Thirty #3
His eyes darken. Gabriel leans in slowly. His mouth brushes the inside of my thigh, lips soft against the chill on my skin. I tense, breath catching. He doesn’t rush. Just presses a kiss there, then another, higher. The rough graze of his jaw chafes sensitive flesh, sending sparks up my spine.
I suck air through my teeth. My hands slide into his hair, fingers tangling in the dark strands.
He groans against me, the vibration humming through my core. His tongue follows, hot and deliberate, tracing the edge of my underwear from the gap in my silk shorts. The fabric dampens under his mouth. He hooks a finger under the lace, drags it aside without tearing—patient, unhurried.
The first real touch of his tongue makes my hips buck. Heat floods me, liquid and insistent. He flattens his palm on my stomach, holding me down gently, the weight of it grounding. His other hand grips my thigh tighter, the calluses catching lightly on my skin, fingers digging in to keep me open.
I arch anyway. Can’t help it. The friction builds—his jaw working, rough against smooth. Every pass of his tongue is fire, precise, circling where I need it most. Pressure coils low in my belly, tight and aching.
This is him. Gabriel. Taking. His mouth working me, steady and focused. My control frays with each lick, each suck. No directing this. I just feel.
Don’t stop.
His free hand slides up, joining his mouth. Fingers press in, slow and thick, curling just right. The stretch burns sweet, fullness hitting deep. He finds that spot inside, strokes it relentlessly while his tongue flicks faster.
Heat and salt mix in the air—him, me, us. The TV sounds tinny and far away now, white noise against my own gasps punching out.
My thighs tremble. I clamp them around his ears, heels digging into his back. He doesn’t stop. Doesn’t falter. Just pushes me higher, the friction burning delicious red lines into my skin.
Let go.
The thought crashes through. Seven years of walls—barricades against loss, against men like him—and here he is, on his knees, dismantling them with his tongue. I don’t have to fight. Don’t have to be the one who holds it all. He can. He wants to.
Tension snaps.
Pleasure rips through me, white-hot and blinding. My back bows off the cushions as a cry tears from my throat, raw and unchecked. Waves crash one after another, leaving me gasping, limbs liquid.
I come down shaking, one hand still twisted in his hair, the other gripping the arm of the sofa. Sweat cools on my skin. The room refocuses slowly.
Gabriel softens his touch, easing me through the aftershocks with soft kisses to my thigh. I look down. He’s watching me, chin resting lightly on my knee, eyes dark and quiet. His hands still hold my thighs, thumbs stroking slow circles.
It swells again, fierce and frightening. I love you, it says, in a voice I keep behind my teeth. I’m not ready to let it out. Not yet. But it’s there now, and it’s not going anywhere.
I reach for his hoodie strings, wrapping them around my fingers. Tug him up. He rises, knees popping as he straightens.
“Bedroom,” I say, voice breathy and wrecked.
His hands slide under my thighs, lifting me effortlessly.
“Lead the way,” he says, his voice husky.
I wrap an arm around his neck and nod toward the short hallway. He carries me past the kitchen’s lingering wine scent, past the bathroom’s damp steam still clinging to the air. The bedroom door clicks shut behind us with a soft, final sound, cutting us off from the rest of the world.
Out in the empty living room, the string lights glow over the abandoned popcorn bowl, kernels scattered like fallen stars across the rug.
Two wine glasses stand untouched on the coffee table, their contents dark and still.
On the TV, a 90s alt-rock band plays on a rooftop to an empty couch, their music tinny through the speakers. I want you to want me…
The hours dissolve into the dark.
It feels like barely a breath later when a phone vibrates against the nightstand—a harsh, mechanical buzz at 4:30 a.m. It cuts off after one short pulse.
The mattress shifts beside me, dipping under his weight as he sits up. The room is black, the kind of pre-dawn dark that swallows shapes. I float just under the surface of sleep, too heavy to climb out of it.
Warm lips brush my temple, fleeting as a breath.
And against my ear, so low it barely disturbs the air—four words, or maybe three and my name, threaded into the dark.
I love you, Ivy Hayes.
I almost surface. Almost reach for it, hold it up to the light, make sure it was real and not wishful static my half-dreaming mind had turned into words.
But the front door eases shut before I can decide, the latch a soft final click, and the dark folds back over me, and I let it pull me under without an answer—the words still warm against my ear, real or dreamed, mine to keep either way until morning.
When I wake, gray light is seeping through the blinds. The bed is empty, the sheets cool where he’d been. But draped over my bedroom chair—careful, deliberate—is his Capital City Crows hoodie, sleeves pushed up like he’d just taken it off.
The fabric smells like cedar and snow and him. I press my face into it and inhale.
He’s on the road. But he’s coming back.