28. Maren #2
“I’ve been thinking about this,” he said, against my thigh. “Every day of this past week.” His mouth moved higher. “Every practice, every film session, every dinner I ate alone.” Higher still. “Every time I texted you and you didn’t answer.”
“Ryan—”
He pressed his mouth to the crease of my hip and I stopped forming words entirely. He hooked his thumbs in my shorts and panties and worked them down and off slowly. Then he met my eyes from where he was and said, low, “Lie back.”
I lay back.
He spread my thighs and settled between them and took the full measure of me before he touched me, and his patience—looking at me like I was something he’d been waiting on and wasn’t going to rush now that he had me—
“Ryan—” His name came out desperate.
“Tell me what you want.” He pressed his mouth to my inner thigh and I felt his breath, warm and close, just not where I needed it.
“You know what I want.”
“Tell me anyway.” His tongue traced a slow line that stopped just short of where I was aching. “I want to hear you say it.”
“Your mouth,” I managed. “Please, Ryan, I need you to fuck me with your tongue.”
A fire lit in his gaze and he hummed as he lowered his face to my pussy.
The flat of his tongue first, broad and warm, and I arched off the mattress immediately.
He pressed his forearm across my hips to hold me down and I grabbed the sheets with both hands and let go of every careful thing I’d been holding for the past two weeks.
The composure, the professionalism, the maintained distance, and just felt it.
I fully lived in this moment where all he wanted was my pleasure.
His mouth was thorough and patient and absolutely deliberate, reading me the way he read everything, adjusting when I made a sound or shifted or dug my fingers into his hair.
He worked me to the edge and held me there, not letting me tip over.
“Please—” My voice had completely abandoned me. “Ryan, please—”
“You want to come?” Low, certain, entirely focused on me.
“Yes—”
“Ask me nicely.” His tongue swept in a slow circle and I gasped. “You know how. Have you been a good girl, Maren?”
“Please,” I breathed. “Please, I’ve been so good, I need—”
“There she is.” He pressed his tongue exactly where I needed it and slid two fingers inside me and I came apart hard, my whole body arching, his name coming out of my throat on a broken exhale that echoed off the walls of my bedroom and I absolutely did not care. “Ryan, oh fuck!”
He kissed the inside of my thigh while I came back to myself.
Pressed his lips once to my hip. Then he stood and stripped his shirt off over his head and I watched him through heavy-lidded eyes.
The lines of him in the lamplight, the broad shoulders, the chest I knew the feel of, and I reached for him.
He caught my wrist. Brought my palm to his mouth and pressed his lips to the inside of my wrist, right over the bracelet. Alltid din.
“I’ve missed you,” he said. “Every hour of the past two weeks.”
I pulled him down to me.
He got his jeans and the rest off and then he was over me and I put my hands on his chest and felt his heartbeat under my palms. Fast, just slightly, the tell of everything he was keeping controlled, and I pressed up into him.
“Maren.” My name in his mouth, low and wrecked.
“Ryan,” I said.
He paused above me. His jaw moved.
“I love you,” he said. Plainly. Not a discovery.
It had been true for a while. He was only now saying it out loud.
“I wanted you to know that before—I just needed to say it. You don’t have to say it back.
Not tonight. Not until you’re ready. But you have to know.
I need you to know. I will do anything for you, for us,” he whispered.
I looked up at him in the low light of my room.
This steady, certain, completely genuine man who had driven across the city and talked to my brother and shown up at my door and was now saying this to my face with nothing held back, and the word was in my chest, warm and certain, exactly where it had been living for months.
I wasn’t ready to say it. Not tonight, not as an answer to him saying it first. When I said it I wanted it to be its own moment, so it meant something to him the same way this moment meant something to me and I knew he would understand.
He pushed inside me slowly and I felt the breath leave his body, the long exhale of it against my throat, and I wrapped my legs around him and let myself feel all of it. “Fuck.” His growl was the sexiest thing I’d ever heard in my life, then he started to move.
“Du ?r min,” he said, against my neck. Low and certain, the Swedish coming up from underneath his control the way it always did when he had stopped being careful. “Alltid din.”
“I know what that means,” I breathed.
“Good.” He pulled back and drove forward and I gasped. “Then you know I mean it.”
He set a rhythm. No reason to hurry. He kept his weight on his forearms so he could see my face, and he watched me with that complete and undivided focus he never seemed to spend on anything else, and it made me feel like the only thing in the room.
His eyes held mine through it and I didn’t look away, because we’d been careful with each other for so long and I was done being careful.