Page 147 of Gin and Lava

“Shhhhhh.” He stops moving and makes me match his breath again. “Just be here with me. Don’t say anything.”

He kisses me and moves his hips—not fast, because God, nothing about this is fast—but he increases his pace. And I’m trembling. I’m clutching his hands. I’m panting. What I’m feeling isn’t an orgasm, so much as a full-body implosion. Or the opposite of an out-of-body experience—it’s anin-bodyexperience and I feel everything.

Mason reacts to every flinch, and moan, and tremor. And I can’t get enough of how he perfectly holds me down, how he perfectly sinks himself to the hilt, how he perfectly claims every sound from my throat.

And I’m so full, I can’t breathe.

I’m so full, all I can hear is his heart beating.

And I’ve lost my mind, because his body is an expanding universe above me, stretching with a gravity and vastness I can’t fathom.

Mason is more than I could ever imagine.

And when he comes, I wrap my arms and my legs around him, foolishly thinking I can contain what this is—not wanting to admit what’s happening, but knowing.

And I hate that I know.

It makes me grip and hold and never want to let go.

Because there’s only one truth between friends …

Mason and I are never going to have sex again.

47

MASON

We shouldn’t have done this.

Naomi’s body relaxes under me and the vice of her arms and legs lets go. I pull out and roll off of her onto my back, rolling onto the side of her queen-sized cloud of three-thousand-count sheets and softness.

Wereallyshould’ve stuck to my no-sex rule, because that was not … nothing.

I lift my hands and cover my face. But when I breathe in to try and settle the banging in my chest—my hands smell like her. They smell like beach sand and soldered metal and a taste in her skin that’s sweet as vanilla but more earthy and human. That smell is everywhere. It’s on my hands, on my skin, on the bed, in the air.

She’severywhere.

Wereallyshouldn’t have had sex, because that wasnota hot fuck.

And that’s what I do. That’s what I am. I’m the asshole who talks shit, and acts like an ass, and when given the opportunity fucks with the big cock the universe granted him.

That’s it.

Nothing more.

Never anything more.

I hold back every curse word that I want to let out like shrapnel, and my chest goes tight because all those truths and bullets ricochet inside my own body. They tear everything to shreds, and it’s hard to breathe.

I sit up, tossing my naked legs off the bed and turning my back on the most beautiful woman in the history of women—because I don’t want to see her face right now. I don’t want to confirm every bullet hole in my lungs.

I shouldn’t have done this. But I did.

I couldn’t help myself. She was wearing that ring and kissing me, and I’m an idiot who’s weak. I stand up and walk to the far side of the bed, finding my boxers and my jeans and pulling them on.

“Wait,” Naomi says, and that one word feels like a pill of arsenic I’ll be forced to swallow. “What are you doing?”

She knows what I’m doing, but I still have to say it out loud.

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