5. Mia
MIA
The house is still loud when I get here — ESPN murmuring in the great room, Jax’s laugh carrying down the hall, ice clinking against glass out on the deck — and I’m sitting on the edge of Grant’s bed in the dark listening to all of it like a countdown.
The room smells like him, cedar and salt and something underneath that I can’t name, and I’ve been in this space maybe twice before tonight, always briefly, always with a reason ready in case anyone asked why.
Nobody’s asking tonight. That’s the whole difference.
The jersey’s on the floor. I took it off before I let myself think too hard about why.
I’m not wearing anything under it, and he knows that, has known it since this morning, since the coffee spilled down the front of it and he looked at me like I was something he was trying hard to still call a girl.
The door opens. Closes. Locks — I hear the deadbolt, small and final, an ordinary mechanical sound that somehow carries the weight of an entire decision behind it, and something in my chest unlocks right along with it.
He doesn’t say anything at first. Just looks at me — the kind of look that takes its time, that I feel on my skin before his hands ever get there — and I have to remind myself to breathe.
“Grant.”
“Yeah.” His voice has already dropped somewhere lower than I’ve heard it go.
He crosses the room. Sits on the edge of the bed facing me, one hand coming up to my jaw, tilting my face toward the little bit of light coming through the blinds like he wants to see every part of this. Like he’s memorizing it.
“You sure?” he asks.
“I’ve been sure since the coffee spilled.” It comes out steadier than I feel. “Probably before that.”
He studies my face a moment longer, like he’s checking for a crack in the certainty, and whatever he finds seems to satisfy him, because his hand moves from my jaw down to my collarbone, tracing the line of it lightly, so I feel every inch of the attention.
“Good,” he says. “Because I’m not stopping once I start.”
Outside, muffled through the walls, the house keeps living its ordinary evening — a door closing somewhere, the low murmur of the TV, none of it aware that everything in this room is about to change.
He kisses me instead of answering. Slow this time — nothing like the hallway, nothing rushed about it — his hand sliding into my hair, tilting my head where he wants it, and I let him, because apparently that’s a thing I do now, let Grant decide the angle of everything.
His mouth moves from my jaw to my throat, and he takes his time there too, teeth grazing the place my pulse is going embarrassingly fast, one hand flattening against my stomach like he’s memorizing the shape of my breathing.
I reach for him — want to touch him back, want some of this to be mine to direct — and he catches my wrist, gentle, and moves it back to the sheets. “Not yet.” Low. Certain. “Let me.”
I don’t argue. Something about being told to receive this, no reciprocation required, unravels something in me faster than his hands do.
He moves lower. Careful, gentle, and by the time he settles between my legs I’m shaking, propped up on my elbows to watch because I don’t want to miss any part of this.
He looks up once before his mouth gets there — a question I don’t need words to answer — and when I don’t look away he doesn’t either.
By the time he actually gets there I’ve stopped being embarrassed about the sounds I’m making, because he’s good at this in a way that isn’t about technique at all — he’s clearly been thinking about doing this since Tampa, eight months of wanting it he never once said out loud.
He finds a rhythm and holds it, patient, until I’m right at the edge of something — and then he eases off, watching my face while I try to chase what he pulled away.
“Grant—”
“I know.” He doesn’t stop watching me. “I want to hear you ask for it.”
Heat climbs my throat, and it isn’t from what his mouth is doing — it’s that I’ve never had to ask anyone for anything in bed before — it was always assumed, or fumbled toward, or over before anyone thought to name it.
Grant wants it said out loud. Wants ownership of the want, not just the receiving of it.
“Please,” I say, and the word comes out wrecked. “Grant, please.”
He gives it back to me immediately, like that’s all he was waiting for, and this time he doesn’t let up. My hips come off the mattress and he holds them there with one forearm, steady, unbothered, like my whole body trying to buck away from too much is the reaction he was working toward.
“Grant.” His name again. It sounds different in my mouth than it used to. Not the name I used across a dinner table growing up. Something new. Something that comes out cracked and wanting.
He looks up at me, dark-eyed, and says, “Again,” like an order, and I give it to him again because apparently that’s a thing I do now too — say his name until it stops sounding like a name at all and starts sounding like something closer to a confession.
By the time he moves up my body I’m not thinking in words anymore.
