17. Charlie #2
He kissed her slowly. The pace was a deliberate choice, every movement a question his body posed and hers answered. His palm settled on the curve of her waist, over the flannel, and he paused there. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
The flannel had two remaining buttons. He unfastened the first while his mouth traced the line of her neck, the hollow behind her ear where the honeysuckle concentrated, the pulse hammering beneath the thin skin of her throat.
Her breath hitched. The second button let the flannel fall open, let his fingers trail down the ridge of her collarbone, along the strap of her tank top, across the bare skin of her shoulder.
Mapping her collarbone, the rise and fall of her breathing, the vulnerability of skin offered by choice.
This wasn’t how he operated. He’d slept with women who expected confidence, performance, the bright, wide-open version of Charlie promised in photos and highlight reels, who knew what he was doing and didn’t falter. Now, he trembled.
He drew her closer, guiding her onto the bed beside him, with a care he’d never given anyone, one hand cradling the back of her head.
The flannel pooled open around her and her dark hair fanned across the white cotton and the sight of Skylar Hartley looking up at him with trust in her gold-flecked eyes hit him so hard his breath stuttered.
He pressed his forehead against hers and steadied himself.
“Still okay?” A whisper now, because the room had become a chapel and volume seemed like sacrilege.
“Still okay.” Her fingers found the hem of his shirt and tugged upward. “Your turn.”
When he pulled the shirt over his head, her palms flattened against his bare skin and the contact seared through him.
His whole body oriented toward the pressure of her touch.
When she traced the ridge of his collarbone, he closed his eyes and let the sensation exist without suppressing the response, without the reflexive Next Play that would carry him past the feeling before he could absorb the weight of the moment.
He would allow himself this one time, and he intended to memorize her.
Every surface. Every response. He pressed his mouth to the warm skin below her ear and her pulse stuttered against his lips.
His fingers skimmed down her side, over the curve of her waist, tracing the line where the tank top met skin, and Skylar arched into the touch.
The involuntary movement undid him more than any deliberate gesture could have.
Eager fingers peeled the tank top over her head and lowered his mouth to the curve of her shoulder, tasting forbidden fruit.
Every kiss, every touch was a question. Is this okay?
And this? His hand traveled the plane of her stomach, the dip of her waist, the soft skin along the inside of her hip, and each new territory earned a different sound from her.
A catch of breath. A low hum. A whisper of his name that dissolved before the second syllable.
Skylar’s vocabulary of pleasure became a language he wanted to learn fluently.
His thumb brushed the inside of her wrist and her fingers curled.
His lips traced the valley between her breasts and at last finding a stiff peak, sucked in the sweetness of her skin.
Her spine lifted off the mattress. When his hand found the waistband of her sweatpants, he paused and met her eyes.
“Yes.” No hesitation. The gold blazed.
Slipping under the material, his finger found her wetness.
She raised her hips, giving him more access, and his pulse urged him forward.
He savored the moment. His mouth and his hands and his patience working in tandem, reading her like the rhythm of a sentence he was still composing, adjusting, finding the break where it wanted to land, fingers pressing deeper when her breathing told him he’d found the right cadence, his thumb circling her clit.
He watched the crease that formed between her brows when the sensation sharpened, the way her lips parted on a breath she couldn’t hold, the moment her eyes squeezed shut as her walls pulsed around his fingers.
When Skylar came apart under his touch, her body bowing off the bed, his name breaking open on her lips, the sound traveled through him and rewired a circuit he hadn’t known was faulty.
He’d spent years executing the playbook, keeping emotional exposure minimal and ensuring he contained the risk of becoming his father by not staying long enough to care.
He could fall in love with this girl.
The realization didn’t arrive as warmth or certainty.
A cold wire tightened behind his sternum.
If he fell, he would carry the capacity to hurt her.
Not the distant, theoretical damage of a one-night encounter, but the specific, intimate destruction that only someone who knew where all the wounds lived could deliver.
Skylar’s hand found his nape and pulled him up to her mouth, and the kiss she gave him, breathless and trembling and grateful, demanded that he stay.
“Do you have a condom?” Skylar asked.
Even here, she protected herself. He respected the instinct more than he could say. “In my wallet.” He crossed the room on legs that barely held, retrieved the foil packet, and turned back.
Skylar shed the last of her clothing and sat in the center of the bed with her dark hair falling over one shoulder, bare and unguarded.
The sight of her knocked the breath from his lungs.
More than the skin or the curves or the lamplight tracing the lines of her body, though all of those registered in a rush that made his hands shake.
But because Skylar Hartley, who armored herself against the world, had chosen to be defenseless in front of him.
Skylar pushed a strand of hair over her shoulder. “Come here.”
He shed his jeans and returned to her. The contact of her fingers rolling the condom on nearly undid him. With his forehead against hers, her breathed her in, letting his fingertips trace her ribs, the underside of her breast. Then he dipped his mouth to follow the same path.
Her hand cupped his cheek and her eyes found his, and the floor of his stomach dropped.
He was unprepared. Every inch of Skylar beneath him, warm and present and looking at him with an openness that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with trust, dismantled a mechanism he’d relied on since childhood. The exposure terrified him more than any fourth-quarter deficit.
“It’s just you and me.” Her hand curved along his jaw, drawing him down to her.
The permission cracked the last seal. The terror remained coiled in his gut with the freefall awareness of a man at the brink of a drop he hadn’t expected. But Skylar’s eyes held his, gold and steady and unafraid, and for the first time Charlie stopped protecting himself.
He pressed his lips to hers and let himself fall.