Page 114 of Any Port in a Storm

Nick’s eyelids flutter shut as my fingers close around his cock.

“God,” he groans. “Yes.”

I lean down to press my lips to his. “You like that?”

He looks directly into my eyes. “I love it.”

Before I can come up with some sort of quippy response, he flips us over, hurriedly parting my thighs and teasing me with the head of his erection. I can’t control the moan that escapes my lips.

“Just a second,” he says breathlessly. “Condoms are in my dresser.”

“Okay,” I say, struggling to breathe around the feeling of the fingers he’s just slipped inside me. “But we don’t…” I scramble for the right words. “We don’t have to. If you don’t want to.”

“Don’t have to what?”

“I’m on the pill,” I tell him. “And…there’s no one else. Hasn’t been in ages.”

I watch his expression shift from shock to lust to affection. He considers me for a moment. “There’s no one else for me, either.”

I’m smiling like an idiot. “Well, okay, then.”

He grins, too. “Okay, then.” He presses a row of increasingly erotic kisses down my neck, swirling his thumb around my clit until I’m crying out his name.

I try to bring my thighs together; need to feel some sort of friction, some release, against the thrumming ache that has me flush and slick and ready, but he eases them further apart. “Not yet,” he breathes.

“I need you,” I whimper.

“Of course, sweetheart.” He covers my mouth with kisses. “Whatever you need.” He moves over me, slides inside me, and I cry out at the contact.

“Better?” he asks, grinning against my lips.

“More,” I whisper.

And he gives me more. And more, and more, and more, until I’m vibrating with pleasure around him, ready to explode from the beauty and intensity and magic of it all.

I had no idea it could be like this.

When it’s over, it’s better than all that—it’s almost cataclysmic. My entire world has splintered into two parts—the before and the now. It feels inevitable, in retrospect, but I don’t think I realized how precious a thing our relationship really is. How lucky we are to have it.

Because what we have is something reverent; something pure. It’s a thousand yearning stares and a thousand lingering glances; a million dreams we didn’t dare vocalize, all scattered aimlessly along the path of our history. Watered and nourished and left to bask in the sun.

How could a love like that yield anything but a field of wildflowers?

“So, what are we going to tell people?” I ask, wearing Nick’s t-shirt and drinking a coffee in his bed the next morning.

“Hmm.” He shimmies closer, wrapping his arm around my waist. “I’m not sure any of what we just did is fit for public consumption.”

My mind races over the highlight reel of our morning: Nick crawling over me in the dim light, kissing me like a man starved, delivering such a devastating cascade of neurotransmitters that I’m not sure I’ll ever come down off the high.

“That isn’t what I meant, and I think you know it.” I lean over to kiss his cheek. “But no—we absolutely cannot share any of that.”

“So what are you really asking, then?” he teases.

“You’re going to make me work for this, huh?”

“Maybe.”

“Nicholas O’Connor, don’t be a punk.”