THE NEXT MORNING, Fin could feel Tyler’s anxiety before she even opened her eyes. She’d slept again, which was unusual for her. With a man in her bed, which was even more unusual. She couldn’t remember that ever happening before.
It’s because you trust him.
Jetty’s voice in her head. Her aunt, who had known so much at a glance. She’d probably had more clairvoyance than Fin’s mother, who’d worn silk scarves and sat on a curb chirping ominous warnings to passing tourists in the French Quarter. Her mother, who hadn’t ever minded parting a dope from a dollar. Who’d had the gift and abused and ignored it at every turn. Who’d let it drive her straight to that half-hinged life she’d barely held on to, like the edge of a sail in high winds.
All these years later, the common-sense intuition in Fin’s head still sounded just like her stolid aunt. It was still Jetty who was trying to keep Fin from running from herself.
Tyler’s anxiety was bright and specific, like how lime green was almost never just called green. He was worried about Kylie. Fin could feel it. It was a personal worry and Fin knew, without having to ask, that it wasn’t one he’d talk about if she asked. Not right now.
No. Right now he needed a distraction.
“I don’t know how to trust a man,” she said into the morning light that she still hadn’t opened her eyes to see. She stayed behind the comforting, warm curtain of her eyelids and felt him turn toward her, the blankets pulling tight against her breasts and then loosening when his warm hand traced over the plane of her stomach.
“I didn’t know you were awake over there.”
“Doing some early-morning worrying, just like you.”
He chuckled, pressing his lips into her hair. His soft, warm lips transformed into a sharp bite over the lobe of her ear, and she jumped, her eyes flinging open, his smiling, sleepy face filling her vision.
“Morning,” he whispered.
“So it is,” she whispered back.
“Why don’t you trust men?” he whispered to her, his face light and open and playful.
“Because I never knew any,” she said simply. “No father. My mother never had boyfriends. No uncles. No friends. No cousins. No brothers. My mother was very clear that all they do is take and never give. That they wreck you.”
“And your aunt?” Tyler asked, his voice still low, but the playful whisper long gone. He painted a picture over her hip bones with the palm of his hand, but it was more soothing than arousing.
“Never married. They’d had a brother who’d died when they were little, Jetty and my mother. But my time with Jetty, in her home, it was very female. Just me and Jetty and Via. And after Jetty passed, it was just me and Via.”
“You dated.”
Fin nodded. “Yes, but sort of in the same way that someone visits a zoo.”
Tyler laughed and absently snuggled her closer in a comfortable way. “Out of curiosity?”
“And because you know for sure that the animals stay locked in their cages. They can never really get to you.”
“Ah.” The mirth in his eyes dimmed. “Have I gotten to you, Fin?”
“Ty, you never even had a cage.” She traced his eyebrows, so light in color sometimes she forgot they were even there. “That’s why you were so scary to me. You were always a wild animal. All I knew how to do was hurt you enough to keep you very far away.”
“I don’t want to be far away.”
She sighed and looked at the ceiling of her apartment, her haven, her fortress. It was at that moment that the weak morning sun finally peeked around the edge of the neighboring building and hit her window, an orange cloud of light that turned her room into a candle.
“Have you ever done this before? A relationship?” she asked him.
“Yes and no. I dated a woman for a few years after college. Sam. She was sweet and never nagged me about my weird hours. I was doing an a.m. sports radio show at the time and had to leave the house at 4:30 every morning. I was usually in bed by 8:00. Not exactly a ton of fun in your midtwenties. We called it quits when it became clear that she was waiting for me to ask her to marry me. And later I was regularly seeing a woman, Alicia, back in California, but when Seb’s wife died and he needed me, I called things off and moved home.”
“You were relieved to leave her behind,” Fin intuited, fascinated, despite the pacing feeling in her gut, to hear about Tyler’s past.
“Yeah. Or rather, I was relieved to have a good reason to leave her. She was a cool person. There was no reason that it wouldn’t have worked except for the fact that I just didn’t care that much. And leaving town to go take care of my best friend made it so that I never had to tell her how little I cared.”
