14. Maren #4
We stayed like that for a moment. Both of us breathing hard. The room very quiet around us, the city light low through the blinds, the sheets twisted and warm underneath us.
Then he gathered me up—arms coming around me, pulling me back against his chest—and pressed his mouth to my hair and held me there while our breathing slowed.
I leaned back against him and thought about what I’d said.
Please don’t ever stop fucking me like this.
I hadn’t planned to say those words. It had just slipped out, the way a lot of things kept slipping out around him I hadn’t planned on saying. The way my walls kept developing inconvenient gaps whenever he was in the room.
He pulled the blanket up over both of us. “I’m staying,” he said. And that was that.
The city went quiet outside. I lay there in the dark as his hand moved slowly up and down my side until I drifted off, wrapped in his arms, warm and sated.
Some time later, in the middle of the night, I woke to him stroking his thumb over my hip.
If I’d had to guess, it was when he realized I was awake, he moved his hand lower, past my abdomen, and slipped it into my panties.
I moaned and rested my hand on top of his as he stroked my clit.
I turned around and climbed on top of him, straddling him.
After I grabbed a condom from the nightstand and slid it on him, I slid myself down his length slowly.
Once he was fully inside me, stretching me, that’s when I started to move.
I’d put a shirt on at some point, and I yanked it over my head.
“You’re so fucking beautiful, Maren,” he said as I rode him. Running his hands along my thighs, he squeezed at my hips, pulling himself in deeper.
“Oh fuck, that feels so good,” I said.
Immediately, Ryan’s hands moved to my breasts, kneading and pinching my nipples.
He sat up a bit, fucking up into me. What followed was sex I was starting to understand I’d been settling for not having.
Him vocal about what I did to him, that low, unhurried voice telling me exactly how good I felt and exactly what he was going to do next, and me telling him what I wanted back, clearer than I’d ever been with anyone, asking for things without waiting for permission, and him giving me all of it and more than I asked for.
He pulled me closer and took a nipple into his mouth and lowered one hand to rub my clit.
I threw my head back as I cried out. He felt so fucking good and knew exactly what to do to make me scream and cry out his name as I was flooded with ecstasy.
I could feel his release as he pumped into me, holding me up as my own made me boneless.
When the aftershocks subsided, he pulled me down so we were chest to chest and ran one hand through my hair.
“Beautiful,” he whispered right before he kissed me thoroughly.
Perfect. That’s what he called me. But what was really perfect?
Him. He made me come before he did, usually more than once, and harder than I ever had in my life, which I was starting to understand was something he required of himself.
This was its own problem, because it was getting harder to pretend this was just convenient or casual in any way.
Afterward I was on my back, the lamp throwing warm light across the ceiling, and he was beside me with one arm under his head and the other resting on my waist like it belonged there, warm against my skin.
“The skates,” I said eventually.
“What about them.”
“You knew my size.”
“I noticed your shoes at Cole’s party. You left them by the door when you came in.”
I turned toward him. He was studying the ceiling, perfectly composed, like this was a completely normal thing to have done.
“You checked my shoe size,” I said.
“I needed to know.”
“For the skates you were planning to buy me.”
“Yes.”
I turned back to the ceiling. The feeling in my chest was the kind I’d been trying not to accumulate, because accumulating it meant I was further gone than I’d admitted, and I wasn’t ready to admit it yet.
“Thank you,” I said. “For tonight. All of it.”
He turned his head to look at me. “You liked it?”
“I liked it.”
“Good.” He turned back to the ceiling and pulled me into him. His hand moved, absent and warm, against my waist. “We have a game Tuesday,” he said. “Home.”
“I know. I have the night off.”
He turned his head. “Come anyway.”
“I don’t usually come when I’m not working.”
“I know.” He waited a beat. “Come anyway.”
I understood what he meant. Not as Griffin’s sister attending a family obligation. His seats. Where I was there for him, specifically, in a section that said exactly that to anyone paying attention.
I should say no. I said nothing of the kind.
“Okay,” I said.
He nodded and squeezed me briefly and his hand kept its slow, absent movement against my waist, and I lay there in the quiet of my own bedroom thinking about shoe sizes and a man who had gotten on one knee on a concrete floor to lace my skates and said it’s mine, I wanted to share it with you like it was the simplest sentence he’d ever spoken.
I was in trouble.
I’d known it for weeks. I just hadn’t known it was this kind.