Talia was softness, wetness, and sublime pleasure wrapped around me so completely that there were times I forgot what kind of man I was supposed to be. Careful. Controlled. Somebody with restraint. Then she would open for me, take me deep, make one of those broken little sounds against my mouth, and all that discipline I liked to claim would start coming apart in my hands.
One night, I had been stroking her slow and deep, one hand braced beside her head, the other holding two fingers against her tongue so she could taste herself the way I had learned she liked. Her eyes had closed on a gasp, lips soft around my fingers, body tight and wet under mine, and a fucking tear slipped out the corner of my eye before I could stop it.
One tear.
Like my body had needed somewhere to put what she was doing to me.
My mouth had gone slack around a sound I barely held back, toes damn near cramping from how hard I was fighting not to cum inside her. And she had no idea. None. She was too gone under me, sucking my fingers, hips lifting, pussy pulling at me like she wanted everything I had been trying to keep out of her.
Shit, that woman had me fucked up.
Kendra had come by two days ago, talking about she was stealing her friend back for one evening and acting like I had joined a gang without knowing the rules. Talia laughed so hard in my living room she had to grab the arm of the sofa, and tenminutes later, Kendra and I were standing in the kitchen talking like we had known each other longer than forty-five minutes.
That was how it had been with the people around her too.
Easy where it needed to be.
Real where it counted.
We barely posted in the group anymore. Not even on our own pages. Twitter was mostly me talking sports and the occasional banking rant. Talia still used Instagram more than I did, and every now and then, she’d throw up some little picture from dinner or a shot of her shoes beside mine at the front door, and the comments would fill with hearts, eyes, and flames.
Kendra would pop under it with some loud shit like, IKDR!!
And Talia would respond with hearts, kisses, anything that said she was happy without explaining who had helped put that smile on her face.
I’d look at the screen grinning anyway, because I liked seeing her like that. I liked knowing some of that light on her face had my fingerprints on it.
But that was also where it got complicated.
Part of me enjoyed the softness of it. The little signs. The way we had something good enough for people to notice without handing them the whole thing. Another part of me got tight every time the outside edged too close. Too many eyes. Too much room for folks to start building stories around something I was still trying to hold right.
Both things lived in me at once.
I liked seeing her glow and I liked being the reason for it.
And the minute the world leaned in too hard, something in me wanted to pull her back where it was ours again.
Still, the deeper truth stayed the same.
I was happy with her.
Happy in a way that had stopped feeling casual a while ago. Happy enough that the old rules I used on lighter shit had started fitting wrong. Happy enough that somewhere in the last week, I had started thinking I might love her.
I hadn’t said it yet.
Hadn’t turned the thought over enough to trust my own mouth with it.
But it kept showing up anyway. In the quiet. In the mornings. In the way my body settled when she was near and got restless when she wasn’t.
Then she looked up and saw me.
Her whole face changed.
That did something to me every time, but this one hit different. Maybe because this was her rooftop. Her event. Her in full motion, sharp and beautiful with the skyline behind her, running the kind of night that asked something of her. And still, when her eyes found mine, the shift came. Her smile came all theway in, bright enough to make the rest of the rooftop lose focus for a second.
She said something to the journalist, then came toward me, weaving through clusters of people and high-top tables like the whole space knew to make room for her.
I met her halfway and caught her by the waist, pulling her into me before she got all the way there.