He slid up a few inches and nudged her back so that they could both share her pillow, their noses just a few inches apart, that steel rope braiding itself between their eyes again. “But I’ve never done this before, Serafine. I’ve never waited and waited for someone I wanted so bad. Well, it’s not want exactly. It’s...attraction.”
The lonely teenage girl who still lived somewhere in her heart immediately deflated. She’d thought he might say love.
“No, don’t get me wrong,” he laughed as he read her expression. “I don’t mean attraction in the cheap, shallow sense of the word. I mean it in the...magnet sort of way. Wherever you are, I want to be. When you move, something in me follows you, even all these lonely months, when I haven’t let it be my eyes that follow you, something in me still followed you. Attraction. I was, am, stuck to you. I don’t know how else to describe it.”
“Energy,” she whispered. “Our energy knew how it felt about each other before we did. I could sense that all the way back since the first time we met. It was instant for me. I just didn’t like it.”
“I didn’t like it much at first either. I didn’t want to chase you. But, then, yeah. I did.” His eyes went distant for a moment, the murky orange room glowing all around them. Fin got the strange feeling that the room had detached itself from the apartment building. They were simply floating haphazardly toward the sun. “So, what do we do about this trust thing?” he eventually asked her. “You’re not used to trusting men. Neither of us know much about relationships. How do we keep from driving this spaceship straight into the sun?”
She smiled, hearing his words. He’d been thinking about crashing into the sun the same way she had. Explain that one, universe.
She went to groom his bedhead, realized that his villainous hair was already falling in that perfect way that it usually did. Frowning, she moved her hand to his beard instead and was soothed by the imperfection there. The beard that had grown in overnight, even though she’d sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched him painstakingly shave it off not even nine hours ago. She liked the incongruous nature of it. Perfect hair, pesky beard. Something about that was perfectly Tyler.
“We go very slowly,” she said, the answer coming to her from somewhere in the heart of their glowing morning room, almost as if there were a spotlight shining on them and them alone, of all the people in the world. “And we make it up as we go along, even if it only makes sense to the two of us. And Kylie. This doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but us.”
He nodded, his eyes closing in contentment for a moment before they shot back open. “Fin, are you a, uh, marriage type of person?”
She laughed at his obvious discomfort, charmed that he’d made himself ask. “Ty, up until about seventy-two hours ago, I wasn’t even a sleep-the-night-in-the-same-bed-as-a-man sort of person.” She nipped his lips with hers. “This is what I meant by taking things slow.”
He nodded, somehow managing to look both soothed and argumentative at the same time. “I get that. But we haven’t really taken things slow at all, love. You know what I mean? Because I’m in your bed. While you’re naked. We’re about to tell Kylie about us. Three days ago, we hadn’t even kissed.”
“Sure, but we’ve both had feelings for a long time. And what do you mean I’m naked? Are you not naked?”
Instead of lifting the covers, she explored with the pads of her fingers, harrumphing in disapproval when she reached the band of his underwear. He grunted when she gently snapped the band against his hip bone. “I can’t sleep naked. I always end up thinking, what if there’s a fire and I have to run outside in front of all the neighbors?”
She laughed and ducked under the covers, relishing the sudden darkness, the closed heat of the cave of blankets, his chest hair against her cheek. She couldn’t hear his heart beating, but she could feel it, racing against the morning, his breath sprinting to catch up as she slid his underwear to his knees and rested her head on his thigh in the darkness under the blankets. She found his hardness with the palm of her hand and pushed it to one side and then the other, giving him a lazy, wet kiss on the crown and making him bend one of his knees up, almost as if he were protecting himself against the sharp pleasure of it all.
He said her name, Serafine, the whole name. Fin got the same feeling she had as she’d watched him sign her birthday into his calendar. Her full name, her given name, was a contract of sorts. He was signing her into his life with every desperate groan, his hands reaching under the covers, finding her forehead, her hair, her ears. His fingers traced the circle of her lips where she was stretched around him as if he wanted, needed, to feel the place where they were connected.
