Page 139 of Lethal in Pink

“Right here.” My voice is rough. I don’t recognize it.

I move lower. My mouth on her breast through the thin cotton of her sleep shirt, and she arches beneath me, a soft sound escaping her throat that I feel more than hear. My hand slides under the hem, palm against the warm skin of her stomach, and she trembles—a full-body shiver that runs from her ribs to her thighs and back again. I learn the places that make her breath hitch. The spot just below her ribs where my thumb finds a dip in the muscle and her back comes off the mattress. The curve of her hip where my fingers press and her leg shifts, opening for me without being asked. The particular pressure that makes her fingers tighten in my hair to the point of pain, which I register distantly as useful information and file away for later.

She meets every touch with her own. Her nails drag down my back, leaving tracks that burn in the best way, and I hiss against her skin and she makes a sound that might be satisfaction. Her legs wrap around my waist, pulling me closer, her hips rolling up to meet the press of my body against hers, and the friction is almost enough to make me lose whatever composure I’m pretending to have. Her hand finds my waistband, fingers slipping beneath the elastic, and the contact is so direct, so deliberate, that I have to close my eyes and count backward from ten in a language I barely remember.

“Wait.” The word comes out strained.

I catch her wrist, gentle, and bring her hand to my mouth. Kiss her palm. Then her wrist. The inside of her elbow, where the skin is soft and the pulse is visible beneath the surface.

“Let me.”

She understands. I see it in the way her body relaxes beneath mine, the particular surrender of someone who has spent too long carrying everything and is finally, consciously setting it down. Her hand moves to my face instead, palm against my cheek, thumb brushing my lower lip, and the tenderness in the gesture is so precise it hurts.

When I finally enter her, it is slow. So slow I can feel every fraction of an inch, the particular resistance and then the give, the way her body opens for me like something that has been waiting. She gasps against my mouth—a sharp, broken sound that I catch with my lips, and her eyes flutter open, wide and dark and entirely focused on mine. We hold there for a beat. Two. Her breath coming in short pulls against my chest, her thighs tight around my hips, her fingers curled into my shoulders hard enough to leave marks.

“Okay?” I murmur against her temple.

She answers by rolling her hips. Once. Deliberate. The movement drives me deeper, and the sound she makes is low and satisfied and entirely, devastatingly real.

“Okay,” she says, and her voice is wrecked already, and we haven’t even started.

We move together. The rhythm finds us in real time—not prescribed, not performed, just discovered through the particular calculus of two bodies figuring out what the other needs. I adjust to the angle of her hips. She adjusts to the depth of each thrust, her back arching, her head tipping back against the pillow. My hand finds the back of her thigh, pulling her leg higher around my waist, and the change in angle makes her cry out—a short, punched sound that she tries to muffle against my shoulder and fails.

“Don’t,” I say. My voice is rough. “I want to hear you.”

She looks at me then. Her eyes are dark, pupils blown, her lip caught between her teeth in a way that makes me want to put my mouth there and fix it. The flush has spread across her chest, pink rising under brown skin, following the neckline of her sleep shirt where it’s rucked up around her ribs. Her fingers are tight in my hair, pulling with each thrust in a rhythm that tells me exactly how close she is.

“You’re so beautiful,” I say. The words come out without rehearsal, without the particular careful measure I usually apply to language. They just fall out of my mouth, raw and honest and entirely beyond my control. “God, Amiyah, you’re—you’re perfect. You’re so fucking perfect.”

Her breath catches. Her eyes hold mine, and something shifts in them—something warm and bright and dangerously close to breaking—and then she’s coming, her body tightening around me, her back arching off the mattress, his name on her lips in a voice that doesn’t sound like hers at all. “Jae—fuck—Jae—” Her hands clutch at me, fingers digging into my shoulders, her hips rolling against mine in short, desperate movements, like she’s trying to hold on to something that’s already moving too fast to catch.

I follow her over the edge. It hits me like a wave—hot and relentless, starting low in my spine and rolling outward until my vision blurs at the edges. My face presses to the curve of her neck, my mouth against her pulse, and her name is the only coherent thing left in me. I say it against her skin. Once. Twice. A third time, quieter, like I’m making sure she can hear it.

