6. Eden
EDEN
When we reach Viper’s room, he sets my suitcase against the dresser and stands there with his arms loose at his sides. He doesn’t know what to do with a girl and her whole life packed into one bag in the middle of his floor.
That makes two of us.
“You can have the bed,” he says. “I’ll take the couch downstairs.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t leave my father’s house to sleep alone.”
It comes out surer than I am. My hands want to twist together, so I press them flat against my thighs to keep them still.
He doesn’t come toward me, and instead, he waits for a moment.
“Eden,” his voice is low with restraint. “What do you want?”
Nobody’s ever asked me that, and the question catches me off guard.
“I...” I take a step toward him, take a breath. “All you need to know is that I chose you. That’s the whole answer. I want you.”
Then he crosses the floor.
His hand comes up to my jaw, and his palm is huge, and the calluses are rough against my face. He tips my chin up as he bends down, and the press of his mouth on mine is so soft I almost don’t trust it’s real.
A man this big shouldn’t be able to touch a person this lightly.
But he does.
I’ve been kissed twice in my life, both times bad, both times by boys who didn’t make me feel anything.
With him, I feel everything.
He kisses me with nowhere to be and nothing to prove, taking his time.
His beard scrapes against my chin, his bottom lip catching mine and dragging.
He tastes clean, like water and a trace of mint.
When I rise onto my toes to get closer, he makes a low sound against my lips and presses his hand at the small of my back, drawing me flush against him.
He’s so much larger than me. Wrapped up in him, nothing in the world can reach me, and I stop wanting it to.
His other hand spreads wide between my shoulder blades, and the heat of it soaks straight through the thin cotton of my dress. He’s harder than I am everywhere we touch. His hands won’t settle on one place—my spine, my hip, and the nape of my neck.
When he pulls back, his forehead drops to mine. His breathing’s gone rough. So has mine.
“Tell me you want this,” he says. “Tell me you’re staying.”
“I want this.” I brush my lips against him. “Tanner, I’m staying.”
My using his real name does it. Whatever he’s been holding back breaks free.
He kisses me again, and there’s nothing reined in now. The kiss is deeper, rougher, and more intense as his tongue brushes mine.
He walks me toward the bed, and the mattress catches behind my knees. I sit down hard and raise my head up to look at him.
“Lie back,” he tells me.
I do. He follows me down, bracing on his forearms so none of his bulk lands on me. The mattress dips toward him, and I tip a fraction into the dent he makes in it.
He kisses my throat. My collarbone. His mouth is hot and unhurried, leaving a cool track behind where the air hits the damp. The strap of my dress slides off my shoulder, and his mouth follows it down, the drag of his beard along my skin pulling a contented noise from me.
Each press of his mouth lands a beat behind where I brace for it, so I’m always reaching for the next before it comes. I’m coming apart by inches.
“Tanner.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve never—” The embarrassment is real. I’ve never let anyone past a kiss. “I haven’t done this. Any of it.”
He stops and lifts his head. His dark eyes hold mine.
“Then we go slow,” he says. “You tell me to stop, I stop. At any point. Okay?”
“I won’t want you to stop.”
“I need you to understand. You say it, I’m done. That’s the deal.”
I reach for the hem of my dress with a nod. He stops my hands.
“Let me.”
He peels the sundress up and over my head and drops it off the side of the bed. The room is warm, but goosebumps rise up on my arms under his attention, every fine hair lifting.
He looks at me, naked except for my underwear, like he’s never wanted something more.
“Fuck, Eden.”
I should cover myself. Years of being told my body is a temptation to be hidden, and the reflex is right there, halfway up my arms.
I resist. I let him look. I want him to look.
His fingers trace from my throat down between my breasts to my stomach, rough fingertips dragging over skin nobody’s ever touched, and my back arches up off the mattress to chase it.
