Drop Dead Gorgeous

Technically, that’s not a feeling, but it’s all I can come up with to describe this, like I’m filled with glitter and rainbows, buzzing with champagne, and my bones are liquid.

“What did you do? I think you broke me.”

Blake chuckles, and I look down to find him wiping his lips. “I hope not because I’m not close to done with you yet.”

I gasp in surprise, but when he stands and I see his cock straining against his pants, newfound energy shoots through me and I kick my jeans and panties off the rest of the way, wanting room for him between my thighs.

And maybe in my heart?

He quickly undoes his button and zipper, and with one smooth whoosh, he’s nude between my legs, giving his cock a slow stroke. He reaches for the nightstand drawer to grab a condom, and as he slips it on, Holly’s advice floats through some responsible part of my brain. “I’m clean.”

“Me too.” His head notches at my entrance, pausing. “Zoey?”

I blink, trying to make my eyes focus, and realize he’s asking permission. One more check that I’m finally okay with this. Not the sex—I’ve been ready for that for longer than I knew—but for him and this connection we have.

Doubt tries to creep in, cold and dry like a stone in the pit of my gut, and I do my best to slam the door on it, shutting it out. Blake’s eyes narrow, his brain working behind their heat.

Finally, he reaches for the nightstand once more. Coming back with the wooden figurine, he holds it between us. I’m confused at first, wondering if maybe he got it for some weird Pinocchio sex thing I’m blissfully unaware of, but then I realize what he’s offering me.

I touch the figurine for luck, and he smiles as if it’s cute and not weird as hell to do this mid-sex. I can’t help but answer his smile with one of my own when he tosses the figurine to the pillow. “Finally.”

“Yes,” I promise. He thrusts forward, entering me an excruciatingly pleasurable inch at a time, and the word comes out again, stretched out like warm taffy. “Yesssss.”

Once settled deep inside me, a shudder rushes through him, releasing a sigh of relief from his lips. I feel it too. Something bigger than him, bigger than me, and like Aristotle said, we’re creating something greater than the sum of our parts.

How could I have turned my back on this in fear?

He takes my hands, holding them over my head and looking me straight in the eye. There’s no turning away from this, no pretending this is casual. There’s no chance this is a booty call. I’m too much work for that. Work he willingly put in, tiptoeing through the minefield of my past and my irrationalities.

“Come back to me, Zo,” he says, pulling me out of my mind. “Be here with me. Nowhere else, just here, now.”

I am.

Vulnerable and exposed, afraid I’m simultaneously too much and not enough, but Blake simply smiles the smallest, sweetest smile ever. “There you are.”

I see him too.

He’s confident, bold, a believer in love, but he’s also human, and like us all, he has his own weaknesses. Ones he covers with his charm and easygoing nature, but he wants to feel wanted and accepted as much as I do.

As much as anyone does. “I’m here, Blake. With you.”

The whisper releases his inner barriers, and with our hands entwined and eyes locked, he finally fucks me. Our hips buck together in a beautiful, frantic tempo, weeks’ worth of build-up rising to the surface quickly.

I bend my legs, planting my feet on the bed to give him deeper access. I want him everywhere—in me, on me, around me. His breath goes jagged, and I whine with every powerful stroke until he tenses, on the edge for a magnificent moment where his face scrunches up in pleasurable agony.

With a deep, powerful grunt, he falls off the edge, pulsing inside me. His eyes flutter back open afterward and he looks . . . happy. Actually, he looks downright giddy. “I guess you’re not a roll over and fall asleep type?” I tease with a small laugh as he grinds his hips. “Let me guess . . . round two and cuddles?”

Blake releases my hands to trace over my body with his own hands. “Something like that. I’m definitely more the snuggle bug, contemplate the universe type. Or the run a mile type, but you said you don’t run, so I guess that’s out.”

“I’ll take door number one, I think,” I negotiate around a yawn. “And a nap before round two.”

“Deal.”

Blake and I rearrange ourselves in his bed, him sitting with two pillows to prop up against the headboard and me lying on my side with my head on his bare chest. It’s intimate and cozy, with his hands mindlessly mapping out my skin and my fingers dancing through the small patch of soft hair on his chest.