Page 114 of When We Had Forever
My hands press against his chest. “I don’t want to talk anymore. I just want...”
He waits, his breath coming in ragged bursts. “What? What do you want?”
The thing beneath my ribs swells to a throb. “To stop missing you, I think. I’ve spent half my life missing you. And right now, I just want to know what it feels like not to.”
His eyes flare wider. “Are you asking me to—”
“Yes.” I pour everything inside me into that single word. Every last one of those aching, lonely nights when I ran out into the dark, searching for something I didn’t even understand I’d lost. “Please.”
He stares up, but in another second, he lets go. I catch the exact moment when his eyes darken and his lips part. The point at which he understands what I need from him and decides to give it.
His arms lock around me, pulling me down. Our lips crash together. I kiss him like I’m starving for it, like I’ll die if I don’t fill myself with the taste of him, with his smell—that incredible smell, the one I caught in the kitchen last night and should have recognized, because it’s the same deep-forest rainstorm it’s always been.
He rolls me beneath him, feasting on my mouth. We aren’t gentle this time. My fingers scrabble against the ridges of his back. He releases my lips and sucks at my neck—god, that feels like it’ll leave a mark, and I hope it does—then tears at my clothes like they’ve offended him. My orange top hits the rug, followed by my leggings. I rip at my bra and panties myself.
He rears back and stares down as I lie naked and spread beneath him. He’s breathing so hard I can’t hear myself think, but I don’t want to, anyway.
If I did, it would only be about how right he is—there’s no starting over, no fixing all the things that went wrong. The sun will rise tomorrow and everything will still be smashed to pieces. I’ll still have fourteen years’ worth of secrets and betrayals to shoulder. The past will still weigh enough to crush me.
But, for maybe the first time since a girl stood on a mountaintop and let a boy convince her they both were giants, I don’t care. What Michael stole from me, I’m taking back. I’m seizing a moment, aright nowno one can rob me of, if only this once.
All my yesterdays will still be waiting for me tomorrow.
I curl my fingertips into Grayson’s waistband, hunting for the boxers underneath. Nothing meets my touch except smooth, hot skin. My eyes flare. “You’re not wearing any underwear. Why are you not wearing underwear?”
He raises an eyebrow, managing to look simultaneously provocative and uncertain. “Um...irrational optimism?”
Well, isn’t he just full of impressive choices. Ever so slowly, I draw his pants down and take him in my hands.
He makes a primal sound and curls forward, catching himself with an arm propped beside my head. His breath fans across my cheek, heated and quivering, as he kicks his pants all the way off. The whole time I touch him, he looks at me. Straight on, catching me up in that ocean of his, even while my hands coax a strangled sound of pleasure from him.
My breath picks up tempo, keeping time with my fingers. This is so different. Michael always closed his eyes. But Grayson keeps his wide open.
He finally takes my hands and pulls my wrists up over my head, pressing them into the bed. My whole body comes alive, the skin over my rib cage pulling taut as he stretches me lengthwise.
He dips his head and paints whorls of flame against my neck with his tongue. He explores the base of my throat, the ridge of my clavicle, follows the swell of my breast and pulls my nipple into his mouth.
A stab of heated lightning shoots down into my center. Grayson drives it ever deeper. His tongue works at me while his free hand trails down my side, featherlight. His thumb lands against my hip bone and draws tender circles in the spot I love best. The spot I now realize Michael never found.
A wanton moan climbs from my throat, and I throw my head back. The contrast between his forceful mouth and deft fingers spills an ache through me, one that gathers into a fluttering beat between my thighs.
“Kiss me,” I gasp.
He climbs my body and crushes his mouth to mine again. He kisses me with a brutal honesty I absorb like sustenance. I let my knees fall wider, let him pinion me to the mattress while our tongues write a story with one another and heat surges in my veins.
A dark, delicious yearning takes over, a whole bottomless pit of it, a craving I might never be rid of. I kiss him harder, stealing as much of his taste as I can, wrapping my legs around his waist and pulling him closer until his length nudges at my entrance. I tilt my hips up, inviting.
“Are you sure?” he says into my mouth.
I open my eyes to find him still watching me. When I tug my wrists against his iron grip, he holds me fast, the muscles of his arm standing out like ropes.
I nip at his bottom lip. “What, is fourteen years not long enough?”
His pupils change, swallowing up the lamplight. Devouring it. “It’s too long,” he says. The roughest three words ever spoken. “Way too fucking long.”
“Then yes. I’m sure.”
“Oh, thank fuck,” he breathes.
