65. Sage #2
“You said five more minutes twenty minutes ago.”
“And it was the best twenty minutes of my day. I’m extending the pleasure.”
I settle into him. His chest is warm and solid and his arm is heavy across my waist and for a moment, I let myself be nothing but present. In this apartment. In this bed. With this man.
“We really need to get moving,” I say eventually. “Amy is expecting us. And we’re supposed to be packing my stuff to take to your house.”
“Ours,” Holden says.
I look at him.
“The house,” he says. “You called it mine. It’s ours.”
The word blooms in my chest. I lean over and kiss him—soft, quick, the kind of kiss that says everything and takes nothing.
“Ours,” I repeat. “I like the sound of that.”
“Good. Because Milo was busy drawing up a chore chart this morning and your name is already on it. He’s also half-finished with his cross-stitch.”
“He’s not coping well with not working. I can’t believe Fenrir locked him out of his own system.”
“The Norse God’s way of punishing him for going off script. He’ll get access again when they need his help. Until then, it’s a waiting game.”
I swing my legs off the bed and stand, stretching. Every muscle aches in the good way—the freshly used, thoroughly wrung-out way that makes you feel more alive. I reach for my jeans on the floor.
Holden is off the bed before I can get them past my ankles. His hands close around my waist and he lifts me like I weigh nothing, which is rude and also incredibly hot—and turns me to face him.
“What are you doing?”
“Before you fully move out of this place,” he says, setting me down and backing me toward the doorway, “there are a few things we need to revisit.”
“Holden, we don’t have time—”
“We have exactly as much time as I decide we have.” He walks me backward through the hallway, hands on my hips, eyes dark and certain. “This apartment has been very good to me, wildcat. I want to say a proper goodbye.”
“A proper— Holden, what does that even—”
He picks me up again. Carries me to the living room. Sets me on the couch.
“This couch,” he says, dropping to his knees in front of me, “is where I first ate your pussy while Milo watched. Do you remember?”
My face is on fire. “I remember.”
“You came so hard you almost pulled my hair out.” He parts my thighs with his hands, slow, deliberate, watching my face the whole time. “I’ve thought about it every time I’ve sat on this couch since.”
“Holden—”
“Every. Time.” He presses his mouth to the inside of my knee. Then higher. Then higher still.
I grab the cushion beneath me and hold on, because Holden on his knees with that look in his eyes is not a man who’s going to be rushed, and the sound I make when his mouth finally reaches its destination is loud enough that the neighbors definitely hear.
He takes his time with me, relentless, lips and tongue and hands in a symphony of total, consuming attention.
My head tips back on the cushions and I let out a sound that, if recorded, would probably play well in court as evidence of intent to murder.
He is devastating. He is single-minded. He knows my body like the blueprint is burned onto his tongue and he isn’t leaving a millimeter unexplored.
“No,” I say, when his mouth pauses to let me breathe.
“No what?” he murmurs. His hands are on my knees, holding them apart, his face a study in satisfaction.
“No stopping.” There’s that rare, dazzling smile again—predatory, delighted, deeply in love with the way he’s wrecking me.
“As my wildcat commands,” he says, and then he seals his mouth over my clit and sucks.
I come shaking and gasping, one hand fisted in his hair and the other gripping the arm of the couch. He presses a kiss to my inner thigh and says, “One down.”
“One down? How many are we—”
He stands. Picks me up off the couch. Walks me to the kitchen and sets me on the counter. The exact spot we first had sex. I’d cut my finger on a broken glass and he’d sucked the blood from my fingertip. I’d never been more turned on in my life.
“This kitchen,” he says, stepping between my legs, “is where I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That I was fucked.” His hands frame my face. “That you were going to ruin every boundary I’d ever built and I was going to let you. That I’d been alone for years and suddenly there was a woman who was as reckless and turned on by blood as me, and I thought—there. That’s the thing I was missing.”
“Holden.” My voice has gone quiet. Stripped.
“I love you,” he says again. “And when I said permanent last week, I wasn’t only talking about the house.
I meant you. Us. All of it. Your coffee mugs and your disaster hair and the four other men who love you.
I want the chore chart and the stupid cross-stitch that says ‘Full tummies before we talk murder.’ I want the arguments about the thermostat and the mornings where there’s no hot water because five people showered before me.
I want the mess, Sage. The whole beautiful, complicated, impossible mess.
And one day, if we can figure out how to do it and make it legal, I want to marry you, watch your belly swell with our babies and love you until we’re old and cranky. ”
“Can we yell at the neighborhood kids to get off our lawn?”
“We can do whatever you want, wildcat.”
I kiss him. Hard. Pull him into me with my legs and my arms and everything I have, and when he lifts me off the counter and pushes inside me—slow, devastatingly slow, his forehead pressed to mine—the sound I make isn’t about the sex.
It’s about the word home and the way he describes our future, and what it means to finally have one.
We say goodbye to the counter and the fridge. Then the hallway. Then the bathroom door, which is logistically questionable but emotionally significant because it’s where he once leaned in the doorway and watched me brush my teeth and I caught him smiling in the mirror and pretended I hadn’t.
By the time we actually start packing, an hour has passed and I’ve come four times. Holden’s hair is standing up in six different directions and we’re both going to need a shower.
“You’re ridiculous,” I say, folding Amy’s sweaters into a box.
“A proper farewell requires a comprehensive tour.” He tapes a box shut. “I didn’t get to say goodbye to the laundry closet.”
“We are not having sex in the laundry closet.”
“For now.”
I throw a balled-up sock at his head. He catches it without looking.
His work phone buzzes before he can throw it back. Holden checks the screen, and every trace of amusement leaves his face.
“What is it?”