Chapter 12:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

The room smelled like Piper’s perfume, which was either ironic or justice depending on how you felt about things.

My underwear was at home, having been returned in pieces, so Beckham got to that particular discovery faster than expected. He went still for a second.

“You came to the party wearing–”

“Don’t make it weird,” I said.

He laughed — a real one, surprised out of him — and that loosened something in the room. I had not heard him laugh like that before. It made him look younger and less composed and considerably more like a person.

I reached for him, but he redirected my hands.

“Not yet,” he said. “You first.”

“You have a very rigid policy about this.”

“It has served me well.”

He turned me around and took his time tracing my spine with his mouth — slowly, top to bottom, as though he had all night and intended to use it. My hands found the headboard. My left shoulder ached when I gripped too hard, but I didn’t let go. Downstairs the party continued without us; bass through the floor, someone’s laugh rising above the rest.

R𝘦а𝗱 𝖿𝘳o𝗺 y𝘰𝗎𝘳 р𝗵oո𝖾 о𝗻 g𝘢l𝗻𝗈𝗏е𝘭𝘴.co𝗆

He spread my legs and his fingers moved between them, unhurrying, building until I was breathing in short increments and gripping the headboard harder than necessary.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

I had been ready for approximately the last forty-five minutes but I was not going to say that.

“Yes,” I managed.

He entered me slowly. I felt every bit of the adjustment, the breath I took, the small involuntary sound I made that I had not planned. He stilled for a moment, his forehead dropping to my shoulder.

Then he started to move.

There is a difference between sex that is technically proficient and sex where someone is actually present — where you can tell by the quality of their attention that they are tracking you, adjusting, responding. Beckham was present. That was the fact I was going to have to sit with later, and I knew it, and right now I did not particularly care.

He turned me partway toward him.

“I want to see your face,” he said.

It was such a specific request. Not performed. Just what he wanted.

I let him look.

The sheets twisted around us. His hands at my hips, my fingers at his back. The party below was irrelevant. Piper’s perfume on the pillow was irrelevant. Everything outside this particular square of dim light had stopped mattering in any meaningful sense.

His breath changed. So did mine.

“Wait,” he said. “Together.”

I nodded, which was the only response I had available.

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.

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