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She pulled back, popping her mouth completely off of me and replacing it with her hand. Little strings of sticky saliva connected us as she grinned up at me. “Then I guess we’re even.”
Chapter 21
Ava
Ididn’t have the bandwidth to process how nice his penthouse was as he carried me through the front door, my bare body wrapped around his front and his mouth on mine.
I didn’t have the bandwidth tocareabout what this meant or what I was admitting to myself as he took me up the curving stairs and through a set of double doors.
I didn’t have the bandwidth to question how he felt or why he’d walked away from Heather, because his hands and fingers were on me, in me, teasing me, filling me in the low light of his master bedroom, dark gray walls on one side and a floor-to-ceiling window on the other. My dad’s penthouse didn’t compare to whatever this place was, and for a moment, I wondered if I’d been hit by a fucking car back on Delancey and was vividly dreaming in the hospital.
None of it feltreal.
But then he was slipping into me again, with his hand in my hair and his lips in the crook of my neck. His body pressed into the backs of my thighs, my knees hooked around his torso, my fingernails digging into his back. He moaned my name, and it sounded like heaven, like sin, like the only thing I ever wanted tohear for the rest of my life—and I didn’t have the bandwidth to care about the consequences of this.
At that moment, I would gladly be Icarus if he were the sun.
And I was insane for it.
————
I woke the moment Adrian’s arms unknitted themselves from me stitch by stitch. The room was cloaked in darkness as I blinked my eyes open, the sky out of the window only slightly brighter than it had been when we’d fallen asleep. Was he up early again?
I rolled to face him, catching him off guard as I slotted into the empty space of his bare chest. Half asleep and groggy, my mind was screaming at me that he was trying to leave, and I wasn’t going to let that happen again.
He chuckled softly and pressed his nose into the top of my head. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Stay,” I mumbled, the sound muffled.
“I’m not going anywhere.” Gently, he played with my hair, smoothing it down and pushing strands behind my ear. “This is just what time my body wakes me up.”
“Your body is stupid,” I insisted. “The sun isn’t awake yet. You shouldn’t be either.”
He laughed as he pulled me in just a little closer. “Go back to sleep, love.”
“I don’t want you to leave.”
He went silent. There was no sound except our breathing and the steady hum of the heat, and even his fingers paused in my hair, the steady drum of his heart against my forehead slowing.I could feel myself slipping back toward sleep, and I wanted to fight it, wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to run away like he had on the boat or like I had after the charity ball. This was his home, but that meant nothing when he had other places he could go.
“Okay,” he whispered, pressing a kiss to the top of my head. “I won’t.”
————
By the time I’d woken back up, the light of the room had increased dramatically, and the steady inhale and exhale of Adrian’s breathing was still all around me. He was still holding me exactly the same way as earlier that morning.
I pulled my head up from his chest and looked up at him, fully expecting a bored, awake Adrian to be looking down at me. But his eyes were shut, his lips just barely parted…
He’d fallen back asleep with me.
Bleary-eyed and exhausted, I reached up, dragging my fingers across his cheek. The fine lines in his face seemed to smooth as I touched them, and I did it again, touching his forehead, the little lines beside his eyes, the one that ran from his nostril to the edge of his lips. He was relaxed out in the Hamptons, but seeing him like this was another level that I didn’t think was possible for him to achieve.
He blinked awake and blue eyes found mine in an instant. “Hi,” I said.
He studied me for a moment before glancing at the window behind me, a flicker of confusion washing over him. “Was I asleep?”
I nodded.
“Hmm.” He cupped my cheek, his thumb moving back and forth across it. “I can’t remember the last time I slept later than the sunrise.”
