“I like you watching me,” I say and then lick the wet slide of her skin. Smiling as she gasps, I spread her open with one hand and my arm wraps under and over her hip, to hold her down with the other.

Her voice is a breathless whisper when she says, “I like watching you touch me.”

She’s propped up on her elbows, a good vantage point to see my head dip down to take her into my mouth for the first time. I’d laugh if I had it in me, when she falls back on an “Oh God” groan and grabs the comforter on either side of her hips, but I can’t. I lose myself in her heat and her sweetness, sucking on her clit and then licking up one side and then the other before I fuck her with my tongue.

“Kyle,” she moans my name, and it sends me into a new kind of wild. That and the incomprehensible sounds she beats out in time with each thrust. I shift, pressing her thighs farther apart with my shoulders so I can sink two fingers inside her. She’s so wet, the slide is easy, and it brings about the roll of her hips up and into my mouth. Fuck me. That’s exactly what she’s doing. She’s lost in the freedom to take what she wants to get off, to let go with me between her legs. I fucking love it and I go at her clit, flicking it, rubbing the flat length of my tongue over it again and again.

I watch as her hands leave the sheets to dive into my hair. Holding me against her, she grinds her pussy into my mouth so I have nowhere to go but suck her in.

“Don’t stop, please . . .” Her eyes are back on mine. “Please. I’m . . . I’m . . . so close.” Her breath is coming in panting waves, her perfect breasts rising and falling with each gasp.

I suck her clit so hard my mouth hollows out, and I have to hold her to the mattress when she bucks up. Sinking my teeth around it, I flick her with my tongue. She cries out loud enough to wake the neighbors and when she adds my name, fucking screams it while clutching my head to her pussy, I almost lose my load into the white thread count. Christ, this girl calls to me on an elemental level to fuck her bare. I want to expose her feelings so she’s raw to them, make her feel me, and the life going on around her.

I don’t let go. I take in the flush of her first orgasm, lapping it up and then go at her one more time. Why not repeat perfection? Because that’s what this is. I’m greedy now for all things Faith. I take in her wild and let lose on my own. We move together and this time she tightens into me, a beautiful rigid arch from the bed as her body shudders under the steady pull of my mouth.

She has to beg me to let go. I can’t get enough. It’s only on her second “Please, Kyle” that I loosen my hold on her clit, kissing it once before sinking my teeth into her inner thigh. I like the thought of leaving my mark. Much like the tattoo not too far away. I want everyone to know this woman is mine.

She arches from the bed again as my teeth sink in and my name eases from her, not as loud this time, but with just as much meaning. I make my way past her hipbone, stopping long enough to read her tat out loud. “Until next time.”

I arch my eyebrow in question, and even through the haze of her orgasm, which I know by her dilated pupils and funny lift of her lips is still pulsing through her blood, she answers, “My mom died when I was eighteen. Before she closed her eyes she said until next time.” She shrugs, and my heart tightens for the pain I know she feels. “When I left the hospital, it was the first thing I did. I didn’t want to forget.”

“You wouldn’t have anyway.”

She smiles, looking down at me with my chin resting on the words that really live in her heart.

“No. I’ll remember them and who they’re about forever.”

Faith

“Let me see some more of this sweet side, Cowboy. I kinda like it,” I say, and wait for him to dip below the mattress for his jeans. He’s got the condom on in a heartbeat and my legs wrap around his waist to hold him to me. I’ve never felt as close to someone as I do with Kyle at this moment. Call it weird, which I know it is, call it foolish, and it might just be, but it is what it is. He’s easy to open up to.

In one night he’s broken through barriers I fought hard to construct, simplifying what I thought was the most complicated life struggle. I don’t have to pay for the misdeeds of others, James included. He did what he did. I’ll always second-guess myself and if I let them, the what-ifs will come knocking at my door, but I’d like to try and leave them alone. To move forward instead of worrying about what I should have done differently.

I’ve had sex plenty of times before, with plenty of men, but never have I felt the complete abandon I have with Kyle. When he slides into me, our eyes lock together, and he takes in my breath, hovering over my open mouth to take me in again and again. My hips meet his in slow motion. How he can control himself, I have no idea. He has to be painfully hard, allowing me to climax twice, setting his needs aside. Now, buried deep within me, he grinds down so I feel every blessed inch of him.

His name falls so easily from my lips, a whispered shadow in the darkened room. Dipping his head, he takes my nipple into his mouth, sucking on it. Not to draw pleasure from pain, as I’ve found he’s so good at doing, but an easy pull to draw out a sweet pulse that I feel not just in my breast, but between my legs as well.

Burying his head in the crook of my shoulder, he trades between his own hushed moans to sharing sweetness in my ear. So beautiful, want you to feel everything, do you feel that?

It is beautiful. Everything about this night with him is beyond anything I ever thought would happen. And I do feel every brush of his chest against mine, his warm breath as it rushes my skin, calling each nerve to attention. Each of his heartbeats is intensified, and his pounding pulse has a direct line to mine. It seems they need to thrum together.

But more than that, I feel the need to keep him next to me, to have more moments like this one. To let him in, give him more of me, maybe even everything, so there’s a possibility of sweet phone calls in the heart of midnight, of naughty text messages in the light of day, of dinners for two and maybe, just maybe, holiday vacations and long weekends somewhere other than the beach.

“So good, Angel. You feel so good wrapped around me,” he breathes it into my mouth just before licking and claiming me with a long kiss. His tongue mimics the rock and sway of his hips, deep, deeper still with each push forward. I take in every sound he makes, and suck on his lips, and then the rough bristle of his chin and down his neck, savoring the sweet sheen of sweat that coats his chest, making it slide onto mine.

Straightening his arms, Kyle looks down, into my eyes and then along every line of my chest as it rises and falls beneath him. So perfect for me, he says but no sound comes with the words. His muscles flex with the now long glide of his hips. Moving in and out, his pace picks up and he throws his head back on a groan.

“Fuck, Faith, I need you to come with me.” Gripping my legs, he brings them up, so they’re bent at the knee leaving me wide open to welcome him in some unknown and raw place. He’s hitting the heart of me, literally and figuratively. He found me and is making me feel everything.

“Kyle.” His name is a benediction falling from my tongue.

He growls rough and jagged. What should have been sweet sends a flood of heat between my thighs to greet him as he enters me. He groans along with the slide. Mine, so good, so fucking tight and hot become a drumbeat to climb, along with the pounding rhythm of his hips as they snap into mine. And when I’m stretched so thin, ready to break into a million pieces, I bite his shoulder so he will feel every ounce of pleasure I can give him. Raking my nails down his back, I sink them into the flexed muscles of his ass.