ENZO
I’ve had sex before.
Plenty of times. Quick, rough, forgettable. Bodies in the dark. Faces I couldn’t name the next morning. The kind of fucking that scratches an itch and nothing more.
This is not that. This is Stevie looking up at me from her bed with eyes that see too much, hair spread across her pillow, lips swollen from kissing me.
This is her hands pulling at my shirt, tugging it over my head, and the sound she makes when she sees my chest, the scars, the tattoos, the evidence of a life she should run from.
She doesn’t run. She touches.
Fingertips tracing the scar under my ribs. The one across my shoulder. The tattoo on my chest that I got when I was nineteen and stupid and thought it made me look tough.
“You’re beautiful,” she whispers.
No one’s ever called me beautiful. Dangerous. Scary. Useful. Never beautiful.
“Stevie.” Her name comes out broken. “You don’t have to.”
“I want to.” She pulls me down. Kisses my jaw. My throat. The place where my pulse is hammering. “I want you.”
I want you.
Three words and I’m gone.
My throat works around the sound she just put in it. My hands clench in the sheets because if I touch her now, I’ll ruin this. I’ll forget how to be careful.
I kiss her deep. Desperate. My hands find the hem of her shirt and I pull back just enough to look at her.
“Can I?”
She nods. Then says it out loud like she knows I need to hear it. “Yes.”
I lift it over her head. Slow. Watching her face for any sign of doubt.
There’s no doubt.
Just want. Just trust. Just her, laid out beneath me in nothing but a simple bra, breathing hard, looking at me like I’m the only thing in the world.
Fuck.
I’ve never felt like this. Every inch of me is strung tight between starvation and surrender. Touching her might break me. Not touching her definitely will.
I kiss her collarbone. The hollow of her throat. The swell of her breast above the fabric. She arches into me, gasping, and the sound goes straight to my cock.
I want to devour her. Want to mark her. Claim her. Make her scream my name until she forgets anyone else exists.
But I also want to be gentle.
The word feels foreign. I don’t know how to be gentle. I know how to take, how to demand, how to make bodies do what I want.
But this is Stevie. She deserves hands that have never broken anything. A mouth that only knows how to speak soft. A history that won’t bleed on her clean sheets.
All I have is me.
“Hey.” Her hand is on my face, pulling me back to her. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere.” I turn my head. Kiss her palm. “I’m here.”