She took him hard to the back of her throat, swallowing around him and then blinking at the sunlight that was suddenly everywhere as he threw off the blankets and sat up. Taking her by the chin, Tyler sat her straight up, his tongue in her mouth and his hand scrabbling for the condoms on the nightstand. They scattered onto the floor and Fin dived for them, draping herself over the side of the bed. One of his hands snaked up her thigh and she felt the firm press of his thumb between her legs, testing her, teasing her, marveling. She sat up, tore the condom open and sheathed him tightly before crawling forward onto his lap. She gasped as she sat down on him, taking him in faster than she should have, the pinch of discomfort she felt somehow emphasizing just how intimate it was to do this with another person, to invite a man into her body. She would have chased that discomfort, ridden him too hard and too fast, just to understand it all better. But Tyler held her hips still and let her adjust to the raw size of him. His stubble scraped over her nipple, her collarbone, her neck, her temple. His arms were steel bands around her back. She could feel the individual press of each finger as he finally started to move underneath her.
Fin tipped her head back to stare blindly at the glowing ceiling and felt his hands tangle in her hair, trapping her there so that his lips could trace her pulse, so his teeth could gently test the elegant length of her throat.
But there was nothing elegant about the way they ground themselves together, barely pulling apart, just deep and then deeper. He was barely withdrawing and she reveled in the desperate, inarticulate nature of it. There was something unschooled and primal about all that skin, the tight grasp of him. It was uncouth and overwhelming and so ungodly personal.
It was that thought that ignited the quickening deep inside of her. Just how personal this man was.
“I was so wrong,” she gasped, pushing him backward and planting her hands on his chest, riding him hard enough to slam the bed against the wall.
“What?” he asked, his eyes squinting through his own pleasure, trying to make sense of her words on the other side of it.
“I thought you were shallow and superficial, Ty.”
He banded an arm around her waist and tumbled her to her back, disconnecting long enough to have her huffing in frustration, only to sink back into her so fast she tightened and groaned and kept chasing that quickening.
“Dowehavetotalkabouthisrightnow?” he choked out, burying his face in her hair, inhaling sharply, trailing his teeth down the side of her neck, pinning her hands onto the mattress.
“Yes!” she moaned, both in answer to his question and because the hip-twist thing he was doing was just so good. “Because you’re not shallow. You’re so personal, Ty. Even the way you have sex. No one does it like this. Just you. Oh!”
“Say that last part again.” He stopped thrusting, his mouth open, her hands pinned, his body buried deeply inside of hers. He held, held, held, panting, his pupils expanding and contracting, trying to capture the light, the moment, the very image of her.
“Which part?”
He released her hands and went down to his elbows, his forehead against hers. He caged her in gorgeously, keeping the rest of the world out. There was nothing but them. “The part where you said it was only me. Is it only me for you, Fin? Just me?”
He was asking her for words, but she couldn’t oblige him just then. There were no words for this feeling. She locked her ankles around his back, her wrists over his shoulders. She was hugging him so tightly she was doubling back and hugging herself. And wasn’t that just the way it was supposed to be? Wasn’t loving someone like this supposed to involve loving yourself? Wasn’t that what Via had been trying to explain all those weeks ago? You couldn’t logjam one part of your heart and expect the other rivers to flow freely.
“All or nothing,” she eventually gasped, not even capable of caring if he understood what she meant. Just you. But it wasn’t just him. It was only him. “All. Everything.”
A deep, almost helpless sound was coming out of him as he worked himself against her, his forehead dropping to her collarbone as his back curved hard into a C over and over again. She felt the rough scrape of his leg hair, the desperate tug and slide of his hand up and down the curve of her body. She whipped her head to one side and watched him ball up her pretty purple sheets in one white-knuckled hand. His movements went tight and jerky and then he was saying her name again. Her full name. His arms were all the way around her, all his weight on her chest as he spent himself inside of her.
His weight seemed to increase as he fell into what she could sense was a rather meditative state. Fin was, herself, familiar with the postorgasm haze and didn’t begrudge him one second of it. She couldn’t, however, breathe.
