His answers got less verbal as we went, more hands than words. He started guiding me without thinking about it, tilting my hips, slowing me with a squeeze of his fingers when he needed to breathe, urging me faster when he wanted more. Filth slipped out between gritted teeth.
“Look at you,” he rasped when I leaned back, bracing my hands on his chest. “Riding me like you were made for it.”
Heat pooled low and heavy. My cheeks burned, but there was no way in hell I was looking away from him.
Somewhere in the motion, I stopped tracking what was “best” for his injury and started memorizing little things about him instead. The way his eyes went half lidded right before a groan broke free. The angle that dragged a curse out of him and had his nails scraping down my back. The way his chest hitched when I leaned in, hands in his hair, and kissed him while my body moved over his.
A sharp ache bloomed in my chest mid-thrust, sudden and terrifying.
I could do this forever,whispered something traitorous and true.
With him. Only him.
I cupped his face, pulled his mouth up to mine, and kissed him like that thought hadn’t just shifted my entire axis. His lips were hot and sure, tongue stroking into my mouth in a rhythm that matched the slow roll of his hips up into me.
He broke away on a ragged breath, forehead pressed to mine, voice raw against my lips. “You have no idea what you’re giving me back.”
Emotion punched through the heat. Tears pricked, unexpected and fierce.
“I think I do,” I managed. I hoped he didn’t notice the wobble in my voice.
The tension coiled tighter, lower, my muscles trembling with the effort of holding on. His hands were everywhere—hips, waist, up my back, in my hair—pulling me in, anchoring me to him.
“Clara,” he groaned, voice breaking on my name. “I can feel you?—”
“Wes,” I gasped, the world narrowing to the drag, the heat, the way everything inside me clenched and climbed and begged. “I’m?—”
That last word dissolved into a sound I couldn’t have identified if my life depended on it.
The pleasure hit like a snapped wire. My whole body went tight around him first—thighs locking at his hips, spine arching, every muscle strung to breaking—before something inside me finally let go and broke wide open. I clung to his shoulders, nails digging into his skin as I rode it out, his name tearing from my throat on a ragged gasp while wave after wave rolled through me, hot and blinding and so intense it felt like relief.
He followed me over the edge, a half second behind, his whole body going tight beneath mine. His arms banded around me, hauling me against his chest as he groaned into my neck, the sound low and broken and so grateful it made my eyes sting.
We stayed like that for a long moment—tangled, shaking, breathing each other’s air. His heart hammered against my ribs. My thighs trembled on either side of his hips. His injured leg didn’t flinch. It didn’t seem to exist for him at all except as something that had done exactly what he needed it to do.
Eventually, my muscles gave up and I slumped against him, cheek pressed to his shoulder. He smoothed a hand down myspine, slow and steady, like he wasn’t sure whether he was soothing me or himself.
I could have stayed there forever.
“Hey,” he murmured into my hair after a while, voice rough but soft. “You okay?”
I let out a laugh that shook. “Defineokay.”
He huffed against my temple. “Not dead, not mad, can still feel your legs?”
“Barely,” I said. “But in a good way.”
He held me tighter, like he could squeeze the words into something more permanent.
The thought of this being a lesson forhimfelt ridiculous.
There was nothing clinical about the way he’d looked at me. Nothing casual about the way my heart had nearly broken open when he said I was giving him something back. This had not been practice. It was sex, yes—hot and messy and consuming—but there had been something threaded through every touch, every kiss.
A life,whispered the part of me I didn’t let anyone see.This is what a life with him would feel like.
I wanted it with a bone-deep ferocity that scared the hell out of me.
I pressed my face into his neck, breathing him in, trying to memorize the exact mix of soap and skin and sweat—of safety and danger and home.
Somewhere along the way, our lesson had stopped being about his body and started becoming something else entirely.
My heart was in so much more trouble than I’d ever planned for.