He settles his weight over me — heavier than I expected, solid in a way that makes the whole bed feel smaller — and pauses there, forehead against mine, both of us breathing hard, one beat of stillness that feels heavier than anything that’s happened so far tonight.
“Still sure?” he asks. Quiet enough that it’s only for me to hear.
“Grant.” I pull him down by the back of the neck. “If you ask me that again I’m going to start finishing this myself.”
That gets something close to a laugh out of him, low and surprised, and then he pushes inside me and the laugh disappears into something rougher.
His hands find my hips and hold them where he wants them, the kind of grip that says he’s done holding back, and I wrap my legs around him and say his name a third time and he rewards it with depth, with pressure, with exactly what I didn’t know I needed until he gave it to me.
He stops halfway through, buried deep, forehead dropping to my shoulder like he’s fighting for control he doesn’t fully have.
“Give me a second,” he says, rough, and I feel his whole body working to hold still, and I dig my nails into his back instead of letting him have the second, and he swears against my throat and gives up trying.
The house keeps making noise around us. Somewhere through the wall, Jax laughs at something. I don’t care. I couldn’t care less right now if the whole house was standing in the doorway.
“Look at me,” Grant says, and I do, and something passes between us that isn’t only physical — something that feels like an agreement neither of us said out loud yet, sealed anyway.
The pace changes again — slower, deeper, like he’s decided this next part isn’t about speed at all — and I feel the shift building in him before he says anything, the tension gathering low in his spine, his jaw tightening against my shoulder.
“Where,” he says, and it isn’t a question. “Tell me where you want this.”
I know exactly what he’s asking. I know exactly what I want the answer to be, and it isn’t the safe one. “You know where.” My voice barely holds together. “Inside. I want you inside.”
He finishes inside me. I feel it happen — the shift in his rhythm, the low sound he makes against my throat, the way his hands tighten on my hips like he’s holding on to something he’s afraid of losing — and instead of panicking, I pull him deeper and hold on too.
My body said yes before my brain caught up, and right now my brain isn’t arguing.
He stays there after, unmoving, like he’s not ready to let the moment end yet either, and neither am I.
Afterward, I’m curled against his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow down under my ear. He smells like bourbon and salt and the same cologne I remember, except right now none of it smells like a stepdad. It smells like something I want to keep smelling.
His hand moves along my spine, unhurried, like he’s not in any rush to let go of this either.
I trace a line down his sternum with one finger, feeling the muscle there jump under my touch, and neither of us says anything for a long stretch — the kind of quiet that doesn’t need filling. “You’re quiet,” he says eventually.
“I’m thinking.” “About?”
“About how I’m supposed to sit across a draft table from you tomorrow and act normal.” I prop my chin on his chest to look at him. “I don’t think I know how to do that anymore.”
“You don’t have to act normal.” His hand stills on my back. “You have to act like whatever this is.” “And what is this?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Takes long enough that I feel the question land somewhere real in him, not something he’s brushing off.
“Something I should’ve said out loud eight months ago instead of driving home with the windows down, pretending I hadn’t noticed you’d grown up into someone I couldn’t stop thinking about. ”
Through the wall, muffled, I hear Jax say something to Tate — low, amused, the cadence of a man drawing a conclusion he’s not going to say out loud until morning. Tate laughs. They know. Of course they know. This house doesn’t have a single wall that keeps a secret.
I don’t care about that either.
I turn my face up. “What happens tomorrow?”
Grant looks at the ceiling for a second, quiet, like he’s actually considering the question instead of brushing it off. “Whatever you want to happen.”
I think about that sentence longer than I mean to. Whatever you want. Not whatever I decide. Not we’ll figure it out. He’s handing me something — permission, maybe, or a door left open — and it takes me a second to understand what I actually want on the other side of it.
Because it’s not only him. I look at him and I think about Tate’s hands on my waist in the pool, about Brooks watching me over the top of a book he’s not reading, about Jax’s grin sliding sideways every time the air in a room changes.
I want more than one man this weekend, more than I’ve ever let myself want anything before. And the one man I want deciding all of it is the one lying beneath me right now.
I don’t say any of that out loud. Not yet. I close my eyes against his chest instead, and I let his heartbeat carry me toward sleep, and I let the question sit there, warm and a little dangerous, waiting patiently for morning.