“Please,” she breathed again.
“Please what?” he said, and pressed a hot kiss into the vein pulsing in her neck. He grazed his teeth over it and then traced it with his tongue.
“More,” she said. It was the only word she could muster in the heady fog that had consumed her. The ledge she’d fallen over earlier was quickly reapproaching and preparing to pull her into the abyss again. She squeezed his hand that she held and felt his other hand still moving between her legs. His fingers dipped and glided; his thumb traced out delirious circles.
“More what?” he whispered, and bit her earlobe. Tinglesshot down her arm and turned the whole right side of her body to an icy fire.
“Chuck!” she whimpered, needy and fraught.
A soft chuckle puffed against her neck. He was getting off on teasing her, and if it weren’t so fucking hot, she would have scolded him for it.
She used her free hand to grip his face and hold it in front of hers. “You know exactly what,” she said sternly. “I’m going to die, remember?”
He looked down at her with a smug little grin. His pupils were blown out, his cheeks flushed, his hair a tumbling mess.God.He was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She couldn’t help smiling back at him despite the ferocious longing burning her alive. “Well, we wouldn’t want that, would we,” he said, and sat up to remove his underwear.
Olivia propped herself on her elbows to watch him fully undress. He was intentionally slow about it, knowing that her gaze was hungrily tracking his every move. How someone could make such a meal out of removing a single small piece of clothing was a true talent. Or perhaps she was simply starving for him. He hooked his thumbs into the elastic waistband of his boxer briefs and slid them down one painful centimeter at a time. The pronounced V of his lower abdomen slowly came into view like a rising sun, and when he fully exposed himself, Olivia reflexively wet her lips and had to make a conscious effort not to reach out and grab him.
“About time,” she said with an arched brow once he pulled his underwear off his ankles and tossed them aside.
He moved back between her bent legs and placed his hands on her knees. “When did you get so impatient?” he said with a sly grin, and sat back on his heels.
She could hardly hear what he was saying. The need to feel him inside her was growing primal. Unable to stop herself, she reached out and took him in her hand again. “When someone locked me in a house with you and said I couldn’t touch you. Please stop torturing me.”
He fell forward onto one hand, his hips between her thighs, and stilled. He used his other hand to wrap hers and hold himself an unbearable inch from where her aching body eagerly waited for his. He grinned down at her. “I just wanted to hear you say it again.”
She knew what he meant, and she knew that giving it to him would get her what she desperately needed. “Please,” she said. “Please, please, please.”
He gave her the wicked version of his dimple-popping grin and rocked his hips forward. She let go of him and felt him sink in one thick, perfect inch. Her eyes fluttered closed, and her head tilted back.Finally.A guttural moan poured out of her as her body tightened around him. He sucked in a jagged breath and then pulled back out.
“No!Please, please, please,” she begged, and reached for him. The need was desperate. Frantic. Where she normally would have played along, savored his torturous game of slow, teasing inches, she couldn’t take it after being forced to keep their hands off each other.
When he sank back in again, deeper this time, she took advantage. She swung her hands around to grip his ridiculously toned ass and shoved him all the way inside in one hot, firm stroke.
“F-fuck, Liv,” he stuttered as he fell forward and caught himself on his forearms, sounding like he might have been about to come undone already. The smell of him, the heat and weightof his body fully on top of and inside hers, engulfed her in a swirl of perfection.
“Sorry, but we’ve been tortured enough. I need you now.”
He looked down at her, messy hair tumbling forward and handsome face aglow, like he hadn’t considered her point but agreed with it now. Whatever game he’d been planning to play dissolved, and he pushed his hips against hers, notching himself as deep as he could go and making her gasp. “You have me,” he said with a soft bend of his lips.
It was the Olympics of makeup sex.
Chuck found angles Olivia didn’t even know existed. They clawed at each other, caressed each other. Sped up and slowed down. Tangled all their limbs and slicked each other with sweat. Olivia couldn’t get enough. It was equally new and exciting and like watching one of her favorite movies for the thousandth time. She responded to his every touch, rising and falling at his command, and he to hers. Their bodies belonged to each other. She was so consumed she couldn’t tell where she ended and he began.
She eventually sensed him rapidly scaling toward a summit. She heard it in his hitched breath, felt it in the urgent speed of his strokes going deeper and deeper. All over again, she was climbing to the same peak. A burn had started in her toes and rose higher and higher until her thighs shook with want, with near painful need for relief.
When Chuck stilled against her with a hard shudder, groaning out an exquisite, jagged sound that made her heart swell, she tumbled over the edge with him as if he’d reached out to grab her as he fell. They crashed together, his arm hooked under her knee and his other wrapped underneath her, holding them chest-to-chest in an impossibly tight knot. They shatteredto pieces because of and for each other, an infinite loop of giving and receiving that had her breathlessly gasping and him reciting a stuttered poem of her name andperfectandso goodandholy fuckuntil they both collapsed in a blissed-out, exhausted heap.
•••
The usual cocktail of confusionthat swirled through Olivia’s blood after sleeping with Chuck was nowhere to be found as she lazed against his body. They were normally making up from a fight, their boiling blood temporarily setting a new course only to turn back to anger once they finished. But not this time. She felt nothing but peace. And it would have worried her if she’d allowed it to, given the uncertainty of their future. But she staved off thought of anything beyond the exact moment they were in. Only him; only her. His exhales becoming her inhales, the space between them nonexistent.
She lay halfway on top of him, facedown into the pillow with her head cradled between his shoulder and neck and his arm looped around her. The smell of him, the clean, heady scent ofhim, surrounded her: his pillowcase, his hair, his skin still damp from exertion pressed against her nose. She could feel his heart beating against hers where her chest pressed into his, a steady call-and-response as they drifted in a calm silence. Chuck used his thumbnail to trace a line up the back of her arm that broke her body out in tingling goose bumps. She shivered with a smile and snuggled herself closer to him.
Neither of them had spoken in ages, not wanting to burst the safe, perfect bubble. They’d taken to communicating by touch: her lips grazing his jaw, fingertips gliding over his chest;his hand stroking her back and tangling in her tousled hair. Olivia could have existed in the moment forever.
“Liv,” Chuck eventually said after what could have been the most perfect century of all time. His voice softly rumbled in his chest.
Olivia lifted her head to look at him and found a dreamy, warm haze in his eyes. His hair was a mess, his cheeks beautifully flushed. He looked plainly like a man possessed by feeling.