***
We wrap around each other like vines, entwining tighter with each passing moment. I kiss him with joy in my heart and realize all the anger I spent years harboring toward him is finally gone. All the feelings of inadequacy and hopeless unrequited love have fled on the wind. He’s forced them out. Chipped away at the walls of the tiny box I’d shoved him into — with dark-eyed looks and teasing comments and passion-fueled fights and breath-stealing kisses — until the tiny cage where I’d locked him away for almost a decade disappeared entirely.
His eyes never leave mine as I pull his shirt over his head, as he kicks off his jeans and stretches out over me, until we’re skin on skin with not a single barrier left between us. The veins cord tightly in his arms as he braces his body above mine. I kiss him again as my legs loop around his hips to pull him against me.
“Come closer,” I demand, arching up into him.
“Oh, I’ll come.” He grins against my mouth as his hands slide lower. “But not before you do.”
Holy frack.
For what feels like an eternity, his fingers move over my skin – a bow over strings, pulling notes of pleasure from my body until I’m shaking with it. He’s the conductor and I’m his private symphony, crying at his command and singing at his touch until the melody of passion he’s been playing with his hands builds to a crescendo and I can’t take another moment of torture without him inside me.
“Nate,” I whisper, a chord of desperation in my tone. “Please.”
“Are you sure?” he mutters, control hanging by a thread as he stares down into my eyes. “We don’t have to do this, if you aren’t ready. If you want to wait…”
“We’re naked. There’s a condom on your dick. Your hands are on my boobs. I justlicked your abswith my tongue.” I glare at him. “What possibly gave you the impression that I don’t want to do this?”
His forehead drops to mine. “I just want you to be sure. This isn’t the kind of thing you get to do-over.”
“Nate.” I kiss him until we’re both shaking with need. “You keep saying I’ve been waiting — don’t you know what I’ve been waiting for?”
He stares at me with a question in his eyes.
“You,” I whisper. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Phoebe.” His voice vibrates with electricity and emotion. “Phoebe.”
In the space between two heartbeats, he drives into me and changes my life forever.
***
Not long ago, I thought of Nate and me as a natural disaster that would kill us both. Two opposing landmasses whose collision would cause catastrophic damage to both sides if they ever gave way beneath the tension building between them.
I was right; we are an earthquake.
We shift and sigh and shape each other with fingertips and lips — until the ground shakes and boundaries fall, until fault lines are crossed and every bit of terrain is left unrecognizable.
Nate makes love to me and it levels us both to rubble.
But there’s beauty in the wreckage. Pleasure in the pain. Because, in the end, his ruins are indiscernible from mine. We’re together when the dust settles and the shakes subside, holding each other so close I can’t tell my soul from his.
***
“Do you remember the first day we met?” I ask absently, running my fingers down the length of his bare chest.
He goes still. “Of course I do.”
“Do you remember the prayer you came up with to bless the bird funeral?”
A chuckle moves through him. “I think it wasI Believe I Can Flyby R. Kelly.”
“I thought you weresocool.” I laugh lightly. “So grown up and original. Had I known you were just plagiarizing sub-par R&B songs, I wouldn’t have been half as enamored with you.”
He tilts my head up so our eyes meet. The soft look in his makes my heart turn over. “You were enamored with me, huh?”
“Yep.” I nod. “Thankfully I grew out ofthatnonsense.”