Page 80 of Promise Me This

“This feels a lot like taking it slow,” she gasps, bucking her hips. I grind my palm into her clit in response, still stroking her with my fingers. “I need you, not your hand.”

“Sorry, I got distracted.” I pull out of her, and she whimpers. I nip her bottom lip and then reach for the bedside table, retrieving a condom from the top drawer and tearing it open with my teeth. I offer it to her with a lazy grin. “Would you do the honors?”

She giggles but takes the offered condom and unrolls it on my cock. Just the feeling of her doing so is nearly enough to end me.

I guide myself to her entrance, feeling her stretch around me as I push forward with painstaking slowness. Her head tilts back, and her mouth opens on a moan. I rock my hips steadily, taking more of her each time until I’m buried completely within her.

Her heat envelops me, and suddenly I’m starved and she’s the first thing I’ve tasted in a decade. I thrust into her with everything I have, and she cries out in response. Her arms come around me and her nails anchor into my shoulder blades and it’s a glorious pain coupled with the pleasure I’m feeling. Her eyelids flutter closed as she loses herself in the rhythm, and her hand moves between us to rub her clit in tandem with my thrusts.

“Fuck, I love it when you touch yourself.” I flick my tongue over her nipple in the way I remember her liking, and feel her muscles convulse around me. “Leo, I need you to look at me while you get yourself off.”

Her eyes open and she finds me in the dim light of the room. I lose myself in the feeling of her and the endless blue of her gaze and the swell of emotion in my chest. It crashes over me like a wave, and I let myself drown in it.

“I’m not ready for this to be over yet,” I say.

She tilts her hips upward, which drives me deeper into her core. “It’s just beginning, Callum,” she whispers. Her fingers continue circling her clit while she uses her other hand to reach for a pillow, which she tucks beneath her elevated hips. The new range of motion fills me with ecstasy on every stroke, and the moan that rolls out of her tells me I’m not alone.

To see her so confident in herself, in what she wants, makes me fall even further in love with her. It makes me want to give her the world. My life. My soul.

She’s always had it, I remind myself. To think otherwise all this time was simply idiocy on my part.

Her dark, wild hair is splayed over my sheets, and her skin is flushed as her back arches with pleasure. It’s a beauty that’s raw and unabashed. It’s every wet dream I’ve had of her since the day she walked into my life.

Unable to hold myself back any longer, I thrust into her with everything I have. Steady rhythm gives way to desperation. I need to be as close to her as possible. She’s the sun, and I’m ready to burn.

Her inner walls tighten around me, and her hand locks onto my bicep, anchoring herself as her own orgasm builds.

“I’m going to come,” she cries.

“I’m right here with you.”

Stars explode across my vision, but I watch her through it all. The pleasure between us swells into a beautiful crescendo, and then we come down together, the way we always should’ve been.

When the aftershocks have subsided, I roll off her and discard the condom. She turns to her side, leaving a place for me behind her, and sighs contentedly when I curve around the half-moon of her body.

“I’ve missed you so badly,” I whisper against the slick skin of her neck. I follow it up by licking her, and she laughs.

“Stop, that tickles!” she shrieks, and then she rolls to face me. Her expression grows serious. She traces a hand along my cheek, around the shell of my ear, and down my jawline, following it with her gaze. “I’ve missed you, too. More than you know.”

I smile down at her, basking in the glow of her happiness. It’s the first time I truly recognize her, without the guards she’s built up around herself all these years. She’s got the beginnings of laugh lines around her lips, and it thrills me to see it. To know she’s been laughing, even in her grief. To know that there is still joy to come.

Her hand moves from me to find the amulet that dangles between her breasts. The one she always has on. I cover her hand with mine and turn our palms over to take a better look at it. The milky white stone is unlike any I’ve ever seen, cut into an oval and set on a thin, gold chain. I tilt it in the low light, trying to figure out exactly what it is.

“It’s made from some of Poppy’s ashes,” she says, answering my unspoken question.

Tears prick at my eyes, but I blink them away. This is a happy moment, her sharing our daughter with me. I don’t want to cry now.

I bring the stone to my lips and kiss it before letting it fall back against her skin. She looks up at me with her mouth parted but doesn’t say a word.

“Tell me about her.”

She starts to roll toward the edge of the bed. “I brought the journal so you could read—”

I grab her hip and steady her in place. “I want to hear it from you.”

She draws her bottom lip between her teeth.

“Hey,” I murmur, pressing my lips to her forehead. “It doesn’t have to be the sad things. Tell me the happy things.”

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