She gave him a light back scratch, slow and sweet, meant simply to remind him that he was a part of the world. But it was almost as if she’d static-shocked him. His body went rigid, his weight was gone and then she was being dragged under the covers, the blankets sloppily blocking out the light as he sealed them both into her bed. She blinked into the sudden stuffy darkness and then gasped when her knees were pulled apart and a warm mouth licked between her legs.
“Tyler.”
“Shh,” he said, letting his voice rumble into her. “Just pretend I’m not even here.”
She laughed. How could she pretend he wasn’t there? He had his tongue between her—
“Oh, lord.” Fin arched up and a slice of light almost blinded her where the covers pulled free and the morning invaded. She clawed them back down.
This was too much. Too good. But also too much pressure. It was too transactional; there was too much pressure for her to come.
“Ouch!” she yelped when he bit her sharply on her thigh.
“Quit thinking up there! If you come, you come. If you don’t, the world is not going to end. Just lay back and let me start my morning off right, all right?”
Not exactly loving being told off, Fin crossed her arms over her chest. But any rigidity she’d been attempting to hold on to simply melted away as he started to pet her with his tongue. Each of his strokes somehow both deep and soft.
“Personal,” she whispered, mostly to herself. The air under the covers was stiflingly hot, and it felt good. They were sweaty and slipping against one another as she started to rock against him. He held her down with one forearm over her hips, but his other hand explored and slid and pressed deeply inside of her.
She wanted so badly to let go...but just couldn’t. Everything he was doing felt so unbelievably good, but he’d already come and she was taking so long and he must be getting bored and—
“Fin,” he said, his lips against her thigh again. “Read my energy. Read me. Be honest with yourself. How am I feeling right now?”
As his tongue came back to draw circles around her clit, Fin let herself reach out and find his energy. It didn’t take much. The man was loud. Which made Fin realize just how hard she’d been working to block him out before.
How hard she’d blocked out everyone she’d ever slept with.
She sucked air in through her lungs, let her eyes close in the stuffy blackness of the blankets and let herself feel him. His energy hit her like a wall of light and sound. She was flung sidelong into his golden sphere of life and feeling and...contentment. There were other emotions there as well, of course. Every human was a complicated tapestry of thousands of feelings, each of them struggling to top-dog the next. But there, loudest of all, in Tyler, at that moment, with his head between her legs, was contentment. Followed closely by a lingering arousal that hadn’t leached from him after his orgasm.
He gave her a potent, twisting kiss, and Fin could not, for the life of her, scent even a trace of impatience in the man. He was fully in his body, in the experience of her. Her back arched when he kissed at her again.
“That’s it,” he muttered.
Light slanted in again from the side, momentarily blinding her as she arched for him, cried out, twisted at his hair. She let his golden glow take her away as her heels dug into his back, just trying to hold on to the bounds of the earth.
When the orgasm swept over her, she’d never known another one like it. This was jet stream and ozone on the air, clear blue sky, plummeting upward at the speed of light. She lost her grip on the sheets, arrows of cracked light burning her eyes as her body slashed its way through pleasure.
She fell back, her top half limp even as her legs still trembled. She’d probably have the imprints of his ears on her thighs, she’d been gripping him so hard. She must have been gasping for breath, there was blanket in her mouth, her own hand over her forehead, her hair everywhere. She felt Tyler fighting with the blankets and then light surrounded them on all sides, no longer orangey and glowing, but a glaring full-morning slice that told her just how much time had passed since they’d gone under the covers. She waited for the requisite guilt to swamp her that it had taken that long for her to come. But it didn’t come. Maybe it was the lovely buzz that still reverberated through her limbs, maybe it was Tyler, grinning at her from her shoulder, the blankets in a hood over his hair, his big feet waving happily from the foot of the bed.
Either way, the guilt didn’t come. But laughter did. Fin threw her head back and laughed her heart out.
She grabbed Tyler’s neck and hugged him, realizing that so many other times his energy had mixed with hers, she’d attempted to grab it by the scruff of the neck and leave it on the curb. But why? Why, when it felt this good to let it course through, in her blood like a stiff drink drunk too fast? She hummed with it, reveled in it and knew, in her heart, he was experiencing the exact same thing.