Chapter 16 Abbie #2
I do. I swear when he licks into me with devastating patience.
I swear when he hooks my knees over his shoulders and settles in like oral is a craft project he's been waiting a year to finish.
I swear when he slides two fingers into me and crooks them while his tongue works tight circles, and my nails rake down his back hard enough to leave welts he'll feel tomorrow in every Topanga draft.
"Fuck, fuck, don't you stop, Gray, you absolute disaster—"
"Keep insulting me." The words vibrate through my clit. "It's doing something unspeakable to my ego."
"Your ego is, ah, already the size of—"
He sucks, hard, and whatever insult I had dissolves into a broken moan.
My hips lift off the bed. He pins them with one forearm and keeps going, relentless, until I'm thrashing and swearing and coming apart with his name snarled between curses.
He doesn't ease off. He works me through the aftershocks until I have to yank his hair and haul him up because another second of that tongue will kill me.
He doesn't let me catch my breath for long.
One thick finger slides back into me while I'm still twitching, then a second, and he fucks me with his hand the way he used to on Sunday mornings when we had nowhere to be, slow curls, obscene wet sounds, his mouth returning to my clit in short, devastating pulses.
"Again," he murmurs. "You've got another one. I can feel it."
"I don't... Gray, I can't—"
He eases his hand and lets me turn toward him. "Want me to stop?"
"No. I want this. Keep going." I draw him close and dig my nails into his shoulders and let him drag me up the second cliff, swearing the whole way, until I break with a sob that has nothing to do with sadness and everything to do with how well he still knows the wiring under my skin.
He kisses the inside of my knee afterward like an apology for being good at this.
"Proud of yourself?" I rasp.
"Extremely." He drags his forearm across his mouth, shameless. "Your turn to ruin me a little."
He sits back on his heels for a second, just looking at me, my blonde hair a mess across his pillow, my chest heaving, my thighs still trembling, and the expression on his face is so openly starved that my anger softens.
"Stop staring," I say.
"Can't." He drags a thumb through the wetness on my thigh, then lifts it to his mouth without breaking eye contact. "A year's worth of imagining this and the real thing is worse. Better. Both."
"Pick a lane, Valentine."
"The lane where you climb on my cock before I forget how to be a gentleman about asking."
He's grinning. Mouth wet. Hair a black mess from my fists.
"Ride me," he says, simple and filthy. "Use my cock. I want to watch you take what you need while you're still mad at me."
I shove him onto his back and straddle his hips, and I sink down onto him in one long slide that punches the air out of both of us.
He's thick, stretching me open, filling me until the anger and the wanting blur into the same white heat.
Familiar in a way that makes my throat ache even as my body clenches around the intrusion like it never forgot the map.
"Christ, Abs." His hands find my hips. Don't steer. Just hold. "You feel... you feel like every fight we've ever had and the apology afterward."
"Don't get poetic." I roll my hips, testing, then lift and drop harder. "Get useful."
"Yes, ma'am."
I ride him. Unhurried at first, long rises, slow sinks, the kind of pace that lets me feel every inch, and then desperate, because the anger and the attraction are the same current and I'm done pretending I can separate them.
My palms brace on his chest. His tattoos flex under my fingers.
Every time I slam down he makes a punched-out sound that feeds something vicious and tender in me at once.
"Nails," he gasps, when I drag them down his sternum. "Yeah, leave it. Leave proof."
I leave proof. Red lines. Crescent moons on his shoulders. I lean forward so my blonde hair curtains both our faces and kiss him while I grind, and he kisses back like he's starving and furious about it.
Every downstroke knocks a sound out of him that I want to catalog. Every upstroke makes my thighs burn in the best way. I dig my nails in again, new lines crossing old, and he arches under me with a curse that would scandalize every boardroom he's ever commanded.
"Harder," I demand.
"You're already—"
"Harder, Gray. I'm not glass. I'm the woman you left waiting, and I want to feel it."
His restraint snaps, permission received, leash dropped.
His hands finally grip my hips and help, lifting and slamming me down onto him in a rhythm that turns crude and loud.
The wet slap of skin fills the room. My breasts bounce.
His jaw goes tight. I tip my head back and laugh, breathless and mean and so turned on I can barely see.
"Yes," I gasp. "That... that's the version of you I remember."
"This version never left," he grits out. "He just got buried under flights and fear. Fuck, Abbie, look at you taking every inch of me like you were built for it—"
Halfway through, I change the angle, lean back, palms on his thighs, rolling my hips so he can see everything. His gaze drops and sticks. The look on his face is pure stunned hunger, the look that used to make me feel powerful in kitchens and rented hotel rooms.
"Like what you see?" I ask, breathless.
"Like is a weak word." His voice scrapes. "You're... Abbie, you're the hottest angry woman on the planet, and I built this bed hoping I'd get to watch you do exactly this on it someday."
"Creepy."
"Honest." His hands flex on my thighs. Still not steering. "You want me to lift? Hold still? Beg?"
"Beg."
He blinks. Then, because he's Grayson Valentine and somehow still capable of being ruined by a request, he says, rough and immediate: "Please.
Please keep riding me. Please use my cock until you're done being furious.
Please let me feel you come again so I know I get to be useful for something other than disappointing you. "
It's so raw I almost laugh. Instead I sink down hard enough that his head tips back and a moan punches out of him.
"Useful," I repeat. "Remember that word."
"I'm close," I warn.
"Same." His thumb finds my clit, rubbing as I bounce. "Together. I want... Abbie, together—"
"Then come with me." It's an order. "Don't you dare finish after. With me."
He nods, jaw tight, light blue eyes locked on mine.
I drop harder. Faster. The cedar frame finally complains.
The storm outside throws rain against the glass like applause.
When the orgasm hits me it's jagged and bright and I cry out into his mouth; a heartbeat later he follows, hips snapping up, burying himself deep as he comes with a groan that sounds like surrender and victory braided together.
I collapse onto his chest. We're both shaking. Sweaty. We come down with the same clumsy coordination we always had, laughter under the wreckage, and then I'm sprawled across him again, ear over his heart, listening to it slam.
Afterward, when the sweat is cooling, I trace the fresh nail marks on his chest and feel tenderness, dangerous and uninvited, try to climb into the anger's seat.
"Don't look at me like that," I whisper.
"Like what?"
"Like this fixed the year."
"I'm not." He catches my tracing fingers, kisses the tips. "I'm looking at you like a man who just got his wife back for one night and is trying not to say the three words that would make you put your hand over his mouth again."
"Good. Don't say them."
"Wasn't going to." A beat. "Out loud."
"Still furious," I mutter into his skin.
"I know."
"Still going to regret this in some daylight version of myself."
"Maybe." His fingers sift through my hair. "But Abs?"
"What?"
"You swore like a sailor and rode me like you meant it. If that's regret, I'll take the citation."
I pinch his side. He flinches, then laughs, and the laugh rumbles under my cheek in a way that feels dangerously like home.
Later, much later, the storm thins to a steady patter on the roof.
By morning, the roads should be clear. His arms settle around me.
"Stay," Gray murmurs into my hair. "Please. For tonight."
"I'm not going anywhere." I press closer, fitting myself against him the way I used to. "Roads are closed."
"That's not what I meant."
I know what he meant. I haven’t forgiven him, and I don’t know what happens next. What I can do is stay. For tonight. I can let myself have this one thing.
"Go to sleep," I whisper.
He falls asleep first, his breathing going slow and heavy against my hair. He didn't defend any of it. Not one second. He just listened. That shouldn't mean as much as it does.
My last thought before sleep is:
Oh no.