He learns what my body likes with that hand. No hurry in him. He grazes his hand over my ribs, the dip of my waist, the curve of my hip, and every place he touches comes alive and stays awake.
His thumb brushes the underside of my breast, and my whole body jolts toward it. He does it again, learning what it does to me, then tugs my nipples between rough fingers until I’m telling him to keep going.
There’s no shame here. There’s only his hand, big enough to span my whole ribcage, the same hand that breaks bones for the club, touching me like I’m the most fragile thing he’s ever held.
I put my own hands on him while he does it, because I want to know him, too. Under my palms, his skin runs hot and tight over muscle, ridged with old scars I can’t see in the dark, only trace—a seam along his shoulder, a knot below his ribs.
My thumb finds the scar along his ribs, healed now. The only reason this man is breathing is because of me. I move my thumb around it, careful. He catches my wrist and moves my hand lower over the healed wound, telling me without saying it that I don’t have to be careful with him tonight.
By the time his fingers reach the band of my underwear, I’m pushing up into him, needing more from him.
“Is this okay?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He drags my underwear down my legs and drops them off the side of the bed, and for a moment, he looks at me, bare and open, more exposed than I’ve ever let anyone make me.
Then he settles his head between my legs, his shoulders so broad they push my thighs wide on their own. His beard scrapes the inside of my thigh, up toward where I’m aching for him. He kisses my thighs, taking his time until I’m squirming under him, and then his mouth is on me.
The touch of his tongue tears a sound out of me I’ve never made. My hand flies to his hair and fists there. When he groans against me, the vibration shoots through every nerve in my body.
He’s patient, using long strokes against my sensitive nub to build a pressure that winds tighter behind my hipbones with every pass. I’m climbing toward an edge I’ve only found alone, in the dark, hating myself after.
There’s no hating myself now. There’s only his mouth, his beard rough against the inside of my thighs, and his hands pinning my hips down so I can’t squirm away from how good it is.
The delicious sensation builds and builds past anything I’ve ever given myself, past anything I knew my body could do.
“Tanner.” His name comes out wrecked. “I’m—”
I don’t need to finish the sentence, because he knows what’s happening to my body.
He doesn’t let up. He pushes me right up to it and over, and I come apart under his mouth with my spine bowed off the bed and his name on my lips. Every muscle pulls tight and then lets go at once, a long pulse that wrings me out and leaves me trembling on his sheets.
When it becomes too sensitive, I push him back gently.
He kisses the inside of my thigh and comes up over me, and I’m shaking when he kisses my mouth, and I taste myself on him. I should be embarrassed. I’m not.
He brushes my hair off my damp forehead with two fingers.
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod. I can’t do much else yet; my limbs are loose and useless.
“You’re shaking,” he says.
“Good shaking.”
He huffs, the closest thing to a laugh I’ve gotten out of him, and it changes his whole face. “Good shaking,” he repeats. “I’ll take that as you enjoyed it.”
“Yes, I enjoyed it.”
“We’re not done,” he says.
“Thank God for that,” I respond.
He huffs again.
He kisses me again and settles his hips between my legs. The hard length of him lies hot against me—not in me, only there, pressed along where I’m wet and open and aching from his mouth.
I don’t plan to move. My hips do it on their own, a slow drag up into him, chasing the pressure, and the friction punches a gasp out of me.
He goes rigid above me. “Do that again.”
So I do. I push up into him, and he drops his forehead to mine and lets me, holding himself on locked arms while I learn the shape of what I want against him.
Then he takes over. He moves his hips and slides his cock—not penetrating me, only through my folds. With every movement, the thick ridge of him drags over my clit on every pass. The head of his cock catches my opening, and my whole body jerks.
“Tanner—”
His mouth is at my ear. “Not yet. Just this.”
He works himself through the slick of me, certain, unhurried, and every glide drags fire over the spot his mouth already found, building me up again faster this time.
