Strong Enough

“Upstairs.” His voice thick with urgency. “My bedroom.”

Two seconds later, we were tearing up the stairs and he was pulling me into his pitch-dark bedroom. With frantic hands, we shoved off shoes and socks, tugged off jeans and underwear, and then fell onto the bed, our mouths joined. I ended up on my back and he settled between my legs, grinding his slick, hard cock against mine, which was rising fast.

“I fucking love your body.” His words sent fireworks shooting through me.

“I feel the same,” I said, running my hands over his wide, muscular shoulders and back.

“More,” he said in that commanding tone of his. “I want more.”

“Take it.”

He got to his knees, and I heard the sound of a drawer open and close. A series of clicks. Hands rubbing together. In the shadowy dark, I could see the outline of him preparing to fuck me, and my heart pounded furiously in my chest. I watched as he began to stroke himself, a tremor moving through my body when I felt his warm, silky fingers slide between my legs. Deftly, unabashedly, he explored me, his touch so expert I almost couldn’t believe he’d never done this before. I love your hands.

I bent my knees and opened wider for him, inviting a more intimate touch. He eased one finger inside me, and my stomach muscles tensed at the sweet, tight burn of it. “Yes,” I whispered. One finger became two, teasing and stroking and stretching me. Whether by happy accident or on purpose, he rubbed my prostate, and my lower body started to hum. Fuck, that feels good. Fully hard again, I took my cock in my fist and rocked my hips, fucking his hand and mine at the same time.

He grunted. “Jesus. That’s so fucking hot. Don’t stop.”

I kept doing it, careful not to go at it too enthusiastically so I wouldn’t come yet. But his fingers were too deep, his eyes on me too hot, and you can only work against your own body for so long before it tells you to fuck off, this is happening. And I wanted it to happen with him. “Derek.” I struggled to speak. “Now.”

I’d never wanted anyone this badly, and I’d never cared so much about making it perfect for someone. It wasn’t that I’d been a selfish lover, but in the past it had mostly been about the physicality of sex. The arousal, the fuck, the release. With Derek, it was different—I was conscious of his desire for me on another level. I knew it had to be powerful enough to overcome fears that resided at the very core of his being. I was aware that he had chosen me not just over another man, but over himself.

I wanted to be worth it.





Twenty-Three





DEREK



This was it. No turning back.

Not that I wanted to. All my inhibitions were gone, annihilated by my physical need to have this man. To take him. To know, once and for all.

I could barely contain myself as I tore open the condom packet and eased it over my aching cock. My fingers shook. It was a different kind of excitement than I’d ever felt—a storming, swirling mass of nerves, desire, anticipation, fear, hope, dread, greed, thrill. And at the center of it all, the eye of the storm, was my awareness of him. Maxim. It wasn’t only that I wanted the answer to a question. I wanted him.

After coming home from Carolyn’s, I’d tried to numb myself with whiskey—would I never fucking learn—and forget the feelings I’d had watching him flirt with those women. But it was no use. I knew it was no use the moment I heard his key in the lock. I knew what I was going to do the moment I saw him from where I sat in the lonely dark. I just hoped he’d have the good sense to stop me.

But he hadn’t. And the more we kissed and touched and struggled against what I finally saw as the inevitable conclusion of such passion, the more I wanted to surrender to it.

So I had—I shed every last doubt and let my deepest instincts take over. And now I was being rewarded for it.

His body beneath mine. His cock in my mouth. His cum down my throat. His tight, hot ass grinding against my fingers. His hand on his dick.

Easy, easy now.

My heart was pounding. I couldn’t breathe. Maxim’s sweet, low voice in the dark was like a secret I wanted to keep forever.

He closed his eyes, his expression tense and his breaths deep and measured as I gently pushed the tip of my cock inside him.

I couldn’t talk. I didn’t even have sentences in my head—just words that jumbled together as my brain tried to process what I was feeling as I slid deeper, inch by inch. Fuck. Yes. Hot. Tight. This. More. Want.

When I was buried inside him, I fell forward, bracing myself above him, my lips an inch from his. I closed my eyes. “Sweet Jesus.”

He wrapped his arms and legs around me. “Does it feel good?”

I swallowed, afraid to move, because I knew I would come in two thrusts. “Yes.”

He kissed me, his tongue teasing between my lips. “I want this to be everything you imagined.”

But I hadn’t imagined anything even close to this.

Slowly, with control that shocked me, I began to roll my hips, easing in and out of that unbelievable heat. He moaned against my lips, and I loved the sound of it so much, I moved a little faster, a little harder, just so he’d do it again. It’s so good, so fucking good. I’d never felt anything like it.

“You’re perfect,” he whispered, “so fucking perfect.”

It was all perfect, every single thing—his legs around me, his hands on my back, his breath on my lips. It made me feel close to him. Like what we were doing wasn’t just about sex—it was about us. I lifted my head up slightly to see his face, and our eyes locked. Fuck. Right then, I understood why he’d come so quickly in the living room when I’d looked up at him. There was something so intimate, so powerful, so blistering hot about eye contact in a moment like that. It was more than contact. It was connection, and it was intense.

My body reacted, moving faster and harder and deeper until I was bucking wildly over him, every brutal thrust punctuated with a sound from the back of my throat and the slap of skin on skin. I grabbed the headboard, almost desperately, as if I needed to hold on. He brought a hand back to his cock and jerked himself as unrestrainedly as I was fucking him, all the muscles in his arm and abs and chest flexing, his legs tightening around me. It’s everything I’d always wanted sex to be—sweaty and hard and rough and animalistic and fuck, fuck, I’m going to come and then it was the sight of him losing control beneath me that finally pushed me over.

But it wasn’t the sight of his muscles or his hand or his cock. I wasn’t even looking at it.

It was his eyes. It was the connection. It was the answer to everything, because it wasn’t only a connection to him—it was a connection to myself, a path to understanding a part of me I’d always found incomprehensible, foreign, ugly.

With Maxim, it made sense. It was as much a part of me as the heart beating in my chest or the blood rushing through my veins. And it was beautiful.

With him, it was beautiful.