CHAPTER 9 — NO PRETENDING #3
The command cut through me. I obeyed because it was fair and because the pleasure surged harder when I stopped trying to control what I felt.
We moved slowly at first, then with more urgency, adjusting bodies, limits, breaths.
The room shrank until it became bed, skin, crumpled sheet, the heat of his thigh against mine, my hand gripping his hip, his voice breaking when the pleasure grew too strong for irony to contain.
Everything about him felt like both answer and challenge.
Every time I tried to take control by instinct, Noah pulled me back—to presence, to exchange, to a physical honesty that refused to let me turn this into a simple power grab.
The pleasure built without gentleness, but with a clarity that frightened me.
It wasn't just his body, though his body was destroying me.
It was the way Noah held my gaze when he was on the verge of losing words, the way he said my name without fear, the firm hand on my hip when he wanted me to keep going, the other attentive to my shoulder when my body forgot its own limits.
I wanted to hate this mixture of care and desire.
I couldn't. It held me tighter than any dominance would have.
When Noah reached his limit, he didn't turn away.
He kept his eyes on mine until the last possible instant, as if this too were a test. His body tensed beneath mine, his breath caught, and the sound that escaped his throat pulled me over with him.
My own climax hit heavy, deep, more intimate than I thought I could stand—a release that started in my abdomen, rose through my chest, and left me defenseless for a few seconds.
I pressed my face into the curve of his neck, breathing in his skin, feeling the final tremors pass through us both, and the word that almost came to my mouth wasn't hate, or mistake, or revenge.
It was his name.
We stayed motionless afterward, not from peace, but because we lacked the strength to rebuild the walls just yet.
I was still partially on top of Noah, positioned carefully so I wouldn't crush him or strain my shoulder.
He ran his fingers lightly over my nape, an absent gesture that felt too familiar for that hotel bed.
The sweat cooled slowly on our skin, the sheet twisted beneath our legs, and my breathing took a while to find a rhythm that didn't depend on his.
“Does it hurt?” Noah asked. The professional tone tried to return, but it came out broken at the edges.
“It does,” I answered, before pride could take over. I felt his body go alert, then added, turning my face to look at him, “But not more than I chose.”
“That was a terrible answer.”
“It was honest.”
He stared at me for a few seconds, and there was so much there without a name that I almost preferred when we'd hated each other in simpler ways.
Then Noah let out a tired breath, touched the side of my face, and kissed me once, briefly, as if testing reality after the fire.
The gesture almost hurt. Not in my body. Somewhere else.
We cleaned up with little conversation, slow movements, and a tenderness too strange for people who claimed not to trust each other.
Noah helped me readjust the wrap on my shoulder, and this time I didn't crack jokes.
He didn't comment on my obedience. He just ran his fingers along the edge of the bandage to check the pressure, and the touch, now after everything, seemed to carry a different kind of intimacy—less hungry and more dangerous.
When we went back to bed, it was his. Neither of us argued.
Maybe because arguing would mean pretending there was still a clear boundary between the mattresses.
Noah fell asleep before me, lying on his side, one hand still near my waist, as if it had stopped there by accident and sleep had kept it in place.
I stayed awake, watching his face in the dim light from the window.
Without the irony, without the clipboard, without the weight of confronting me, he looked more vulnerable and more distant.
The urge to touch his mouth came with a dull anger at myself.
I'd said I wouldn't use this as a weapon.
In the dark, with my body still marked by him, the promise seemed easy.
I feared the morning because morning always brought back the versions that night suspended.
Near dawn, I woke to his movement. Noah was sitting on the edge of the bed, shirt already in his hands, hair messy, expression shuttered—like someone who'd woken before his own regret could reach the room.
For a second, neither of us spoke. My body still remembered his with a precision that irritated me, but what tightened my chest was watching him pull away carefully, as if he didn't want to wake me—or as if he didn't want to be stopped.
“Going to run?” I asked, my voice rough from sleep and something worse.
He stopped with the shirt in his lap. He didn't look at me right away. When he did, I saw he hadn't slept enough to put his defenses back on either.
“I'm going to shower before the team wakes up,” he answered. “And then I'm going to check your shoulder, because that's still my job.”
“Just a job?”
The question was unfair, and I knew it even as I said it.
So did Noah. He pulled on his shirt slowly, covering the body my mouth still remembered, and the loss of him hit me in a childish way.
When he stood, he grabbed his toiletry bag and headed for the bathroom door, but stopped before going in.
His hand stayed on the handle, shoulders tense beneath the light fabric.
“Don't do this, Damon,” he said, not quite turning around. “Don't try to turn the morning into a test I'm already going to fail.”
The door closed between us before I could find an answer that wasn't too cruel or too honest. I lay alone in his bed, surrounded by his scent on the pillow, by the warmth still lingering in the sheet, and by the violent realization that I hated watching him leave more than I should have.
The most dangerous part of the night hadn't been touching Noah, or hearing him say he wanted to continue, or discovering that my body still fit against his with devastating ease.
The dangerous part was that when he left the bed, something in me wanted to ask him to stay.