Page 177 of A Smile Full of Lies
So I did what I always do with him. I followed him. Up the stairs. Down the hall. To a room I’d only glimpsed once before — when he was wearing a mask and calling me prey.
Now? Now he was calling mehis wife.
He opened the door slowly.
His bedroom hadn’t changed much. The furniture was still antique. The wallpaper still peeling at the corners. But the bed was new — delivered two weeks ago, before we even made the decision to move in after our first overnight stay here.
We stepped inside together, and he closed the door behind us.
I turned to face him, breath caught in my throat, heart hammering like a drum beneath my ribs.
“I’m not afraid,” I whispered.
“I know,” he said. “But I am.”
I blinked and my brow furrowed.
“Not of you,” he clarified. “Of how much I fuckingfeelright now.”
He took a step forward. Then another.
“I’ve waited so long for this,” he said, voice low. “For you. For this life. For thismoment.And now that it’s here… I don’t want to fuck it up.”
I stepped into his space, laid my hand on his chest, and felt his heartbeat crashing beneath it.
“You won’t.”
He stared down at me like I was something holy, and then he dropped to his knees. Right there. On the floor of the bedroom he grew up in. Where his future had once been written in blood and grief.
He knelt like a man at church, pressed his forehead to my stomach, wrapped his arms around my hips, and held on like I was his altar.
And then he whispered, his voice rough and ruined, “Let me love you slow tonight. Please.”
Tears burned behind my eyes as he looked up at me.
I nodded, too overcome to speak.
He stood, lifted me like I weighed nothing, and laid me on the bed like I was everything to him.
He undressed me without a word. No rush. No commands. Just reverence.
Every button, every strap, every inch of skin revealed like it mattered more than anything he’d ever touched.
He kissed the scar on my chest. The curve of my breast. The trembling pulse in my throat.
And when he stripped for me, I saw it in his eyes, how much he wanted me… how much hefearedwanting anything that much.
“I’m yours,” I whispered.
He exhaled like he’d been holding his breath for years, and when he came down over me, body warm and solid and real, I opened for him like I was made to take him.
There was no violence in it. No punishment. No stakes. Just love. Messy, devastating, sacred love.
His hands in my hair. My mouth on his skin. Our bodies fitting together like puzzle pieces that finally made sense.
He moved slow: deep, steady thrusts that stole the air from my lungs. He kissed me through it, one hand wrapped around the back of my neck, the other gripping my thigh like he never wanted to let go.
“You’re mine now,” he murmured.
