen, going back to milk in the morning and nothing else, and some small, scared part of me is already bracing for that version.
But his arm doesn't loosen. If anything it tightens, pulling me in closer, like he can feel the thought happening and wants to argue with it without saying a word.
"Stop thinking so loud," he murmurs against my hair. "Sleep. We'll figure the rest out tomorrow."
"Together?"
"Together." He says it like it's obvious. Like it was never going to be anything else.
I let myself believe him, just for tonight, and somewhere in the dark, tangled up in a boy I spent six months trying not to need, I fall asleep faster than I have in months.