21. AVA #2
I've given him one grenade already. The second one will be sent on another day when the time is right.
"I want to be on top," I say.
He rolls us.
I unzip his jeans and push them down. He lifts his hips to help.
His hard, thick cock springs free. I wrap my hand around the shaft, stroking from base to tip.
He groans, his hands gripping my thighs.
I push my own jeans off. Pull my underwear down my legs and throw both somewhere I don't care about.
When I straddle him, the slick heat of me pressing against the length of him, we both make a sound that fills the dark room.
He puts a condom on. I reach between us, position him at my entrance.
I hold his gaze. The last time we did this, I gave in to something I couldn't fight anymore.
Tonight I'm not surrendering. I'm deciding.
I sink onto him inch by inch. The stretch of him filling me pulls a cry from my throat. Every inch of him pushes deeper until he's fully inside me.
"Ava." His voice is wrecked.
I lean forward and press my forehead against his. My hands cup his face. My thumbs trace his cheekbones, the edge of his beard.
I hold his face the way you hold something you're afraid will be taken from you.
I start to move. Slow, rolling strokes, rising until only the tip of him remains inside me nearly slips free. Then I sink back down in a long, grinding stroke that drags him against the spot that makes my vision swim.
“You're so tight," he says through his teeth. "I can feel you squeezing me every time you come down."
"Don't stop touching me."
His hands find my hips, but I take his wrists and guide them to my breasts instead.
"Hold me here."
He cups my breasts with a gentleness that makes my eyes sting. His thumbs circle my nipples. The dual sensation of his hands on my most sensitive skin and his cock buried inside me makes my thighs tremble on either side of his hips.
I ride him with my eyes open. Watching his face. Memorizing the way his jaw clenches when I grind down hard. The way his lips part on a shattered exhale when I clench around him. The way his eyes, dark and blown wide, never leave mine.
Stay, my body says with every stroke. Stay, stay, stay.
His hands slide from my breasts toward my stomach. I catch them, lacing my fingers through his, pressing our joined hands into the mattress beside his head.
The position brings my face inches from his, our breath tangling, our chests nearly touching.
"I need you closer," I whisper. I mean it in a way that has nothing to do with physics.
He frees one hand from mine and wraps it around the back of my neck, pulling my mouth to his.
The kiss is deep and messy. But I don't care because his tongue is stroking mine in the same rhythm as my hips and everything in my body is converging toward a single point of blinding, aching need.
I increase my pace. Faster. Deeper.
His hips rise to meet mine on every downstroke. His hands grab my ass and pull me down, driving himself far inside me. My free hand grips his shoulder hard while my hips roll in a rhythm that's becoming less controlled by the second.
"I'm close," I pant against his lips. "Don't stop."
He plants his feet on the mattress and drives upward, hard. My whole body seizes.
The angle changes everything, the pressure on my clit grinding against his pelvis on every upstroke.
"Come for me," he says. "I want to feel it."
The orgasm tears through me in a wave so violent my body locks above him. My walls clamping around him in pulsing, rhythmic contractions.
His name rips from my throat, and I hear my own voice like it belongs to someone else, someone unguarded and completely incapable of pretending she isn't his.
He follows seconds later. His grip on my neck tightens, his hips surge upward one final time. He buries himself to the hilt as his cock swells and pulses inside me.
A guttural groan leaves him, his face pressed into my shoulder, his body shuddering beneath me in long, rolling waves.
I collapse onto his chest.
My arms wrap around his head, pulling him toward me. I can't stop holding him. My hands move over his hair, his jaw, his shoulders, constantly touching, constantly confirming.
His heart hammers beneath my cheek. His arms circle my back and pull me flush against him, his hands splayed wide between my shoulder blades.
We lie there for a long time. His fingers trace slow patterns on my back.
My cheek is pressed against his chest, rising and falling with his breathing, which gradually slows from wrecked to steady.
"Stay," he murmurs.
"This is my house, Kai. You stay."
A low laugh vibrates through his chest and into mine. His arms tighten.
I press my face into his neck and breathe. Cedar and sweat and the faint trace of clay still on his skin.
I lie on the bed, my hand sliding to my stomach beneath the sheets to the secret I'm still carrying. The baby that is half him yet entirely unknown to the man whose heartbeat is drumming against my ear.
The skin there is warmer than the rest of me.
Or I could be imagining it. I might be imagining a lot of things tonight.
But one thing I'm not imagining: the weight of what I didn't tell Kai.
Telling Kai about the pregnancy would destroy every trust we’ve built tonight. He'll count backward. He’ll realize the baby was conceived before the accident and see every month of my silence as deception.
There's only so much truth one night can hold.
One truth per night. That's what I tell myself. One fault line exposed while the other stays buried, rumbling quietly beneath everything I've just built with my own shaking hands.
His breathing deepens. His arm grows heavy across my waist. He's falling asleep.
Biscuit pads into the room, nails clicking on the hardwood, and collapses beside the bed with a huff.
I lie awake in the dark.
Please stay, I think. Please be the man who stays.