I’m soaking him. I can hear it, the wet drag of us together. My hips lift into him, greedy, working myself against the hard line of him.
He keeps his eyes on my face and reads everything I can’t say. Every muscle in him is locked, holding on by a thread, giving me this and only this until I’m strung so tight I’d beg if I had the breath for it.
“Please.” I find it anyway. “I need all of you.”
“You have me.”
He reaches over to the nightstand, and there’s the tear of foil, and he kneels up to slip the condom on.
“What happens after tonight?” I ask. I told him I didn’t want to talk, but I’m talking.
He settles over me again, forearms bracketing my head, and holds my eyes until I quit moving.
“This isn’t a tonight thing, Eden.” His thumb strokes my cheekbone. “You’re my forever.”
I exhale, my whole body feeling the weight of those words.
He reaches between us and lines himself up, and the blunt pressure of him there makes me clench up on instinct.
“I’ve got you. Breathe.”
I breathe, and my breath shakes going out.
He pushes in by inches, giving me a little and stopping, letting me stretch around him. It burns, and it’s strange, and I want more.
A stinging sensation pulls as my body opens for him, sharp enough that my nails dig into his shoulders.
Sweat beads at his hairline, his jaw is tight, and his arms are locked.
He keeps his eyes on my face the whole time, reading me, stopping when I wince, pressing in when I loosen. There’s no rush in him at all.
“Still with me?”
“Yeah.” My nails are dug into his shoulders. “Don’t stop.”
He presses into me, and once he’s fully seated, I’ve got both arms locked around his neck and my face pressed to his throat, breathing him in. He holds there, buried and unmoving, his forearms shaking with the work of staying put.
Every place we’re joined, my pulse throbs around him, the stretch right at the edge of what I can take. I lock my ankles behind him to keep him deep, and he groans low, his whole body shaking with how hard he’s reining himself in.
“You’re—” He cuts himself off. “Tell me when.”
I tip my hips up, testing, and the drag of him inside me turns the burn into a deep ache that’s way more pleasure than pain.
“Now,” I say. “I’m ready.”
He moves. Careful at first, his eyes on my face for every flinch that doesn’t come anymore.
The stretch gives over to a slick, deep pull that builds with every stroke, and I rise to meet him without being shown how, my body learning him the same as it learned his mouth.
Every thrust drags over a place inside me I didn’t know was there.
“That’s it,” he says, rough against my jaw as he pumps in and out of me.
The pressure gathers again, deeper and fuller than before, wound around my center.
He drops a hand between us and finds my clit, and that’s all it takes—his fingers and the deep push of him at once, dragging me past where I can hold it.
“Tanner, it’s happening again.”
“Let go.”
I break around him. It rolls up from where we’re joined, and my thighs clamp around his hips. My body clenches tight around the thick length of him, a long pull of pleasure that pulses through me.
He follows me over with a groan torn from somewhere deep, his arms caging me, his hips stuttering and then stopping, and we come down together into a shaking heap.
His breathing slows. My hand moves up and down his spine in long passes.
Soreness settles between my legs, a tender ache. It’s a good kind of proof that I gave my virginity to him, and it can’t be undone.
He moves off me and steps away for a moment, taking care of the condom, then pulls me into his side as he settles back down, tucking me under his arm. My ear rests over his heart.
His skin is damp under my cheek, and I press closer into the heat coming off him.
“You’re mine now,” he says into the dark. “You walked in that door. Around here, claiming isn’t something a man says and then takes back. It’s done.”
I lift my head to look at him. “I want to be yours,” I say. “But that goes both ways. I don’t share, either.”
The corner of his mouth goes up.
“Mine,” he says again, making it permanent.
I settle down again with my ear over his heart and his arm anchoring me.
I’m exactly where I chose to be. Nobody put me here. Nobody talked me into it or out of it. I chose, and the choice was only ever mine.
His breathing evens out under my ear, and I let mine match it, and I stay.