“I think I just found religion.”
I giggle. I don’t want him to move an inch. My legs come around his, twisting and twining, and he indulges me in breathless kisses delivered through smiles. My legs are smooth, his are covered in soft hair, and the sensation of them sliding together, the heat of him heavy and already hard again between our bodies, rekindles something inside me, triggering a desperate need for more.
When he pulls back, just barely, his eyes seem nearly backlit. “Be right back.”
“Don’t go.”
He laughs, kissing the tip of my nose. “I should get rid of this.”
Oh. Condom.
With a tiny groan of protest, I let him pull back and climb from the bed. He pads across the room. He is a study in shadow and geometry: straight lines frame the muscle along his spine, triangular planes at his shoulders, the hard curve of his backside.
I watch his shoulders as he works with his back to me, grabs a tissue from a box on the dresser, and drops the trash into the bin.
In the dim light I see the way he hesitates, taking a deep breath.
Carter straightens and turns. The front of my body is cold with the loss of him over me and it’s compounded by the tremor of anxiety that he’ll step away, clear his head, come to his senses.
“Are you sore?”
If anything, I feel hungrier. My voice is hoarse: “No.”
He squints, seeming to study me from across the room. “Are you freaking out?”
It still feels like I can’t catch my breath, and it hits me in this bewildering burst what we’ve just done and how much I want him back in bed with me. “Not in the way you mean.”
He takes one step closer and stops, looking down at me.
“Are you freaking out?” I ask.
“A little.” He reaches up, scratches the back of his neck while my stomach dissolves away inside my body. But then he adds, “I need to . . .”
More hesitation. My lungs are incinerated.
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” he says, “about you. I’m in love with you, Evie. You’re finally here with me. I don’t want to sleep.”
I sit up, aware that he can see me better with the moonlight coming in the window behind him. The sheet falls away, and I climb onto my knees.
I hear his breath catch somewhere high in his throat, but I don’t have to tell him to come back to bed, that it’s okay, that we’re a done deal. He closes the distance between us, smooth skin sliding over mine as he pulls me down, pulls me under again.
chapter twenty-two
carter
I wake to scratchy sheets, an unfamiliar ceiling, and the kind of artificial darkness that only comes from heavy curtains. There’s movement at my side and for one horror-filled moment I remember Kylie, with her overglossed lips and no concept of personal space, and my heart nearly stops, starting again only when I see Evie sleeping next to me.
An electric shock rolls through my body when I think of how we got here, how kissing felt like drowning and never wanting to come back up.
Evie looks soft like this. Maybe soft isn’t exactly the right word, but there’s a stillness I’ve not seen in her before, like her walls are down and I could touch her skin and move straight past it to her bones.
She’s so close—we’re almost nose to nose—and I can make out every eyelash, count each tiny freckle. She’s also naked, which I’m pretty happy about, but then I worry how she’ll react when she wakes up and sees that I’m naked, too.
Are we still friends today?
Did she hear me say that I was in love with her?
A part of me wants to be more scared than I am. It would be easier if we came to our senses and chalked this up to a good time and crazy lapse in judgment. But my brain and body are a united front on this in love with Evie thing. The sheet is low on her back, her dark hair is tangled across the pillow. I think we had sex four times last night. I stretch my legs, clench my stomach. It feels like we had sex twenty times last night.
I reach out and run a finger over the hand tucked under her chin and up the length of her arm, and she starts to stir.
I suddenly realize I have no idea what I’m going to say and close my eyes, steadying my breaths so she thinks I’m still asleep. A few moments of silence pass before curiosity gets the best of me. I feel ridiculous; I’m a grown man pretending to sleep to avoid a grown-up conversation. A smile begins to tug at my mouth and I chance a peek, both of us bursting into laughter when we find the other doing the same thing.
With a hand on my face she pushes me away. “You’re an idiot.”
Warmth pools in my chest. “I’m the idiot? Have you seen your hair?” I reach to smooth it down and she laughs, trying to escape.
“Have you seen yours?” she asks with a grin.
I pause, serious for a moment. “Still freaking out?”
She plays with her lip and hesitates before answering. “A little. Are you?”
I tell her the truth: “A little.”
“Do you want to stop this . . . whatever this is?”
I lean forward and press a kiss to the corner of her mouth before meeting her eyes. “No . . .”
“Okay,” she says, her gaze falling to my lips. “Do you want to avoid discussing it and have sex again?”
I move until I’m hovering over her, marveling at how much of her body I can cover with mine. I look down between us, to where her legs bracket my hips. I rock forward, experimentally, and feel the way I easily slip across her skin, smooth and already wet.
She groans softly and I know that sound. I remember the way it echoed around the room.
Her hands move along my sides, nails dragging up my ribs and across my nipples to my shoulders. With a hand on the back of my neck she pulls me down and then there’s nothing between us at all, not even air.
For a moment I think we could come from this, two bodies moving against each other at just the right speed, in just the right spot, like we did that night in her apartment. But that’s not what I want.
Evie must be on the same page because her arm is already stretched to the side, fingers fumbling with the strip of gift shop condoms I tossed there at some point during the night.
My eyes nearly cross when she rolls the latex over me, and I give her a reproachful look, batting her hand away. There’s no waiting after that. The sheet comes up and over our heads, a tent of white. My heart is racing and she rolls us over to straddle my hips, taking me inside and moving in tiny little starts and stops until she figures it out, gets where she really needs to be.