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At my wife, laughing in my bed.

And I don’t want to fire anyone. I don’t want to be anywhere else on the face of the planet.

I tear open the box.

When I come back to her, the laughter has gone soft. She reaches for me. I settle between her thighs, and she wraps her legs around me, and for a long moment we just stay like that. Breathing. Looking at each other. Her hand on my jaw. My hand in her hair.

“Okay?” I whisper.

“More than okay. But getting impatient.”

I go slow. So slow it nearly kills me. I watch her face the whole time. She’s so incredibly tight and I’m not a small man. I watch for any flicker of hesitation, any wince, and I’m ready to stop if I see it.

I don’t see it.

What I see is her eyes going wide and then falling closed. Her lips parting on a long, unsteady breath. Her fingers digging into my back, pulling me closer, until there’s nothing left between us at all.

I bury my face in her neck.

“Noelle.”

Her name comes out of me the way it did in the shower. Rough and broken. Except this time she’s here to hear it. This time she answers.

“I know,” she whispers. “I know. I’m here I feel it too.”

I start to move.

She meets me. Clumsy at first, then not. We find a rhythm the way we found everything else these last few weeks. Without meaning to. Without planning it. Slowly, and then all at once, like it was always there and we only had to stop fighting it.

The bed creaks. The snow falls past the window. Her breath catches every time I move, and she says my name over and over, like a question and then like an answer.

I want to make it last. I want to make it last forever.

I don’t last forever.

But I make sure she gets there first. I hold her while she does, her whole body drawing tight beneath mine and then coming apart, her cry muffled against my shoulder, her nails biting into my skin. And watching her, feeling her, holding her through it, is what finally breaks me.

I follow her over with her name in my mouth.

For a long time afterward, neither of us moves.

I’m too heavy. I know I’m too heavy. I roll to the side and take her with me, tucking her against my chest, and she comes without a word. Her head on my shoulder. Her arm across my stomach. One of her legs still tangled with mine.

Her heart is racing.

So is mine.

I stare up at the ceiling.

I don’t know what I expected. Relief, maybe. The tension finally gone. The itch scratched. That isn’t what this is. It’s quieter than that. And so much worse.

She shifts against me. Sighs. Presses a small, sleepy kiss to my chest, right over my heart, like she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it.

My arm tightens around her.

“Maverick?”

“Hmm.”