Great Big Beautiful Life(106)

My gut clenches. I know he’d tell me, and I’m dying to hear, but with how little time we have left and how many rules we’ve already broken, this feels like a line I can avoid crossing.

I’ll ask her myself tomorrow.

“Tonight, I want it to just be us.” No thinking about the job, or about our lives on opposite sides of the country, or how heartbroken I might be come Saturday night.

“Just us,” he agrees softly, lifting my hands to kiss the tips of my fingers. When our lips next meet, every ounce of my restraint cracks. I reach for the buttons on his shirt. He slips mine over my head and lifts me against him, my thighs wrapping around his bare waist, his heart and mine pounding in sync. He carries me to his bed and we tumble onto it, the rest of our outer layers coming off as we bury ourselves in the blankets, the soft smell of almond everywhere and still not enough. I press my nose against his neck and inhale, his low laugh vibrating through me.

He skims my underwear down my legs, leaving trails of goose bumps behind, and I push his briefs down too. We tangle together, a knot of heat and electricity. “Is this okay?” I whisper, my hands on his jaw, his on my hip bones as he settles his weight on top of me.

“It’s just us tonight,” he whispers.

My heart thrills, but I still ask, “Is that a yes?”

He kisses me more deeply as his hand wanders over to his wallet on the bedside table. “Yes,” he says, pulling a condom out and kissing me once more before sitting back on his heels.

“Thank god,” I breathe, watching him work the condom on. I pull him back to me hungrily, my whole body tightening in anticipation of the moment he presses against me, then relaxing to make room for him as he pushes into me with a rough groan.

“Oh, god,” I cry out, a little too loud, but I’ve never been great at playing it cool, and it feels so good to finally have him. He shivers over me, holding still until I urge him closer, gradually taking more of him, little sparks flying across the corners of my vision from the sensation. He bucks his hips once, a test, and I cry out again.

“You okay?” he asks, cupping my jaw in one hand.

“I’m amazing,” I breathe.

“You are,” he replies. My laugh is cut short when he moves again. The pleasure whites everything else out. I arch up under him, and his hands scrape down to my thighs, gripping hard as he thrusts into me. “I want you on top of me,” he says.

We roll together until I am. I sit up on my knees, then slowly lower myself onto him, my eyes falling closed at the hot slide of our bodies together. He folds me over him, kissing me deep, his tongue stroking into me as I lift myself slowly and sink back down.

“God, Alice.” He grips my waist, hard enough that his nails will likely leave marks but still not hard enough. No part of him could ever be deep enough in my heart or body to satisfy me.

I grind myself against him; knot my hands into his dark, overgrown hair; bite down on the side of his neck to keep from crying when he grabs my ass and pulls me even harder against him. He catches my breast in his mouth, and everything in me tightens. I sit back, gasping for breath before I come undone.

“Sit up,” I tell him, pulling on his shoulder, and he does, his back pressed to the headboard. I shuffle closer, his hands gently guiding me onto him in this new position.

“Alice,” he hisses against my throat as I move with him, slowly now, almost delirious. A small noise rises in my throat, a hm? that turns into something more like a purr.

“I can’t get enough of you,” he whispers, his lips moving in a light, teasing pattern along my neck. “I thought I’d been in love before, but this is different.”

“I know,” I whisper back, still moving in that languid rise and fall, the need in me mounting with every glide, my voice thin and breathless. “I feel like you’re mine. Like you’re mine in a way no one else ever has been.”

“I want you to be mine,” he murmurs, gripping me harder. We move faster.

I try to tell him I am, to explain to him that all the things we don’t know about each other, all the time we haven’t spent together, couldn’t possibly weigh more than this feeling in my bones, the joy of being close to him.

But I can’t. The feeling swells within me, too big for words.

We flip over again, him stretched out on top of me, one of his hands holding both of my wrists above my head.

“I love you,” he tells me again, and I try to say it back, but the only thing I can get out is his name, again and again, like I’m begging him for something. Begging for him.

And then his name breaks into a wordless cry as I bow up under him, the waves of sensation pummeling me, his hiss of my name my only tether through the dark wash of pleasure.

He breaks too, and I tighten my thighs around him, holding him to me as we crest. I have no idea if it goes on for seconds or for hours, that feeling. But finally it draws back, and he slides clear of me and drops beside me onto the bed, pulling me into a curl against his sweat-slicked body.

We lay there, catching our breath in a heap, the blankets kicked off and his arm a loose coil around me, so long that we start to drift off.

“Will you stay?” he murmurs sleepily.

“We haven’t even eaten dinner,” I tease. “You can’t kick me out yet.”

“Tonight, I mean,” he says.