Chapter 9 #2
The orgasm tears through me without warning.
My back arches off the mattress and my walls clench hard around his fingers while he keeps working me through every wave of it with his tongue and his hands, relentless and steady, until I'm gasping and boneless and so oversensitive that every brush of his mouth makes me twitch.
My fingers finally loosen their grip on his hair.
He presses one last open-mouthed kiss to the inside of my thigh, unhurried and deliberate, then lifts his head.
The raw hunger in his expression as he looks up the length of my body makes the heat rebuild before the aftershocks have even finished, like the first orgasm was nothing more than a preview.
My hands find his belt, and while my fingers aren't entirely steady, I get it open.
Jesse shoves his jeans and briefs down and kicks them free, and the full sight of him in the dim light makes my breath stall.
He's hard and thick, and my hand wraps around him before the decision is even conscious.
A sharp hiss escapes through his teeth as his hips drive forward into my grip, and the way his careful control splinters at that single touch sends a surge of power through me.
"Raven." My name lands like a warning. His hand closes over mine and stops it. "Not like that. Not this time."
He pulls my hand away and pins both wrists above my head with one hand, his grip firm enough to hold me but careful enough not to bruise. His mouth comes down on mine, and I can taste myself on his tongue. My hips tilt against him before I can stop them.
"You want me inside you?" His free hand drags down my body, rough palm skating over my breast, my ribs, the curve of my hip. His fingers dip between my thighs and stroke through the slick mess he's already made of me, and my whole body jerks beneath him. "Tell me."
"Yes." The word comes out wrecked.
"Yes, what?" His fingers circle my clit in slow, maddening passes, and his mouth brushes the shell of my ear. "I want to hear you say it."
"I want you inside me." My voice fractures on the last word because his fingers haven't stopped, and the pressure is building again with an urgency that borders on unbearable. "Jesse, please. Now."
The sound he makes is low and satisfied, something close to a growl, and he releases my wrists to grip my hips with both hands. He notches himself against me, the broad head pressing where I'm swollen and aching, and holds there long enough that my pulse becomes the loudest thing in the room.
"Look at me." Every layer of control has been stripped out of his voice.
His fierce gaze holds mine, and then he pushes inside me in one long, steady stroke.
The stretch is consuming, filling me so completely that a sound escapes my throat I don't have a name for, something caught between shock and need.
Jesse holds there, buried to the hilt, his jaw clenched tight and a vein standing out along his neck, his arms trembling with the effort of keeping still.
"Christ." The word grinds out of him like it costs him. "You feel incredible."
"Move." The word scrapes out of me raw and desperate. "Jesse, move."
He pulls back slow, almost all the way out, and I feel every inch of the drag.
Then he drives forward hard enough to shift me up the bed, and the sound that tears from my throat belongs to a version of me I've never met before.
He sets a pace that's deep and deliberate, each stroke bottoming out with a force that punches the air from my lungs, his hands gripping my hips hard enough to leave marks I'll find tomorrow.
"Right there." I can barely form the words. "God, right there."
"I know exactly where you need it." His mouth finds my neck, his teeth scraping against my pulse point. "Your hot little pussy squeezes me every time I hit it."
His hand slides between us, his thumb finding my clit and circling in time with his thrusts, and the dual sensation pushes me right to the edge of what I can take. My nails rake down his back hard enough to leave welts, and the groan it pulls from him is raw and completely unguarded.
The pace shifts. Faster. Harder. His breathing turns ragged against my skin. He hooks his hand under my knee and pushes it higher, changing the angle, and the next thrust hits so deep that my vision whites out.
"You feel what you do to me?" His voice is wrecked against my ear, his hips driving forward with a force that shakes the bed frame. "Ten years, Raven. Ten goddamn years and nothing ever came close."
I can't answer because the orgasm building low in my belly is one I can feel in my teeth, in the base of my skull, in the desperate grip of my fingers clawing down his back.
"Come for me." The command is low and ragged against my mouth. "I want to feel it."
The orgasm detonates from deep inside me, my entire body seizing around him so hard that he swears through clenched teeth.
Wave after wave rolls through me, each one triggered by his relentless rhythm, and I'm crying out with every thrust, broken half-words and desperate pleas for more that I couldn't stop if I wanted to.
Jesse follows three strokes later, burying himself to the hilt with a guttural sound that's half my name and half wordless wreckage. His hips stutter against mine as he spills inside me, and his forehead drops to mine with his breath coming in harsh, ragged pulls against my mouth.
Neither of us moves for a long time. His breath slows against my mouth, and the room settles into quiet around us.
Jesse shifts his hips and withdraws, and the sudden absence leaves me hollow and satisfied in equal measure, a combination I've never felt before.
He lies beside me in the dark with one hand warm and heavy at my hip.
The moonlight through the curtains has shifted, cutting pale angles across the hardwood floor.
Outside, the cedar trees sway in whatever wind has come up, and the cabin holds us both in its own particular stillness.
After a long moment, he pulls me against him, my back to his chest, one arm draped across my waist. His breathing has gone slow and even, but his hand splays wide across my stomach like he's keeping track of me even on the edge of sleep.
The quiet settles in. I can hear the faint creak of old timber and the steady rhythm of his heartbeat against my spine.
I wait for the complicated feelings to arrive. The regret. The second-guessing. The careful, clinical voice that's kept me alive for a decade by being louder than whatever I actually want.
None of it comes.
What I'm left with is simpler and considerably harder to argue with.
The wanting hasn't gone anywhere. If anything, it's dug in deeper, found the spaces I've spent years keeping empty, and filled them so thoroughly that I can already feel how much the loss would cost me.
Jesse's arm across my waist feels like it belongs there, and that certainty terrifies me more than any cartel kill team ever could.
I've spent my whole adult life being afraid of exactly one thing: needing a person I couldn't afford to lose. Turns out I should have been afraid of how quiet it would feel when it finally happened. How much it would feel like peace.