Page 81 of You, with a View

He rises to his knees, panting, one hand on my hip. The other goes to my chest, right below my throat. He brushes his thumb up the column of my neck, pressing in when he gets to my pulse point.

“Are you holding yourself back from your natural inclination to choke me?”

He laughs, incredulous. “What?”

“You always touch my neck when we’re doing things.”

“Things?” His hips start moving, too slowly, an unbearable drag.

I groan. “Kissing, touching, fucking now.”

His expression softens into something achingly vulnerable. “I like feeling your heart beat fast for me.” A secret revealed in the middle of our sex. “That’s how I know you like me.”

I look down the length of our bodies, to where he’s inside me. To his hand, curled tight around my hip. I make a whole production of it, then drag my eyes back up to Theo’s.

“I think it’s obvious I like you.”

He bites his lip against a grin, rocking into me. “You haven’t said it.”

My heart starts beating faster underneath his thumb. “Were you waiting for me to?”

His head kicks back as his pace increases, then slows again. He groans. He’s holding himself back. He wants it to last, and that makes me want to break him into desperation. Ineedit.

“Because I do,” I say, quietly.

Theo’s eyes open, and he looks down at me, hips working, stomach clenched tight. “You do what?”

My nerves and need and arousal all mix together, making my voice shaky. “I like you.”

He pushes into me so hard on theyouthat my voice breaks.

It’s not a secret now: I like him, so much,toomuch, and maybe he’ll ruin me. Not just because he’s curled over me now, mouth crashing over mine, holding on to me so tight I’ll feel it for days,but because he pulls back and says breathlessly, grinning, “I like you, too.”

“I got that,” I say, and he laughs, grabbing my hips to set a pace that’s hard and perfect.

Our amusement bleeds away to rough groans, the sounds of Theo’s body working into mine. His fingers dig into me, moving up to my breasts. He rests a hand on my chest, the heel of his palm pressing over my heart. It’s the softest pressure there, the most intense pressure inside me, but his hand feels heaviest. It hurts the best.

I reach up and press my palm over his heart. It’s racing. We’re even. He smiles, like he wants that. Like that’s what he was waiting for.

It’s only minutes until I’m close. I tell him shakily, digging my fingers into his arms. His eyes get fever bright, and he curls over me, sealing our mouths together as he snakes his hand between us to get me there.

“Oh god.” I groan, my eyes squeezing shut as my body pulls tighter and tighter.

“Yeah,” he breathes against my ear, nipping at my skin. “When you come, I come. I can feel how fucking close you are—”

His words push me so hard over the edge of pleasure that I surge up against him, crying out. He presses his face into the curve of my neck, panting, until his pace shortens, stutters. The sound he makes as he comes stretches out my orgasm; it’s so relieved, so wrung out.

The tension leaches out of Theo’s body in waves, in the slowing undulation of his hips and the way our kissing turns from frantic to sated. Everything slows, and after an indeterminate stretch of time, Theo lets out a sigh, his final kiss so much like the first: tender, soft.

He lifts some of his weight off me, brushing my wild hair back from my face. I frame his jaw with my hands, pressing my thumb to his bottom lip. We stay caught in a gaze that says so much of what I can’t out loud. His heart is racing from what we just did.

Did he feel it, too? That line we crossed? It didn’t feel like simple sex. Then again, nothing between us has ever been simple.

My heart skips as he gets up to take care of the condom, and it’s still unsteady when I come back from my trip to the bathroom. He’s lying with his hands behind his head, eyes fixed on the ceiling. They move to me when I crawl in next to him, and his mouth pulls up proudly.

“You look wrecked.”

I appraise him as I settle in. “Did I not work you hard enough? You should be passed out. Or incapable of speech, at the very least.”

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