CHAPTER 17 - FIRST TIME

My mom and Dominic leave for dinner at seven and the front door hasn’t finished closing before Knox is in my doorway.

He’s been different since the dinner table – since his eyes snapped to Dominic’s hand on the back of my neck and something behind his expression rearranged itself into a configuration I haven’t seen before. He’s been watching me all day with this focused intensity that goes past his usual possessiveness into something more urgent, like he’s running a calculation and the answer keeps coming back the same.

“Come here,” he says, and I go because my body has been trained to respond to his voice the way plants respond to light, and he takes my hand – which is new because he doesn’t usually hold my hand, he usually GRABS things – and leads me down the hallway to his room and closes the door behind us.

His room smells like him. Leather and engine grease and warm skin and that unnamed thing underneath that makes my lower belly tighten every time I breathe it in. He turns to face me and his hands go to the hem of my shirt and he pulls it over my head with a slowness that’s so unlike him that I almost ask if he’s okay.

“I’ve been patient,” he says, and his voice has that low register that I feel in my chest. “I’m done being patient.”

My pulse spikes so hard I’m sure he can hear it, and based on the way the corner of his mouth twitches, he can. His hands go to the waistband of my shorts and he slides them down my legs and I step out of them and I’m standing in front of him in a bra and underwear and the way he looks at me makes me feel more naked than if I was wearing nothing at all.

“Knox, I’ve never–” The words catch in my throat because saying them out loud makes them real, and his hands stop moving on my waist and his eyes come up to mine and something shifts in his face that I can only describe as a door opening and a lock engaging at the same time.

“No one’s really touched you.” It’s not a question. He says “really” with an emphasis that tells me Ryan Parker’s four awkward kisses don’t register on whatever scale Knox is using to measure experience, and he’s not wrong because nothing Ryan did with his mouth came within a continent of what Knox does with his hands.

His eyes go dark in a way that’s equal parts reverence and hunger, and the combination of those two things on the face of a man who has been systematically dismantling my self-control for over a week makes my knees feel like suggestions rather than structural elements.

He picks me up. His hands under my thighs, my legs wrapping around his waist on instinct, and he carries me to his bed and lays me down with a carefulness that’s so foreign to everything I know about Knox Voss that my chest aches with the tenderness of it even as his hands are already reaching behind me to unhook my bra.

He undresses me the rest of the way and then he stands at the edge of the bed and pulls his shirt over his head and his jeans come off and he’s – bigger than I expected, and I’d felt him through his jeans enough times to think I had an estimate but the estimate was wrong and I am staring at him with an expression that must communicate something close to alarm because he leans down and his mouth brushes my ear and he says, “I’ll go slow. For now.”

He settles between my legs and his weight over me is grounding in a way I didn’t expect, and his mouth is on my neck and his hand slides between us and his fingers find me already wet and work me open with the kind of thorough attention that tells me he’s preparing me for something my body hasn’t accommodated before.

“You’re so wet,” he says against my throat, and his fingers curl inside me and my hips lift off the bed. “You’ve been this wet all week and nobody’s been inside you. Do you know how insane that makes me?”

He pulls his fingers out and positions himself against my entrance and the pressure of him there – blunt and hot and impossibly wide – makes every muscle in my body tense. He pushes forward the first inch and the stretch pulls a sound out of me that I catch between my teeth, and he stops and his forehead drops to mine and his breathing is ragged against my lips.

“Look at me,” he says, and I open my eyes and his face is right there, close enough that I can see the ring of darker grey around his irises and the way his jaw is clenched with the effort of not moving. “I need you to look at me when I do this.”

He pushes in further and the stretch burns and I grip his shoulders hard enough that my nails bite into his skin, and he feeds himself into me inch by inch with a patience that I can feel costing him physically because his arms are shaking on either side of my head and his whole body is vibrating with restrained force. He talks the entire time – telling me how tight I am, how warm, how he’s been thinking about this since the engagement dinner when he caught my scent across the restaurant and his body decided I was his before his brain caught up, and the constant stream of his voice gives me something to anchor to while my body adjusts to the size of him stretching me open from the inside.

He reaches the hilt and we both go still, and the fullness is so complete that I can feel my heartbeat pulsing around him and his answering pulse inside me, and for one suspended moment neither of us breathes.

“Knox,” I say, and his name comes out broken and raw and something in him SNAPS – I can see it happen behind his eyes, this visible fracture in the restraint he’s been maintaining, and his hips pull back and drive forward in one smooth stroke that pushes a moan out of me loud enough that the neighbours might hear it and neither of us cares.

He starts moving with a rhythm that’s slow but deep, bottoming out with every thrust in a way that makes me feel him in my stomach, and his mouth is at my ear narrating everything – how I feel around him, how my body is gripping him like it doesn’t want to let go, how he can feel every clench and flutter and the sounds I’m making are going to ruin him for anyone else for the rest of his life, which is fine because he wasn’t planning on there being anyone else.

My nails drag down his back and he groans into my neck and his hips speed up and each thrust hits something deep inside me that sends shockwaves through my abdomen, and I say his name again because it’s the only word my brain can produce and every time I say it his rhythm stutters and then drives harder, like the sound of his name in my mouth is a trigger he can’t override.

“Say it again,” he says, and I say it, and he thrusts so deep that my back arches off the mattress and my legs lock around his waist and I’m so full of him that I can’t tell where he ends and I start.

He doesn’t stop after the first time.

He cums with his face buried in my neck and my name between his teeth and his hips pinning mine to the mattress, and before I’ve finished catching my breath his hands are on my hips and he’s flipping me over onto my stomach.

“We’re not done,” he says, and his hand slides down my spine, and I press my face into the pillow and feel him harden against me again already.