Page 279 of Falling Backwards
“It is what I want,” she says.“You are what I….Thank you, but I don’t wanna stop there.At touching.So damngood, Luke, but it’s not enough.I do wantyou.All of you.Please.”
My brain can’t make sense of how she’s bashful and confident at the same time while she undoes button after button—it can’t make sense of how she can feel so soft and so smoldering at the same time.
“Yeah?”I ask huskily as my shirt gets pulled off.
Our gazes meet in the faint glow of that light through these shadows.She’s nodding again when I take her gold-touched face in my hands.
Our kiss is fire.
Her moan is kindle.
My restraint is ash.
I skate my hands down her body so I can start lifting her.“Put your legs around me.”
She does it without a word of protest, her arms going around me too.
Once I have her picked up and held securely, we’re moving.
M A G G I E
While Luke carries me to his room, I drown a little bit in minutes-old memories of him making slow love to me with his fingers, and in how much hot honesty was in everything he said, and in how he looks and feels in only jeans and socks like that time in the sporting goods store.It all stirs the flutters in my stomach anew, makes me feel like my lungs don’t quite work even though they definitely do.
I’m so ready to keep going.To be each other’s in this new way.He’s ready, too, I know.
As soon as he sets me on the edge of his bed, I urge him into a kiss.He plants his hands on either side of me while each of us tries to own the other’s mouth, and then his touch is high on my thigh again and pushing up my dress, and I get to relish the feeling of his bare chest beneath my palms for two seconds before his hands are elsewhere yet: at the zipper on the back of my dress.I get ready to help take the thing off.
“Love this dress on you,” he says over my lips.“Also gonna love it on my floor.”
A smile overtakes me, then a hushed giggle.
I think I hear him add something under his breath—it sounds like, “Trace the swirls another time.”
I halfway process what that might mean, then move past it to tell him, “Yeah, Ithoughtyou’d love it.”
I feel his grin.“You thought right.”
The dress is unzipped now, so we gather it in our hands and pull it over my head.It hits the floor, indeed.Our mouths hit in another kiss.The air of the room hits all my exposed skin, bringing up chill bumps.
And worry about my body hits my insides.
But only briefly.
It fades right away again because I don’t want it.I have no use for it.It doesn’t serve me.
Also because Luke has already stopped kissing me to straighten up and look at my body in the faint light reaching this room from the other one, and I can see well enough to make out the utter appreciation on his face.
I’m his ten.
His eyes meet mine.He curves a hand to my cheek and I instantly lean into it.I want to close my eyes, but I resist; I want even more to look right back at my ten.
The love that lives in my chest is so full, so solid.
Talk about feeling like my lungs don’t quite work.
I adore it, though.I adore him.I adore what we have and how far we’ve come and who we are when we’re together.I adore knowing the future is firmly in our clasped hands, no longer under our feet.
