Chapter 7 #2
“It’s very—”
“Vibrant?”
“I was going to say confident.” He turns to me and his face is different than I’ve ever seen it—open, unguarded, the professional armor stripped away and what’s underneath is a man who keeps running his hand through his hair because he doesn’t know what to do with his hands now that they’re not holding a legal pad. “Like the woman who bought it.”
The wine is on the counter. My shoes are on the floor.
He’s backlit by the city through the window and his sleeves are rolled to his forearms and his eyes are dark and warm and nervous and I’m done waiting.
I’ve been waiting for months. I’ve been waiting through every meeting, every phone call, every time his fingers brushed mine across a desk and we both pretended it didn’t happen.
I’m standing in my apartment in my dress with my bare feet on my hardwood floor and this man is looking at me like I’m the most terrifying and beautiful thing he’s ever seen and I don’t want to be patient anymore.
“I almost recused myself from your case,” he says. “Twice. The first time was the day you—”
I cross the room in three steps, grab the front of his shirt, and kiss him.
Not slow. Not careful. I kiss him like I’ve been starving for it, and the sound he makes against my mouth—a groan that starts in his chest and vibrates through my lips—tells me he has been too.
His wine glass hits the side table with a clank, forgotten, and both hands come to my waist and pull me flush against him.
His body is warm and solid and his mouth opens under mine and his tongue slides against my tongue and my fingers are already yanking his shirt from his waistband.
“Mara—” He pulls back half an inch, breathing hard. “I should tell you—I’ve been thinking about this since—”
“I know.” I pull his shirt over his head.
Flat stomach, dark hair trailing below his navel, shoulders broader than his dress shirts ever let on.
My hands land on his chest and his muscles tense under my palms and his breath catches.
“I know exactly when it started. The day I walked in and you looked at me like what I was saying actually mattered.”
“It did matter.” His voice is rough. His hands slide down my hips, gripping the fabric of my dress. “You matter.”
Something cracks open in my chest and I don’t seal it shut. I reach behind my back and pull the zipper and the dress pools at my feet and I’m standing in front of him in black lace and nothing else and the way his eyes drag down my body makes my skin burn.
“Sit down,” I tell him.
He sits on the couch. I stand between his knees and his hands come up to my hips—tentative, careful, like he’s handling something he can’t believe he gets to touch. I reach back and unhook my bra and his breath rushes out of him.
“Jesus, Mara.”
I climb onto his lap. Straddle him with my knees pressing into the velvet on either side of his thighs and his hands slide up my ribs and cup my tits and his thumbs find my nipples and my head tips back and a sound comes out of me that I haven’t made in years—desperate, raw, pulled out of some deep place that’s been locked down so long I forgot it existed.
His mouth replaces his hands. Hot, wet tongue circling one nipple, then the other, his teeth grazing the sensitive skin, and my hips are already grinding against him.
I can feel him through his pants—hard, straining against the zipper—and I roll my hips and press down and his groan vibrates against my chest.
“Take these off.” I’m pulling at his belt, fingers clumsy with urgency. He lifts his hips and between us we get his pants down and my hand wraps around his cock—thick, hard, pulsing against my palm—and he hisses through his teeth and his head drops back against the cushion.
I push my underwear aside and sink down onto him.
The stretch hits me like a shockwave—full, deep, my whole body clenching around him as he fills me inch by inch.
He feels different. Not just bigger or thicker, though he is—different.
A different shape, a different heat, a different rhythm of breathing underneath me.
My body has only known one man for seven years and now every nerve ending is firing with the newness of him, cataloging everything—the way his cock curves slightly, the way he throbs inside me, the way his hands grip my hips with a kind of reverence Caleb stopped offering years ago.
I’m full of someone who chose me and I chose back and my eyes sting with something that isn’t sadness.
It’s the shock of being touched like I matter by someone who means it.
I plant my palms flat on his chest—warm skin, the hammering of his heart under my hand—and rise up slow until I almost lose him. Then I slam back down and the sound he makes is wrecked.
“Fuck—Mara—”
I ride him hard. No slow build, no teasing, no careful choreography.
I ride him like a woman who’s been starving for this and just realized she’s allowed to eat.
My thighs are burning and my hips are snapping and every time I take him deep something inside me lights up—this bright, almost unbearable pleasure radiating from where his cock hits the deepest part of me.
The orange velvet is soft under my knees and his chest is slick with sweat under my palms and I feel powerful and reckless and alive—I feel like myself for the first time in so long that a laugh bubbles out of me, breathless and wild, and his eyes go wide watching me lose myself on top of him.
This is what it’s supposed to feel like.
Not the careful, transactional sex of the last two years with Caleb—lights off, perfunctory, his mind somewhere else even when his body was in the bed.
This is someone underneath me who is here.
Whose hands are memorizing my hips. Whose eyes haven’t left my face.
Whose cock is twitching inside me every time I grind down because he’s already close and fighting it and I love that I’m doing that to him.
“Slow down—” His voice is ragged, his fingers digging into the flesh of my hips, trying to set a pace he can survive. “You’re going to make me—”
“Good.” I grab the back of the couch behind his head and lean in until my mouth is against his ear and my tits are pressed flat against his chest and I can feel his heart slamming against mine through our skin. “Come with me.”
I grind down and roll my hips and his hand shoots between us, thumb pressing my clit, and the pleasure spikes so hard my thighs shake.
His touch is firm and deliberate—he’s paying attention, adjusting pressure, reading my body like he reads case files, with focus and precision and complete investment in the outcome.
His other hand slides up my back and fists in my hair and his mouth finds my neck and I’m riding him faster now, chasing it, the heat building in my belly and spreading outward until my whole body feels like it’s vibrating.
“Right there—don’t you dare stop—”
His thumb circles and presses and I shatter.
The orgasm rips through me from the base of my spine and floods outward, my whole body clenching around his cock, my hands running up his chest and gripping his shoulders as the wave takes me.
He follows me—grabs my hips and bucks up into me with a groan so deep it sounds like it’s being torn out of him, his whole body locking under me, pulsing inside me.
I feel every second of it—the heat of him, the throb, the way his arms shake as they wrap around my waist and pull me against him like he’s afraid I’ll disappear.
I collapse against his chest. We’re both wrecked—breathing hard, skin slick, hearts slamming against each other through our ribs.
His hands slide up my back, slow and shaking, and he holds me there.
Just holds me. His chin resting on the top of my head, his chest rising and falling, the orange velvet damp beneath us.
“That couch,” he says. His voice is destroyed. “That couch is unbelievable.”
I laugh—really laugh, the kind that takes over my whole body, shaking against him while he grins into my hair.
The city glows through the window. His heartbeat is slowing under my cheek.
My body is loose and buzzing and spent and I feel something I’d forgotten the shape of—not just pleasure, not just relief.
Joy. Actual joy, uncomplicated and clean, chosen by me for me.
I lift my head. His eyes are dark and soft and looking at me with something I haven’t seen directed at me in years—wonder, and warmth, and the quiet certainty that he is exactly where he’s supposed to be.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.” He pushes the hair off my face. “You’re terrifying.”
“You like me.”
“I really do.”
Thank you for reading!