Page 38 of Omega’s Fold

I take my time.

He’s slick for me. His body knows what it wants even if his head is tripping on the newness of it. I work him open slowly, one finger then two, and he pushes back against my hand after the first minute and says, “more,” and I give him more, and I watch the muscle in his back go tight and then loose, tight and then loose, and listen to the sounds he makes, small bitten-off sounds he’s trying to keep in and can’t.

“Stop trying to be quiet.”

“I’m not — “

“You are. Don’t. There’s no one to hear.”

He stops trying. The sound he makes when I curl my fingers is not quiet at all and it goes straight through me.

When he’s ready he says so. Just the word. “Now.”

I line up. I push in slow, the way he needs, watching his face in the pillow. His mouth falls open. His eyes close. He takes me in long, even breaths, and when I’m fully in he exhales against the pillow like he’s been holding that breath for years.

“Oh,” he says. Just that.

“Yeah.”

“Move.”

I move.

Slow at first. Careful, because this is his first time and because he is my match and because the chemistry is so loud in this room I can barely think. He rocks back to meet me after the second stroke. The third. By the fifth he’s taking what he wants, one hand braced on the headboard, and the care goes out of me because he doesn’t need it.

I get a hand under his hip and haul him up. He groans. I find the angle and he shouts — properly this time, into the pillow, one clean syllable — and after that I’m not thinking about anything.

The bed creaks. The old frame of it. I have one hand at his hip and the other spread across his shoulder blade and I can feel his whole body working with mine. His breathing is ragged. His skin is hot under my palms. The scent of him, of us, thick enough to drink.

“Julian.”

“Here.”

“I’m going to — “

“Yes. Go.”

He goes. He comes with his face in the pillow and a sound I’ll hear for the rest of my life, and the clench of him around me drags me with him, and I fold down over his back with my mouth against his nape and let go.

After, I don’t let him go.

I ease out carefully and pull him back against my chest and he lets me. This I hadn’t expected. A man who has held every person in his life at arm’s length, who fought me for a week on every small thing, and now he tucks himself against me under my arm and puts his hand flat on my sternum over my heart and breathes.

“Okay?” I say.

“Mm.”

“Wyatt.”

“Mm.”

I kiss the top of his head.

We lie there for a long time. Long enough that his breathing goes even and I think he’s asleep, and then his hand on my chest flexes once and I know he isn’t. The light at the window’s turned. Still gray, but a brighter gray, the kind that happens before the sun finds a gap in the cloud.

He shifts.

Turns his head on my shoulder. Tilts his chin up. Offers me the side of his throat again, the way he did before, deliberate this time, knowing what it does.