Page 249 of Cross Checked
I slid my hand higher, keeping her pressed against me. “Pip, I’m so far past cheating I don’t even know what game we’re playing anymore.”
Her breath broke on a tiny sound.
I felt her fall apart slowly this time, not with the sharp, desperate crash of last night, but with a trembling surrender that moved through her body in waves. She tightened around me, her head pressing back against my shoulder, my name leaving her mouth like she couldn’t decide whether it was a curse or a prayer. I held her through it, moving just enough to keep her there, to make it last, to feel every second of her letting go around me.
The control I’d been clinging to started to tear as I buried my face in her neck, my arm locked around her, my hips moving deeper now, still careful but no longer calm. “I’m close.”
Her hand slid back, fingers digging into my thigh. “Don’t pull away.”
As if I could. As if there was a version of this where I could be inside her, hear her say that, and survive with any part of myself intact.
“Never,” I said, and the word came out too honest. Too loaded. Too much.
Her body softened around me again, and that was what took me under. Not the heat. Not the ache. Not even the way she felt, though that was enough to ruin me for the rest of my life. It was the trust. The quiet. The fact that she was still holding my hand while I fell apart.
I came with my mouth pressed to her shoulder, a low, broken groan tearing out of me as everything inside me emptied into her. It wasn’t sharp like last night. It was deep and endless, a slow pull from the center of my chest, like I was giving her something I didn’t have a name for yet. My hips jerked once, twice, and then I went still behind her, shaking with the effort of keeping my weight from pinning her too hard.
For a long time, neither of us spoke.
The room had gone brighter, morning spilling across the floorboards, catching on the pile of clothes near my dresser and the half-empty water bottle on my nightstand. Somewhere downstairs, a door opened and closed. Pipes groaned. Hockey House started to breathe awake beneath us.
I didn’t move away.
I couldn’t.
My arm stayed locked around her waist, my body still tucked against hers, my face buried in her hair while I tried to remember how to exist outside of this exact second. She was warm and soft and a little damp with sweat, her fingers still tangled with mine against the sheet.
“Cade?” she whispered after a while.
“Yeah?”
“You’re kind of clingy after sex.”
A tired laugh shook through me, rough and quiet. “After?”
She smiled against my arm. “Fair.”
I kissed the back of her head, then her shoulder, then the delicate curve of her neck because stopping felt impossible now that I’d started. “I can move.”
She tightened her hand around mine. “I didn’t say that.”
My chest caved in around something dangerously close to relief.
I stayed exactly where I was.
Outside my bedroom, the house grew louder by degrees, the muffled crash of male voices and footsteps beginning somewhere below us. The world was waking up. My life was still out there. Hockey, scouts, expectations, cameras, noise, every sharp-edged thing waiting to pull at me the second I opened my door.
But in my bed, Bliss breathed slowly against my arm, and for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, I didn’t feel like I was bracing for impact.
I felt still.
Raw.
Spent.
Terrified.
Hers.
