Chapter 14 #2
"I love you too," I say, and the walls come down so softly that I barely hear them go. "And I'm terrible at this, and you should know that going in."
"Noted." The corner of his mouth shifts. "I'll file a complaint."
The callback lands with a warmth that has no computational equivalent.
When he reaches for me, the motion carries the certainty of a decision already made.
He pulls me in and presses his mouth to my forehead, and the tenderness of it from someone with this much controlled force behind his hands cracks something inside me I thought was structural.
Then his grip shifts, tilting my head up, and his mouth finds mine. The kiss is slow and tastes like solvent and adrenaline and the end of pretending, and his free hand lands at my waist, heavy, proprietary, done keeping distance.
Neither of us says anything when we pull apart. He grabs his toolkit, I grab my laptop bag, and the walk to the truck is close enough that our shoulders brush with every step.
The drive to the loft takes long enough for the adrenaline to finish its exit and the wanting to take its place.
Griff's hand rests on my thigh in the truck, and his grip isn't gentle.
His thumb presses against the inside seam of my trousers in a slow, rhythmic stroke that turns the drive into a specific kind of torture, and the look he gives me when I shift in the seat says he knows exactly what he's doing.
The loft door closes behind us. The deadbolt turns. The late afternoon light comes through the bay windows in long amber columns, painting the exposed brick in gold and shadow, and the space looks and smells and feels like home in a way that has stopped being theoretical.
Griff unfastens his vest and drops it on the counter, and when he turns toward me, I'm already moving, closing the distance with a conviction I have never brought to this before.
Every time before this, the first contact was a fuse, a spark that handed him the authority to set the pace.
He controlled, he held the reins with the same patient hands he brings to every wire he touches.
This time, my hands find the hem of his shirt and pull it over his head, and my mouth is on his before the fabric hits the floor, and I have no intention of letting him take over.
He responds immediately, his hands at my waist, and the kiss carries the taste of someone who has been thinking about this since the corridor. My fingers trace the planes of his chest, the ridges of muscle, the place over his sternum where his heart beats steady and strong against my palm.
The man runs toward live explosives and his resting pulse is lower than mine during a software update.
"Bedroom," I tell him.
"Yes ma'am." The drawl is low and amused, and the effect it has on my nervous system is something I refuse to quantify.
His hands slide under my sweater and pull it off in one smooth motion, and the rest of the hallway disappears in a trail of clothing that neither of us stops to pick up.
His bedroom is the same as we left it, sheets still tangled from the last time we slept here and the last of the afternoon light slanting warm through the windows and nothing on the walls, except it stopped being just his bedroom somewhere between the shortbread and the rings and the morning I woke up here and didn't want to leave.
I push him down onto the bed and watch the surprise register on his face, brief and genuine, because every time before this, he set the terms. His back hits the mattress and I straddle his hips and lean down to kiss him, and the shift in dynamic does exactly what I want it to do: his hands go to my hips, grip tightening on instinct, his whole body recalibrating to the fact that the power just moved.
"My turn," I say against his mouth.
His eyes hold mine, dark and focused, and permission arrives without a word. I find the hollow of his throat, the ridge of his collarbone, the flat plane of his stomach where the muscles tense under my lips, working down his body with attention to the places that make his breathing change.
Each response is small and controlled, because Griff doesn't give away more than he chooses to, and cracking that discipline open is the kind of problem my brain was designed to chase.
My fingers work the button on his trousers and drag them down his hips with his briefs, and the length of him is hard and straining against his stomach. I wrap my hand around the base. The tendons in his neck flex with the effort of holding still.
"You don't have to be steady right now," I tell him.
"Sweetheart." The word is rough and carries a warning I feel in the base of my spine. "You have no idea what I have to be right now."
I lower my mouth to the head of his cock and take him in slowly, my tongue tracing the underside in a long stroke.
He's thick and hot against my tongue, salt and skin and the faint clean taste of soap, and the weight of him in my mouth narrows the world to this: the slow slide, the stretch of my lips around him, the pulse I can feel against my tongue when I take him deeper.
The sound he makes is rough and low, pulled from somewhere deeper than the voice he uses on the radio.
His hand finds the back of my head, fingers threading into my hair without directing, just holding, and the restraint in that costs him more than any render-safe.
I take him deeper, finding the rhythm that makes his hips rock upward and his breathing fracture.
My tongue flattens against the underside on the upstroke and circles the head on the withdrawal, and the second time I do it, the hand in my hair tightens.
His thigh muscles flex against my palms where I'm bracing, and a low groan vibrates through his chest. The sound goes straight between my own thighs, a pulse of wet heat that has nothing to do with being touched and everything to do with what I'm doing to him.
This is the man who pins my hips to mattresses and sets the pace and tells me to stay with him, and he is laid out beneath me with his composure dissolving under my mouth and his hand in my hair trembling with the effort of letting me lead.
I hollow my cheeks and take him to the back of my throat, and his hips buck once, sharp, unplanned, before he catches himself. The loss of control is a fraction of a second, and the effort it takes to regain it shows in every locked muscle from his jaw to his abs.
"Nox." My name on his tongue is raw, stripped of rank and distance and everything he wraps around it in daylight. "Get up here."
The command cuts through the haze, and the voice behind it is the one that gives orders on blast sites. I look up, and the expression on his face is not tender but patient, focused, edged with a hunger he's done managing.
He pulls me up and rolls us in one fluid motion, his weight pressing me into the mattress with an authority that is simply who he is. The shift from my control to shared isn't a concession. It's a collision, two forces meeting at the center and finding the place where neither has to yield.
"You had your turn." His mouth drags down my throat, teeth grazing the tendon. The scrape sends voltage through my chest. "My turn to catch up."
His mouth finds my breast, all heat and pressure, the edge of his tongue circling the peak until the nerves pull tight and my hips roll against him.
He shifts to the other breast and his teeth close on the nipple, a graze that walks the line between sharp and soft, and the sound I make is loud enough to fill the room.
His hand slides between my thighs, and his fingers don't tease.
The first stroke parts me, slick and swollen, and drags upward through the wet heat in a pass that is precise and devastating.
He knows the pressure, the angle, the exact spot where the contact makes my hips jerk, because he's been here before and his hands learn everything they touch.
"Look at me," he says, low and unhurried and not a request.
I do. His eyes are dark and locked on mine, and being watched while his fingers work inside me is more exposed than anything the absence of clothing has achieved.
His fingers press inside, curling forward, and my body clamps around them.
His thumb finds my clit and works it in slow, firm circles that don't match the rhythm of his fingers, the offset deliberate, my body trying to chase two different points of contact and failing to catch either.
The frustration and the pleasure twist together until my thighs are shaking and my hand is fisting the sheet beside my head and the analytical part of my brain, the part that narrates and categorizes and maintains editorial distance from every experience, is going dark section by section like nodes on a topology map.
"Griff." His name comes out ragged, free of the accent and the composure and everything I wrap around it in daylight. "I need you inside me."
"You have me inside you."
"You know what I mean."
"Yeah." His fingers withdraw and I feel the loss like a dropped signal, the sudden absence of contact leaving my body clenching around nothing. "I do."
He enters me in one slow, deep push, and the fullness steals the air from my lungs.
He's thick and the stretch burns at the edge, and my body grips him in a pulsing hold as it adjusts, every nerve recalibrating to the pressure and the depth and the specific way he fills the space that his fingers left empty.
His forehead presses to mine, our breath mixing, and for a suspended beat neither of us moves, just holds.
I feel his body in mine, his eyes on mine, the weight of him and the warmth of him and the light fading through the windows.