3. Mel #2
The moonlight through the waterfall turns his skin to marble. Broad shoulders, the defined lines of his stomach, a trail of dark hair disappearing into his waistband that makes my mouth water.
“What?” he says, and there’s a note of uncertainty in it. Vulnerability.
“I’m appreciating.” I reach up, trace my fingers down his chest, feel the muscles jump under my touch. “You’re beautiful.”
“Men aren’t beautiful.”
“You are.” I sit up, press a kiss to the center of his chest. “Deal with it.”
He groans, and then his hands are in my hair and his mouth is on mine and we’re both trying to get closer, desperate and clumsy and perfect. My bra disappears somewhere, his doing, and when his palm covers my breast I arch into him on instinct, chasing the friction.
“Sensitive,” he observes, rolling my nipple between his fingers, watching my face.
“Don’t be smug about it.”
“I’m not being smug.” He bends, replaces his fingers with his mouth, and I whimper. “I’m being thorough.”
His tongue circles, teases, draws patterns that make my hips lift off the jacket. He’s learning me, I realize. Cataloging every sound, every reaction, building a map of what makes me fall apart.
“Santino - please-”
“Please what?” He switches to the other breast, and I nearly sob. “Tell me what you need.”
“More. I need more.”
His hand slides down my stomach, slow and deliberate, and hooks into the waistband of my underwear. “These?”
“Yes.”
He pulls them down my legs, tosses them aside, and then just, looks. His palm rests on my thigh, warm and steady, but he doesn’t move.
“What are you doing?”
“Memorizing.” His thumb traces a circle on my inner thigh, and I shiver. “I want to remember everything about this. Every detail.”
“You can make new memories later.” I grab his hand, guide it higher. “Right now I need you to touch me before I lose my mind.”
He laughs softly, and then his fingers find me, and the laugh dissolves into a groan that echoes off the cave walls.
“So wet,” he murmurs, stroking through my folds with agonizing slowness. “Is this all for me?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions.”
“That’s it,” he breathes, and his fingers find my clit and my back arches clean off the ground. “There you are. Good girl. That’s exactly-”
I make a sound that’s barely human. He does it again, circling, teasing, never quite giving me enough pressure to tip over.
“Santino, I swear to God-”
“I’ve got you.” A finger slides inside me, then two, and he curls them just right and I see stars. “Look at you. So perfect. So good for me.”
His mouth finds my neck, sucking and biting and soothing, and his fingers keep up that devastating rhythm, and I’m climbing, I’m almost there, I’m -
He stops.
“What-”
“Not yet.” He kisses away my frustrated whine. “I want to feel you come around me the first time. Is that okay?”
I should be annoyed. I should be furious. But the image his words paint sends a fresh wave of heat through me, and I nod before I can think about it.
“Yeah,” I manage. “Yes. Please.”
He sheds the rest of his clothes, and I have exactly one second to appreciate the sight, he’s proportional, which is frankly intimidating given his height, before he’s settling between my thighs and the head of him is pressing against my entrance.
“Last chance,” he says, and the words come out rough, frayed at the edges, his control hanging by a thread. “If you want to stop-”
“If you stop now I’ll murder you.”
He laughs, and then he’s pushing in, slow and steady, and the stretch makes my eyes roll back.
“Breathe,” he murmurs, stilling when he’s halfway inside. “That’s it. You’re doing so well. My perfect-”
I pull him down and kiss him, hard, and when I roll my hips he takes the hint and slides home in one smooth stroke.
“Mel.” My name sounds like a prayer in his mouth. “Oh God, Mel, you feel-”
“Move.” I wrap my legs around him, heels digging into the small of his back. “Please, I need you to move.”
He does.
There’s nothing graceful about it, nothing elegant. We’re two people learning each other’s rhythms, figuring out what works, adjusting angles and trading gasps that echo off the stone walls. But somehow the imperfection makes it better. Realer.
“You’re incredible,” he breathes against my neck, hips snapping harder now, deeper. “The way you take me - the sounds you make - I can’t-”
“Don’t you dare finish without me.”
“Never.” He shifts his weight, changes the angle, and suddenly he’s hitting a spot that makes me scream. “There? Is that-”
“There, don’t stop, don’t stop-”
His hand snakes between us, finds my clit, and starts rubbing in tight circles. The dual sensation, his body moving in me, his fingers working that bundle of nerves, shatters every thought in my head.
“Let go for me,” he says, low and certain, and it’s the sureness of it that undoes me. “I’ve got you. I want to feel it happen.”
And I do.
The first climax anyone has ever given me tears through me bright and total, a breaking-open, and I cry his name into his shoulder while I pulse around him, and it takes him with me. He drives deep and shatters into my neck, my name breaking apart in his mouth like he’s forgotten every other one.
We float there for a long moment. Breathing. Being.
Then he’s rolling off me, pulling me against his chest, wrapping me in his arms like he’s afraid I’ll disappear.
“That was-”
“Yeah,” I agree, not needing him to finish.
“We should have done that months ago.”
“I’ve been saying.”
He laughs softly, pressing a kiss to the top of my head. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been turned inside out. In the best way.”
“Good.” His arms tighten around me. “That’s good.”
I’m still lying on his jacket, I realize. It’s probably ruined. I’ll tell him tomorrow that he can add it to the dry cleaning bill I never paid.
“I’m keeping this shirt,” I say instead, tugging at the button-down I’ve ended up half-wrapped in.
He looks down at me, eyes soft. “You can have every shirt I own.”
“That’s a lot of shirts.”
“I know.” He kisses my forehead. “They’re all yours.”
The waterfall roars outside our little cave, and I press my face against his chest, and I think: I’m so in love with this ridiculous man.
I don’t know yet how much that love will cost me.
***
Now
I wake up alone.
Gray morning light filters through the curtains, pale and cold, and I lie there for a long moment just staring at the ceiling. Santino’s side of the bed is untouched. The pillow doesn’t have a dent in it. The sheets are smooth and cool under my hand.
I reach for my phone. Check the time.
6:43 a.m.
He didn’t come home last night.
The math runs through my head automatically, the way it always does now. Days since we shared a meal: eleven. Weeks since we had an actual conversation: three. Months since he touched me anywhere but a goodbye kiss on the forehead: six.
Six months.
I used to joke that I’d die if I went a day without his hands on me. Now I’ve gone half a year.
Rolling onto my side, I curl my knees to my chest and try to remember the last time I woke up next to him. Really next to him, the way we used to, tangled together, his face soft with sleep, reaching for me even before he opened his eyes.
I can’t. The memory won’t come. It’s been buried under too many empty mornings just like this one.
My phone buzzes. A text from a number I don’t recognize.
He stayed at the hospital, it reads. Recovery monitoring. You would have known if you’d been there.
There’s no signature. There doesn’t need to be.
I stare at the screen until it goes dark, and I think about a cave behind a waterfall, and a man who promised me every shirt he owned, and I try to figure out when exactly I lost him.