Scandalized

He lets out a laugh of triumph, of disbelief, before covering my mouth with his.

I’m kissing him with everything I have, like he’s my anchor to this room and this world, and for a flash I wonder if something terrible has happened to me and this is my heaven, my salvation: in this bed with this man over me, working his body in and in and in and in.

His breaths go from jagged to rhythmic to not just breaths but grunts and then louder, harsher moans, pressed right into my temple and delivered through gritted teeth. He’s so hard, so tense all over, I think he’s close, hear his sounds change to an abrupt, almost shocked cry—

but then he pulls himself all the way out—

a sharp, unexpected loss,

“Not yet,” he gasps tightly—

deftly rolling me to my stomach and lifting my hips to enter me from behind in a single perfect slide.

I scream into a pillow at the feel of him, and he laughs breathlessly, bending to press his sweaty forehead between my shoulder blades. “Holy shit, what is this sex?” he whispers. “Holy shit, Gigi.”

I laugh, too, biting the pillow as he starts to move long and deep, giving me all of him, from the tip to the base, his thighs pressing to mine before he leaves space between us, only to return again hard and then harder and then harder, hitting a place in me that makes me want to shred the sheets with my fingers.

His breaths turn to sounds again. Groans, another disbelieving, overwhelmed laugh, and I look over my shoulder at him, finding his head thrown back, face tilted to the ceiling in an expression of total fucking bliss.

And at least for a moment, every bit of damage Spence did to my heart and self-esteem is wiped away. How can I be unworthy of trust and transparency when a man like Alec can show me this so readily, so openly?

It isn’t just that it’s sex—like he said it’s this sex; it’s unreal, whatever this is. I’m going to need a few days to come down from it. I’m going to have to work to not think about this over and over. If Alec Kim told me he wanted something I’d never done before, I would give it to him without question. He could fuck me anywhere. Does he want me to crawl? I’d do it. I want to feel his relieved exhale against the back of my neck, the dig of his fingertips in my hips. I want to be depraved for him.

He looks down, angling his head to watch his body work in and out of me, but he catches my eyes over my shoulder and smiles wickedly—knowingly—with that obscene bottom lip trapped tightly between his teeth. Alec leans forward and I twist to meet his kiss, hot and messy; he sucks at my mouth, my chin, biting and roughly tugging before he straightens behind me.

“Come here,” he whispers, sitting back on his heels and pulling me backward onto his lap. Reaching up, he gathers my hair and slides it over my shoulder, exposing my neck to his mouth. He pushes up as I grind, and our bodies are so in sync I want to scream into the Seattle night sky how good this is, how it feels to have his hands come around me, one cupping my throat and the other between my legs, patiently coaxing another orgasm free. He holds me up when I start to collapse. It’s fucking, sure, but it’s not just fucking. Alec’s mouth opens on my neck and I feel his breath start to shake, feel how quiet focus turns into desperation, and he angles me down again, moving with such solid strokes I can do nothing but marvel at the beauty of his uninhibited unraveling. Behind me, he whispers “It’s good” and “God, so good” and that he’s close again and again and then gasps my name with increasingly tight strain until he curls his hands around my hips and shoves in deep, coming with a sharp cry.

We collapse, his front to my back, his heaving chest pounding along my spine.

For minutes, we are paralyzed. Sweaty, entwined. He reaches blindly up, finding my hand, weaving our fingers together. His palm presses to the back of my hand, and then he does the same thing with the other, until I’m sweetly caged beneath him, and this time, I fall asleep without even realizing it.

Four

In unison, our phone alarms go off at five, after only maybe an hour of sleep. It’s like being heavily drugged, the way I can barely roll over, and then I realize it’s because I’m still on my stomach with a full-grown, six-foot-one-inch man asleep on top of me.

He stirs, rolling to the side and groaning, covering his face with a hand. “No.”

“I agree,” I mumble into the pillow.

“This must be what zombies feel like all the time.”

It seems we’re on the same page about the alarms: let them go until they time out in a few minutes. His chime sounds like the default setting on the phone, and I feel him laugh beside me at the Black Sabbath ringtone.

“I guess that would get me up, too,” he murmurs, kissing my shoulder.

Laughing, I stretch to grab the bottle of water on the bedside table, offering it to him. He pushes up onto an elbow, unscrewing the cap and taking a long drink. After what we did, it should be awkward to stare directly at Alec in the weak light filtering in from the hallway, but it isn’t. I watch him gulp down the water with primal satisfaction, and it is genuinely one of my favorite things ever to witness. Pillow lines crease his face. His hair is crazy. The fact that it’s five and we have an eight o’clock flight means we don’t have time for another round, but my body doesn’t get the memo. Blood seems to rise to the surface of my skin in anticipation of his hands.

And when he passes over the water to me and I lift the bottle to my mouth, he takes the opportunity to slide his hand over my stomach, stroking back and forth, eyes closed and forehead pressed against my shoulder.

“I had fun,” he says quietly. “I’m so glad you remembered me.”

It is both wonderful and terrible when he says this. Wonderful because I know he means it; terrible, because—of course—this is how the goodbye starts.

“Me too,” I say. “Really. I don’t want to get too intense, but it’s been a shitty year, and I needed this.”

“For maybe different reasons, I needed it, too.” He pauses, frowning. “But I just want to say—”

Oh God.