Page 111 of Before the Bond
Back then, I thought that I would give her time. Give her the life she hadn't started yet. Step back and wait.
I hadn’t accounted for any of it.
I kissed her again. Slower this time.
The firelight shifted and her hand slid up to my jaw, and I felt the moment the restraint I'd been living inside for seven years simply — stopped. Not collapsed. Not broke. Just became unnecessary, the way a door becomes unnecessary once you're already through it.
I moved and she moved with me, and the kiss deepened in a way that made thinking difficult — her fingers pressing deeper against my jaw, the warmth of her mouth I’d avoided cataloguing for weeks.
The edge of the sofa pressed into my back. I shifted without breaking the kiss. She followed. Her hand found my hair, mine settled at her waist, and the distance between almost and here collapsed.
We rolled off the sofa. Not gracefully. Not intentionally. One moment we were on it, the next we stumbled onto the floor.
I instinctively covered her to pad her landing. It ended with us rolling and me on top of her.
Then Olivia started laughing.
Her laughter was real — bright and uncontained, her forehead dropping against my collarbone, the sound of it moving through her whole body.
Something in my chest cracked open.
I laughed, too — quieter, which only made it worse. She laughed harder. I pressed my face into her hair and held on while the fire burned low beside us and the moment settled into something warm and a little unreal.
She lifted her head eventually. Her chest heaved.
“Hi,” she breathed out.
“Hi…”
She pulled me back down before I could say anything else.
Her hands moved with the same decisive competence she brought to everything — no hesitation, no performance. She found the hem of my shirt and I helped her with it and then herpalms were flat against my chest, her thumbs tracing the line of my sternum.
I felt the bond flare at the contact the way it always did when she touched me. Brighter and more present than anything I'd felt in all the years she'd been on the other end of the country.
I pressed a kiss to her jaw. Her collarbone.
It was my turn to take control.
The pads of my fingers dug into her skin as I stripped away her robe. She was wearing a satin nightdress, something that was nowhere near appropriate for the cold, but clung to every part of her.
I could feel my breathing sharpen.
One hand traced up her thigh and the dress’s hem. Her body lifted as I pulled it off fully while the other hand yanked down the rest.
There was no going back.
What followed was not the frantic, desperate thing I might have imagined in weaker moments.
It was the steady, forceful release of everything we had been saving. My seven years of waiting. Her months of longing and not letting herself name it.
I kept the rhythm steady at first. Deliberate. She shifted beneath me to meet it and I felt the bond surge — not the incomplete, aching pull I'd lived with for years, but something fuller. Something being fed rather than starved. Every point where her skin met mine hummed with it.
The rug slid. Neither of us noticed until the hardwood was under my knees. Neither of us cared.
Her hands dragged down my back and I pressed deeper and she made a sound that was not quite my name and I went faster. Her voice peaked with it, breathless and unguarded. The bond built and built between us like pressure finding its point of release.
She dragged her heels against the floor.
