But nothing could block out the feelings that bled into his chest.

He felt like he was dying. Like something inside him was shattering.

When he brought her up over his body and thrust deep inside her, looked up at the view of her, over him, his hardness buried deep within her, he felt undone.

As if he would never be able to separate from her again. As if he would never be whole again if he could not be inside her like this for all time.

The picture that she made was so erotic he could barely breathe.

Her rounded stomach, her glorious breasts. The expression of pure ecstasy on her face.

She was glorious, and at that moment, she was perhaps everything.

And so he lost himself, in the rhythm that she created as she began to flex her hips. As her internal muscles rippled around him, she began to climb closer and closer to another climax, and he found himself perilously close to the edge of the same.

He had made a mistake. Because this wasn’t the same. He had thought that if he was in her again, it would all be familiar. Because not only had he been with countless women, he had her before as well.

He had thought it would bring them back to familiar territory, but this wasn’t.

It was new. It was something bright and wholly different than anything he’d ever had before.

He’d had sex.

This was making love.

This was what happened when your soul saw someone, and they saw you, and then your bodies became one.

This was something he had never believed in. More than that, it was something he had never wanted.

Because this...

This was the precipice of a man’s sanity.

This was him, unmasked.

This was him, without any of the artifice, any of the control.

This was where a loss would make him jump off to the jagged rocks below, and damn the consequences.

This could make a man destroy everything around him, and he was powerless to fight against it.

Powerless to do anything but surrender.

To her, to this.

To the need that pounded through him.

It was the one thing he had vowed never to do. The one thing he had never done. At the hands of his father, under the fist of his grief, he had never surrendered.

And yet, in her arms, buried in her body, he could do nothing but.

He shouted his release as she gave a hoarse cry and found her own, and he was lost. Spiraling into the darkness. But there was light there. And he did not want it. There was light there, but it frightened him more than anything else ever had.

And then she whispered. Into that light.

“I love you.”

And just after that, his phone rang.