20. Izzy #3
“Stop asking every five seconds or I swear I’ll scream.” I trace his jaw, stubble rasping under my fingertips, and he shivers under my touch. “I’ll tell you if it isn’t working.”
“I just want to be sure I’m not pushing you into…”
“Wilson, look at me.” I grip his chin and make him meet my eyes. “I said I’ll tell you. Trust me to know my own limits.”
The carefulness burns off him, and what’s left underneath is hunger.
“Now kiss me like you actually mean it.”
He does exactly that.
His mouth takes mine and his hands slide up my ribs, mapping old territory with new urgency. He walks me backward until my knees hit the mattress, catches me, and lowers me onto sheets that smell of clean laundry and him, holding himself above me on forearms that tremble with restraint.
His mouth finds the pulse hammering in my throat and stays there until I’m the one pulling his head lower.
He kisses down my sternum and unhooks my bra without fumbling, the clasp giving way under practiced fingers. The fabric falls away and he stops, breath warm on my skin.
“You stopped.”
“You’re worth stopping for.” He traces one finger along the underside of my breast, featherlight and devastating.
“That’s a line.”
“It is absolutely not a line.” He presses a kiss to the curve of my breast, soft and reverent. “It’s the truest thing I’ve said all year.”
“Did you rehearse that line in the mirror while I was gone?”
“I rehearsed a lot of things to say if I ever got you back here, and most of it was garbage that would have made you roll your eyes.” His tongue circles my nipple and my back arches off the bed, a gasp escaping before I can stop it. “A few parts were actually romantic, though.”
“Which parts were romantic?”
He moves to my other breast, and I lose the thread of the conversation entirely.
He works my jeans off over my hips, my underwear after them, and the afternoon light goes gold across the bed, painting stripes across my bare skin.
His mouth starts working its way down and I let it get as far as my ribs before I get a hand in his hair and pull him back up.
“No.” I’m breathless, which kind of ruins the authority, but he stops anyway. “You did that at the hotel. Tonight I want to look at you.”
I roll us over. He goes easy, onto his back on the gray duvet, and a little cloud of dust puffs up around him.
I sit up on his hips and take my time with the rest of his clothes.
Belt first. Then the button. Then the zipper, slowly, one tooth at a time, while he lies there with his hands flat on the mattress and his jaw clenched so tight I can see it.
“You’re enjoying this,” he says.
“I’m really enjoying this.” I drag my nails down his stomach and watch the muscles jump under my hand. “Seven years of you deciding when. It’s my turn.”
“Nightstand drawer,” I say, nodding toward the left side of the bed.
He reaches for it without moving me and comes back with a condom, then pauses, turning the box over in his hand with an expression I can’t quite read.
“Same box from months ago,” he says quietly, his thumb tracing the edge of the cardboard. “Nothing in this room has changed, Izzy. No one has been in this bed since you left.”
“That’s either very sweet or very pathetic, Wilson.”
“It’s both at once, and I’m fully aware of that.” He tears the wrapper with his teeth, rolls it on, and his hands land on my thighs and stay there. “Are you sure about this?”
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
I sink down onto him and neither of us breathes.
My body remembers everything I spent months trying to forget, the shape of him and the weight of him and how completely he fills me. He holds perfectly still underneath me, hands on my thighs, eyes open and locked on my face, waiting for me to move.
So I move. Slow. I set the pace and I keep it, and when his hips come up trying to get more, I flatten my hand on his chest and push him back down, and the sound he makes is one I have never gotten out of him in seven years.
“Izzy.” It’s half a laugh and half begging. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Probably.” I lean down and bite his bottom lip. “Lie there and let me.”
He lies there. It’s hard for him, I can tell. I can see it in his neck and in his fists twisted up in the duvet and in the way he keeps saying my name like it’s the only word he’s got left.
I keep him there until I’m shaking. Until the light on the wall has moved. Then I reach down and take his hand and put it exactly where I need it.
“Now,” I tell him.
His thumb finds the spot and that’s all it takes.
I come apart on top of him with his name in my mouth and his other hand spread across my back to hold me up.
He follows a few seconds later with a sound that’s somewhere between my name and a curse, his hips lifting right off the bed, his hands gripping me hard enough to leave marks.
I collapse onto his chest, both of us breathing rough, our hearts pounding against each other through skin and bone. His arms come around me and hold on.
“I love you,” he whispers into my hair, pressing a kiss to the top of my head.
I open my mouth to say it back, to finally set loose the three words I’ve been typing and deleting, one letter at a time, for months.
“I love you too.” The words land against his chest, and his whole body shudders with relief beneath me.