36. Maxim #2
I laid her back against the sheets and took a long moment just looking at her, the city light through the window painting her gold, her dark hair spread loose across my pillow like she'd always belonged there.
She reached for me, impatient, and I caught her wrist gently and pinned it above her head instead, watching her breath hitch at the small surrender of it.
"Let me look at you first."
"Maxim."
"I almost lost this tonight." My voice came out rough, barely recognizable to my own ears. "Let me look."
I reached behind her with my free hand and worked the clasp of her bra loose, easing the straps down her arms and setting it aside before I finally let her wrist go.
She helped me with the rest, lifting her hips off the sheets so I could draw the last of her clothes down the length of her legs and drop them somewhere off the edge of the bed, until there was nothing left between my eyes and every inch of her.
She went still under my hands, and I took my time learning her the way I hadn't let myself in weeks, my mouth tracing a slow line from her collarbone down the center of her chest, pausing at every place that made her back arch off the sheets.
I found her breast with my mouth and felt her fingers thread into my hair, holding me there, a low sound catching in her throat that undid something reckless in my chest.
I moved lower still, past her navel, feeling her stomach tense and release under my lips, until I settled between her thighs and heard my own name break apart on a gasp above me.
"Look at me," I said again, glancing up the length of her body, and she did, propped on her elbows, dark eyes blown wide and fixed on mine even as her hips rose to meet my mouth.
I took my time there too, slow and thorough, learning exactly what made her breath stutter and returning to it until her thighs were shaking around my head and her hands had fisted hard enough in the sheets to pull them loose from the corners.
When she finally came apart it was with a broken version of my name and nothing else, her whole body drawing tight and then loose beneath me, and the sound of it settled somewhere low and satisfied in my own chest.
I kissed my way back up her body, unhurried, and she pulled me the rest of the way by the jaw, kissing me deep and shameless like she wanted more of exactly what she'd just had.
Her hands found my waistband, working it open with fingers that had gone steady and sure, and I helped her push my pants and everything under them down and out of the way, kicking free of them without ever breaking the kiss.
When she finally wrapped her hand around me, bare skin against bare skin for the first time all night, I had to breathe through my teeth to keep what little control I had left.
"Now," she said, low against my mouth. "I need you now."
I settled between her thighs, braced on one forearm, and let her guide me the last inch to her entrance, feeling her hips lift to meet me before I'd even started to push. I eased into her one slow inch at a time, watching her face the entire way for anything that told me to stop.
"Don't stop." Her legs came up around my waist, pulling me deeper, her nails biting into my shoulders. "Don't you dare stop."
I didn't. I kept sinking into her by degrees until there was nothing left between us at all, both of us going still for a moment once I was fully seated inside her, foreheads pressed together, breathing the same air like neither of us wanted to be the first to move and break whatever this was.
"You feel like mine," I said against her mouth, rougher than I meant it, and felt her clench around me at the words.
"I am yours."
That was all either of us needed. I started to move, slow at first, deliberate, reading every catch of her breath like instruction, and she met every thrust with her hips rising to take me deeper, her heels pressing into the small of my back to keep me exactly where she wanted.
The slow patience broke into something hungrier the longer it went on, both of us chasing the same rhythm, skin against skin in the low gold light, her nails dragging down my back hard enough to leave marks I intended to feel for days and welcome every one of them.
"Maxim." My name kept breaking apart on her lips every time I drove into her, higher and thinner with every stroke, until she was shaking beneath me, close, so close I could feel it in the way her whole body had gone tight around mine.
"That's it." I caught her mouth again, swallowing the sound she made. "I've got you. Don't hold back."
She did, arching hard off the sheets with a cry that had my own name caught in the middle of it, her whole body pulling tight around me in waves that dragged me right over the edge behind her, harder than I had ever let myself fall for anyone in my life.
I buried my face against her throat and held on through it, both of us shaking, both of us finally and completely undone.
Afterward we lay tangled together with the city lights bleeding gold across the ceiling, her head on my chest, my fingers tracing slow circles along her spine, both of us still catching our breath in the quiet that only came after everything else had been said.
"I thought I was going to lose you today," I said into her hair, quieter now, the adrenaline finally draining out of me and leaving something simpler behind.
"Not the operation. Not the men. You. And somewhere between that phone call and right now, I stopped being able to pretend I don't know exactly what that fear means. "
She went still against me, waiting.
"I love you, Sofia Reyes."
She lifted her head to look at me, and whatever she found on my face made the last of her guard fall away, open in a way I had never once seen from her, not even tonight.
"I love you too." Her voice broke on the last word, and she said it again anyway, steadier the second time, like she needed to hear herself mean it. "I love you, Maxim. I have for longer than I've been able to admit, even to myself."
I pulled her closer, her heartbeat settling under my palm, and felt something in my chest finally go quiet after a night that had tried its hardest to break it wide open.
Whatever she was still keeping from me, whatever shape her silence took when I asked the wrong question, none of it mattered as much right now as the fact that she was here, breathing against my shoulder, alive and whole and mine in every way that counted.
I fell asleep certain, the kind of certain I hadn't let myself feel about anything in two decades, sure that whatever came next, we'd face it standing on the same side of the line.
I had no way of knowing, drifting off with her weight warm against my side, that in three days certain was going to feel like the most naive word I had ever used about anything in my life.