53

Marianna.

My thoughts came to a standstill.

Which was strange, because my brain never shuts up—my inner monologue runs twenty-four hours a day, like a cable news channel nobody asked for. The silence was dizzying.

All I could do was stare at Duane.

He leaned down and kissed my earlobe. "Your ears are cute, Marianna."

"Stop looking," I said, nudging his chest. He didn't budge.

He guided me toward the bed. My back hit the mattress. His hands found my waistband. His sweatpants—because every single thing I was wearing was his, because I owned nothing in this city, because I'd been wrapped in his clothes for weeks and now he was unwrapping me—

I lifted my hips. He pulled them off.

So. Naked in Duane Richter's apartment. I was on his guest bed with those dark eyes on me, and my brain kept trying to restart and failing, like an engine flooding itself.

"You're staring at me," I said. My voice came out wrong. Breathless. Somebody else's voice.

"I'm looking at you."

He was kneeling between my legs now—when had that happened?—one hand braced on the mattress beside my hip, the other tracing a line down my sternum with one finger. Gentle. Barely there. The touch was so light my muscles twitched on their own.

"Staring is passive," he said. "I am not."

Then his mouth followed the path his finger had traced. Down my sternum. Across my ribs—the muscles under his lips jumping, which is a completely normal physiological response to stimulation, very clinical, very professional—down to my navel.

Lower.

His breath was warm against my hip bone. That spot—

No.

A flash. Quick and sharp. Different hands. Older hands. Hands that had once gone where they shouldn't—

I tensed. Just for a second. A micro-freeze. My thighs locked. My breath caught.

Duane stopped.

I breathed. In through my nose. Out through my mouth.

The flash faded. Whatever memory had been trying to surface—formless, nameless—sank back into the dark.

"Look at me, Mari," Duane said, stroking my cheek, then squeezing my hand, firm, like he was pulling me back to shore.

I'm here. I'm right here.

"I'm okay," I whispered. "I'm fine."

He watched me a moment longer. I nodded again. Firmer this time.

He kissed the inside of my knee. Soft.

Then his mouth moved inward—slowly, so slowly, giving me time to track every inch, to stay here, to stay me—

And I stopped breathing.

My brain made one last heroic attempt at clinical narration—anterior... pudendal... the—and then gave up entirely. Wiped clean. Like someone had unplugged the news channel mid-broadcast.

Because—

Oh.

Is this what it's supposed to feel like?

The question floated up through the white noise like a swimmer breaking the surface. Is this what everyone's been talking about? The thing Josh called me broken for not feeling? The thing every boyfriend decided was my fault?

Because this didn't feel like a fault. This felt like—

Duane did something unhurried and precise, and my hips lifted off the mattress all on their own, and the sound I made would've been mortifying if I'd had a single brain cell left to be mortified with.

"God—"

He didn't stop nor speed up. Just kept that same patient rhythm, like he had all night, like I was the only item on the schedule. And something started building.

My hand found his hair and held on. Some distant part of me worried about his neck—he has a race next week, this is terrible for his cervical spine—

He made a low sound against me, and I lost the thread completely.

The wave hit. My spine arched. My vision went white. Every muscle I've ever memorized fired at once, and for a second I honestly wasn't sure I'd come back together in the same order.

It lasted forever. It lasted three seconds. Time went wobbly again—and for once, I wasn't floating up by the ceiling watching it happen to someone else.

I was arriving. Into my own body.

For the first time.

When the world came back—gray ceiling, city lights, the warm weight of his hands on my thighs—I realized I was crying.

Not sobbing. Just tears, sliding quietly into my hair. I couldn't have told you where these tears came from.

Duane lifted his head. Saw the tears.

Warmth touched my cheek. His lips. He was kissing the tears off my skin, slow, like he had all the time in the world.

"My face is doing a thing," I croaked.

"I see that."

He climbed up my body and kissed the tears off my left cheek. Then the right. Then my forehead, just above the stitches—the spot that's somehow become our shorthand for be gentle here.

Then my mouth.

"You," I breathed, "are very good at that."

"Mm."

"Like, unreasonably good. There should be a license. A regulatory body—"

"Marianna."

"Yes?"

"Stop talking."

"I can't—"

He kissed me again. Effective strategy, honestly.

When he pulled back, his forehead rested against mine.

"You can stop at any time," he said. His voice was rough. Wrecked, even. But steady. "Any point. You say the word, everything stops."

"I know," I whispered.

"Look at me."

I looked. Those dark eyes, close enough to see where the black went warm at the edges.

"This isn't about what you owe me," he said. "Not the apartment. Not the money. If you want to roll over and go to sleep and never mention this again—that's what we do. Nothing changes."

My chest ached.

Because he meant it. Every word. I could see it.

"I don't want to stop," I said.

It might have been the truest thing I'd ever said out loud.

He reached for the nightstand drawer. I heard the crinkle of a wrapper, and my brain—traitor, back online at the worst possible moment—started spiraling. He keeps condoms in the guest room? Does he bring women here? Am I just—

"They're mine," he said, reading my face like a telemetry screen. "From my bathroom. I brought them in tonight."

"You planned this?"

"I planned for the possibility." A beat. "Hoping and planning aren't the same thing."

Then he was back. Above me. Close.

He kissed my eyelids—right, then left. The lightest possible pressure. Like he was sealing something in.

"Fuck," he murmured. Not to me. To himself. The sound of a man who doesn't surrender, surrendering.

Oh.

It doesn't hurt.

That was my first thought. Stupid and obvious and necessary. Because the only other time—with Marcus, that one miserable night I forced myself through like a dentist appointment—it had hurt. Everything hurt. My body was concrete and my mind was on the ceiling and the whole thing lasted four minutes of mutual suffering.

This wasn't that.

He moved, one slow careful roll, and found something in me I didn't know existed. Some part of me that had apparently gotten the memo: tonight's the night we come online. I made a sound. A real one. From a real body that was here.

"Okay?" he asked.

"Yes—" The word cracked in half. "Yes. Don't stop. Don't—"

He didn't stop.

The world got small. No gray ceiling. No $3,466.67. No Josh, no Tyler, no formless memories scratching at the edges. No brother snoring forty feet down the hall. Just this. Just him. Just the rhythm we were building together—my hips rising to meet his, his forehead against mine, our breathing tangled in the dark—and the ridiculous, impossible, wildly inconvenient fact that my body works.

My body works.

Not perfectly. Not like the movies. I was still a little in my head, and he was still a little too careful, and we hadn't learned each other yet—the angles, the pace, the small adjustments that take time.

But it works.

And when the second wave started building—slower than the first, deeper, starting somewhere in my spine and spreading outward like heat—I didn't fight it.

I let it take me.

"I'm—" I couldn't finish. "Duane, I'm—"

"I know." His voice was strained. The famous control finally, finally cracking. "I know. Let go."

I let go.

The world went white.