We collapse together. A tangle of limbs and sweat-damp sheets and the particular, bone-deep exhaustion of people who have just been entirely honest with each other’s bodies. My weight comes down on my forearms, then shifts to my side when I remember I’m twice her size and crushing her is probably counterproductive to the whole experience. She doesn’t seem to mind. Her leg stays hooked over my hip, her forehead pressed to my chest, her breathing coming in slow, deep pulls that I can feel against my ribs.

The morning light has arrived in earnest now. It cuts through the half-drawn blinds in long amber bars, throwing stripes across the rumpled sheets, across her back, across the wall where her handprint is probably visible in the plaster from where she braced herself. The coffee maker has gone silent in the kitchen. The city hum continues outside—louder now, the particular midmorning drone of traffic and construction and the million small sounds that make up a Tuesday in Los Angeles.

Neither of us speaks. The quiet between us is the good kind—the kind that doesn’t need filling, that exists because there are no words urgent enough to interrupt it. Amiyah’s hand finds my chest. Her fingertips trace slow, aimless patterns across my skin—down the center line, along a rib, across the dip above my stomach. The touch is light. Exploratory. The kind of touch that isn’t asking for anything, isn’t promising anything—just acknowledging, with the particular unhurried precision that is entirely hers, that we are here. That we are both here, in this bed, in this light, with the dried drool spot on my collarbone and the handprints on my back and the particular, catastrophic truth of what comes next suspended somewhere above us, temporarily held at bay by the simple fact of her fingers on my skin.

I notice, with the particular sharpness of attention I reserve for things that matter, that she is carefully avoiding the dried spot on my collarbone. Her patterns steer clear of it—looping around the edges, tracing the perimeter without crossing the center, like the spot itself is a landmark she has decided is off-limits. The observation lands in my chest and stays there, warm and private, a joke I will keep entirely to myself because sharing it would require acknowledging that I noticed, and acknowledging that I noticed would require her to murder me, and I have plans for the rest of the day that do not involve being murdered by the woman currently tracing circles on my sternum.

I catch her hand mid-pattern. Her fingers go still in mine. I bring her palm to my mouth and press a kiss to the center—deliberate, unhurried, the kind of kiss that has no audience and no performance and exists solely because I want to put my mouth there and I can. Her skin is warm. Soft. The particular texture of someone who moisturizes with the same precision she applies to everything else in her life.

She looks up at me. Her hair is a disaster. There’s a crease on her cheek from the pillow. Her eyes are soft, the particular softness that only appears when she’s stopped performing entirely, when the carefully maintained walls have come down and what’s left is just her, unedited and present. The smile she gives me is small. Private. Not the polished one she deploys for the world—the symmetrical, camera-ready expression that says I am fine and I am capable and I have everything under control. This is the real one. The one with the slight asymmetry, the one that starts at the left corner of her mouth and takes its time reaching the right, the one that reaches her eyes in a way the other one never quite manages.

I hold it in my chest. Like something I am not ready to put down. Like a photograph I am still burning, frame by frame, into a memory that will have to last longer than it should.

The city hum continues. The coffee sits in the kitchen, probably gone cold by now. The blush sectional waits in the living room, her pink throw pillows arranged alongside my gray ones in a configuration that neither of us planned and both of us recognize as permanent. Outside, Los Angeles is having a Tuesday. People are going to work. Traffic is backing up on the 10. Someone is getting coffee at Beaned & Brew’d and arguing with the barista about oat milk. The world is doing what it does, relentless and indifferent, and in this bedroom, on this mattress, with this woman’s hand in mine and her smile in my chest, none of it matters.

Amiyah’s fingers resume their slow trace across my skin. My thumb moves in a small circle against her palm. The future is entirely, blessedly suspended—not gone, not solved, but temporarily held at arm’s length by the simple, catastrophic fact of now.

We do not move to get up. The coffee can wait. The world can wait. Everything can wait.

Chapter fifty-one

Jae

Igrab my coffee at Beaned & Brew’d and it tastes exactly the way it always does—fucking amazing.