“I am a writer." I dot kisses under her chin and any reachable skin. "Take it as a sign of respect.”
“I’ll take this.” She grabs my bone-hard, stretched-out dick. “As a sign of respect.”
Her hand clamps and slides over me, thumbing the wet tip. Our eyes connect, and humor falls away, leaving the intensity that always rears between us. I’m working between her legs, and she’s working between mine. She drags air in, gasping, churning her hips, fucking my fingers. I suck one berry-tipped breast, watching color blossom over her neck and cheeks.
“Oh, God.” Her back arches off the bed, sheets knotted in one fist. “Yes, Grip.”
Her hold tightens on me, her fingers droppin
g to roll my balls in her palms.
“This pretty pussy.” I gather her wrists in my hand over her head and ease her knee back to her chest, opening her up. “It’s mine, right?”
“Yes. God, yes.” With dry sobs, she strains up to my lips, leaving kisses wherever she can. “You know it’s yours. Please take it. Just take it.”
Her submission, her admission unleashes an unquenchable thirst, an inexhaustible hunger. I need some part of her in my mouth. I bite down on her shoulder and push inside, my breath hissing between my lips at the wet, tight fit. She meets every thrust, and we are fervent, fevered. Pleasure excruciating. Twined together, her heel digging into my ass, my arm hooked under her knee, urging her open to the compulsion of my body pistoning into hers. I cannot possibly in this life be deep enough inside her. I want so much more than her body. She has thieved my soul, and I need to feel the reciprocity, the exchange. To know I’ve pilfered her and taken everything that she would offer and anything she meant to hold. Because that’s what she’s done to me.
I loosen her wrists to grab her ass, angling her. Both legs wrap around my back, and she works her hips up, eager to meet every hard thrust. I sit up, bringing her with me, and she hooks her ankles behind me.
“Ride, Bris.”
Her eyes, possessive, there’s no doubt I’m hers. Her hands, urgent and everywhere at once. Our breaths heave raggedly between our lips. Our bodies are lock and key, and we’re transfixed on each other. Inseparable. Insoluble. I seize her tongue, pulling her in, sucking her, wringing every drop of sweetness from the kiss. She whimpers, her hands clawing at my shoulders, my neck, scraping over my scalp.
“I love you." Her words drop hot in my ear with her breasts flattened to my chest and her thighs clenching at my hips. She tightens her pussy around my cock, a deliberate, hungry grasp and release.
"Bris.” My eyes roll back. I'm at the mercy of those muscles. "I love you, too."
She tucks her head into the curve of my neck, her breaths short and sharp as she recites from “Sonnet LXXXI”, telling me I’m already hers, to rest with my dream inside her dream, that we are joined by forever itself, and that we’ll travel the shadows together. She pants, sitting up straighter, leveraging herself with one arm behind her on the bed, changing the angle, deepening the penetration. In the lamp's light, I see her head flung back in abandon, her muscles straining with the unrelenting ferocity, the rigor of our bodies.
“You alone are my dream,” she says, adapting the quote, tears in the eyes she refuses to pull away from me. “And I alone am yours.”
It is a pledge of persistence, hidden in the poems I sent her. It’s a vow that she won’t ever give up on us. Knowing she held the poetry in her heart when she wouldn't even consider me, when I wasn’t even sure there was any hope, undoes me.
“Bristol, oh God."
I touch my forehead to hers, twisting my fingers into the damp hair at her neck. Pressed together, our heartbeats ricocheting, the universe tips, a dazzling lurching. A spectacular axis spinning beyond my restraint, just beyond my control. I once threatened to make her come with my words, but as the stars go blindingly bright and then dark behind my eyes, I realize she’s the one who did it.
Epilogue
BRISTOL
I HAVE AN eye for the extraordinary.
I can spot something special a mile away. That’s how I knew the day I met the man onstage that he was something special. I just had no idea how much he would change my life. Had no idea I would love him this way. I certainly didn’t have any idea he would feel the same.
“I think this is the best song he’s ever written,” Rhyson says to me as Grip sets up “Bruise” for the listening audience.
“You may be right about that.” I lean close to the baby cradled to my brother’s chest. “What do you think, Aria? Is it his best? Is that god-daddy’s best song?”
My niece squeals, and Rhyson and I look at each other with wide eyes in case it disrupts Grip’s performance.
“Here.” Kai sticks a pacifier into her daughter’s little mouth. “Figures you two would get her riled up.”
Rhyson holds his daughter in one arm, and pulls Kai close to him with the other. The contentment on his face squeezes my heart in the best possible way. After all the tumult that marked the first part of his journey, private and public, he somehow managed to make a normal life for himself. As normal as being a rock star married to another rock star can be. Though, intercepting the look Rhys and Kai exchange over Aria’s dark curly hair, I’m not sure there’s anything “normal” about a love that deep.
Glad I’m not the only one drowning. Grip once told me the capacity I have to love could be my greatest strength. Over the last few weeks, I’ve come to believe him. Especially when that love is for the right man, a man who wouldn’t exploit a heart like mine. He never ceases to amaze me with all the ways he proves he’s exactly the one for me.
“So you may have seen some footage of me a few months ago during a ‘routine’ stop,” Grip says from stage, a slight smile on those full lips I love so much. “It got just a little bit of coverage.”