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Leaning my weight on my left hand, I brought my right down, and he took my fingers between his. Deft and sure, he pressed my fingers to my own dripping core. “Play with yourself until I say so.”

I did, rubbing and circling in a familiar pattern thatthrummed through me like a harmonic chord in the most satisfying way. Behind me, I was vaguely aware of the sounds of Cal unzipping his pants, and then the crinkle of foil as he ripped open a condom. I brought myself closer to a crescendo, ramping up my arousal to a fevered pitch. I closed my eyes, and the warm summer air gathered sweat at my temples. As a droplet slid down my cheekbone, Cal said, “Stop.”

Reluctantly, I did. “Cal,” I breathed out hard.

“Hands up.” Groaning, I brought my right hand back up to my left. Cal grasped my bare hips, and then the tip of his cock was at my soaked, throbbing entrance. As he slid into me, I shuddered out a breath of relief. MyGod, he felt like heaven. Like Hell. Like a symphony of perfectly coordinated notes that strummed through me with maddening perfection.

He reached around me again, and this time when he began a rhythm, slick and with perfect pressure, I hummed in pleasure, pressing my ass against him and silently begging him to pull out and slam his cock deep inside of me. Cal obliged, easing out and then thrusting back inside me. I stretched around him, too full and somehow not enough. Releasing a tortured sound, I pushed against him and rose up higher on my toes as his fingers and cock brought me to my breaking point.

Cal found a rhythm, quicker and harder with each passing second, and I barely managed to keep myself braced against the trunk as he fucked me into such delicious oblivion, I wouldn’t have known if someone had walked past us on the path or not. I wouldn’t have cared. I was riding a high and chasing arelease that I knew would sing through my body and soul with a deafening crescendo.

My orgasm built just as fast and suddenly as Cal’s tempo, and I cried out, almost in pain as my core spasmed around him, clenching hard and then releasing into waves of knee-buckling ecstasy. I lost my grip on the tree, but Cal held me up with his left arm around my torso. He slowed and then stopped, burying himself in me deeply as he found his own release. I leaned against him, breathing hard and basking in aftershocks of pleasure that squeezed around his length still inside me.

The chitter of insects and the rush of a sudden breeze through the trees pricked at my awareness. I lifted my head, looking through my disheveled locks and over my askew glasses to peer around the still forest. “Oh,” I panted.

Cal’s chest rumbled as he chuckled behind me. He dropped a soft kiss on my exposed shoulder where my dress had fallen down. “Oh.”

I put my weight back on my feet, and with a furtive glance around the deserted area, I replaced my skirt back over my bare ass and fixed my top. As I adjusted my glasses, I looked down at the moisture between my legs. Even though Cal had used a condom, I had made plenty of a mess down the insides of my thighs. I pulled a face.

Cal snorted and held out a handful of tissues to me when I turned to face him. “Fluids, right?”

I bit my lip, smiling. “How’d you guess?”

“It’s like I know you,” he mused. He’d already fixed himself,and he tucked my tissues and his in his pocket. “I came prepared for sex in the woods, thankfully.”

“That’s specific of you.”

Cal pulled me up against his lean body again, kissing my lips languorously. “I might have fantasized about fucking you in the fresh outdoors… a couple of times.”

I frowned, pulling away an inch. “I’ve known you for like three weeks tops.”

“I have a very active imagination,” he said seriously.

Twigs cracked behind us. I jumped, whirling toward the sound, only to find another couple making their way from the party to our path. Cal shifted me to the right, pressing me against the wide trunk of the maple tree again. It put us mostly out of sight as the couple passed on the trail.

“I think they have a rhododendron garden up this way,” the man was saying.

“Oh, nice,” the girl replied noncommittally, giving away the fact that they clearly hadn’t been together long. Their feet crunched over gravel and twigs as they slowly walked the path at my back. Cal could see them better, and he peered around the tree to track their progress silently.

I ran my eyes over the buttons on Cal’s chest, up the column up his throat, across his bronze-tinted lips, and then up to his gaze. Forest green eyes watched me with shimmering mirth. I’d been caught ogling.

Silently, Cal mouthed, “You like me?”

I cracked a grin, shaking my head. “Love you,” I mouthedback.

His features melted into a contented kind of joy, and he brought his hands up to cup my face on either side. He bent down to kiss my forehead, inhaling softly. “Love you, too,” he whispered.

I leaned into him, which got easier to do every time we exchanged those words. It was a learned skill, trusting. We humans might be born with the inherent need to trust and rely on others, but it was so easily broken and replaced with self-doubts. The more I relied on Cal, and the more I opened myself up to the possibility of belonging, the easier it became.

When we made our way home later that night, it was to a door that opened readily and a house on a hill that welcomed me just as surely as the man who had invited me into it. Before Cal, somewhere along the way, I’d managed to convince myself that I only deserved locked doors and dashed dreams. Cal had rewritten that, and he’d done it in careful, swirling script over my heart. Just as steady and sure as a finely crafted silverpoint manuscript, he had taken care to bring his words to life at the very center of my being.

Because he loved me for me. I loved him for him.

Our love justwas.