Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
I moved with care, with patience I hadn’t used in years, letting her take all of me at her pace. Every sound she made, every shift in her body, I claimed it. She was mine in a way no one had been before.
I’d been halfway to losing the leash when I felt it—that tight, new stillness that wasn’t just fit, wasn’t just the way two bodies meet. It was the edge of a line nobody else had crossed. It took my breath in a way a knife never had.
Her eyes searched mine like she was ready to judge the man I was about to be.
I made myself breathe. I eased a little, enough to give her space, enough to let my head catch up to the animal in my chest. My palm cupped her cheek; my thumb traced the corner of her mouth. She was warm everywhere. Trembling just a little. But present with me in this very second.
“Look at me,” I said, low, not a command this time, more like a bridge.
She did. Those eyes were open like she had been given a whole new world.
“We go slow,” I told her. “We go how you want. You wanna stop, we stop. No questions asked and no hesitation.”
A small nod, nothing dramatic, but it felt like a door unlocking.
“I want this.” Her fingers tightened at my shoulders, not to push me away—just to hold on.
I kissed her like time had stretched: slow, firm, patient, until the little tension at the hinge of her jaw softened under my mouth. Thumbs skimming the delicate notch at her collarbone, palms smoothing down the lines of her ribs. I learned where her breath hitched—just beneath the swell of her chest, along the curve of her waist. Every sound she gave me, I banked in my memory.
“Tell me if you need to stop,” I said against her mouth.
She nodded, then found speech. “Don’t stop.” Her panting was erratic as she was building.
I didn’t drive forward. I rocked, a slow persuasion, letting her body meet mine and step back from it and then find it again, each pass a fraction deeper than the last until what had been new felt a little more known. She tensed once—small, instinctive—and I stilled, kissed the line that pulsed at her throat, waited her through it. Her hands slid from my shoulders to the nape of my neck, fingers threading there, and her body eased under me.
“Good girl,” I murmured, not out of habit, but because the praise fit the moment and I felt her shiver with it. Not fear. Something else.
I set a rhythm as careful as I knew how, one that let her own pulse rise up to meet it. The room shrank around us until all I could hear was the catch of her breath and the rough sound of mine. The bed caught our weight and gave it back. Her legs tightened at my hips. I felt pure want in the way she lifted to me.
“Thrasher,” she said, like it was a question and an answer at the same time.
“Right here,” I told her, and meant it in more ways than one.
I didn’t rush the climb. I drew it out; I let it live in my chest and belly and thigh until I could tell where she wanted more and where she wanted me to stay exactly as I was. When I changed angle, it was an inch at a time, watching her face, finding the place that pulled a sound out of her that made me grit my teeth to keep from losing the pace I’d promised her. She reached for me, then stopped, uncertain, and I guided her hand where I liked it, low at my side, the grip that steadied me.
“You’re doing fine,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t even being kind. She was new and she was good and she was mine in a way that I hadn’t ever felt before.
Her hair stuck to her temple. I smoothed it back, kissed the skin I uncovered. Her mouth opened for me like a secret. The next breath she took broke on a sound that let me know the pain had drifted into something warmer, something that lit behind her ribs and moved outward.
“Better?” I asked.
Her answer was the way she lifted her hips to meet me, the way her nails bit just enough into my back to write her name there.
I let myself give her a fraction more. Not speed, instead depth. Not force, but complete certainty. The bed creaked a rhythm that became ours, a quiet drum under the blood in my ears. I felt the change before she did, the way her body gathered itself, the way her breath forgot how to behave. I didn’t push past her, didn’t run ahead. I stayed with her, right there in the moment.