Page 12 of Love Letters from a Libra (BLP Signs of Love #13)

“Nah, I mean your space feels like you but in stereo.”

I couldn’t help the laugh that escaped me. “What does that even mean?”

Jules gestured with his hand.

“It means everything you are but amplified louder, but it’s beautiful.”

The compliments slid under my skin, warming places that had been cold since his texts turned distant. I hated how easily he did that, disarmed me with simple observations that somehow felt more genuine than elaborate praise other men had offered.

As we ate, questions hung in the air between us, asked and unanswered. Still, as the food disappeared and our initial hunger faded, space for those questions grew.

I set my fork down, looked directly at him, and asked what I’d been wanting to know since he appeared at my door. “Were you going to ghost me?”

My bluntness caught him off guard. His hand froze halfway to his mouth, and he slowly lowered the food back to the container.

“No, but sometimes I pull back when things feel too good. It’s not you. It’s my history.” There was no hesitation in his voice or shifting of his eyes.

His admission hung between us, heavy with everything it didn’t say.

And I thought about my own history, the key around my neck, the empty apartment, and learning early that people left when they didn’t mean to.

I wondered what lessons his past had taught him and what walls he had built for protection that kept out the very thing he might want.

“Too good? Most people run when things feel bad, not when they feel good,” I commented.

“I’m not most people,” he said, not as a boast but as a fact.

“No, you’re not.” I agreed.

Something shifted between us—a door opening, not all the way, but enough to glimpse what might be on the other side, enough to create possibility.

He reached across the coffee table, palm up, and invited rather than demanded.

After a moment of hesitation, I placed my hand in his, and his fingers closed around mine.

“I’m trying,” he said. And those two words contained more vulnerability than any elaborate explanation could have.

I heard in them everything he wasn’t saying—that his connections scared him, and he was fighting his own instincts to be here, that showing up tonight cost him something, yet I didn’t understand.

“Okay, then I’m trying too.” I squeezed his hand.

We left many things unsaid and fears unvoiced, but we unlocked something new, a fragile honesty that felt more valuable than grand declarations or passionate promises.

His thumb traced the circles on the back of my hand, and I allowed myself to believe that people could sometimes surprise you by showing up instead of fading away.

We migrated to the couch, the empty food containers abandoned on the coffee table.

My legs ended up draped over his lap, casual and intimate, as if my body had decided that comfort trumped caution tonight.

The quiet between us didn’t feel empty. It felt like a conversation, all its own, spoken in the language of our shared space.

Jules took my hand in his, turning it up.

His fingers traced the lines in my palm.

He etched the life, heart, and fate with the gentleness that made something flutter beneath my ribs.

His touch was deliberate and intensive, like he was reading a map of places I’d been and places I had yet to discover.

“Did you know that palm reading and astrology share common roots? Both attempt to map the unmappable trajectory of human life,” he said, his voice smooth as night.

“Are you secretly a palm reader now too?” I joked, watching his finger follow my heart line from the edge of my palm toward my index finger.

Jules smiled. “No, but I notice your heart line is deep and passionate, but it has little breaks in places where it hesitates before continuing.”

I swallowed, surprised by the accuracy of his observation, not just of my palm but of my emotional patterns. “What does that mean in your amateur analysis?”

Jules smirked, but his eyes lifted to meet mine. “It means you love deeply but cautiously, like someone who’s been hurt before but refuses to stop trying. Am I wrong?”

I resisted the urge to close my hand to hide the truth written in my skin. “No, you’re not wrong.”

Something was mesmerizing about hearing myself described through his eyes, particularly by a man I would assume would find such things frivolous. But he spoke with understanding, respect, and knowledge that went beyond casual research.

“You’re someone who’s caught between air and water. You present balance, Libra scales seek equilibrium, but underneath, you crave depth, the emotional intensity of water signs. That’s where you lose yourself.”

His observation landed with such precision that, for a moment, I couldn’t speak his name. Something I felt, but never articulated, was the constant tension between my desire for harmony and my need for emotional depth.

“Maybe I’m tired of balancing. Maybe I want to fall,” I confessed.

Jules shook his head, his locs moving in the ponytail across his back at my words, and the air between us grew heavy. His hand slid up from my palm, up my arm, leaving a trail of goosebumps.

“Falling isn’t always bad, not if there’s someone there to catch you,” he murmured, leaning closer. Why did that make my nipples hard?

“Are you volunteering?” I asked.

He answered, not with words but by closing the distance between us.

His lips found mine with gentle certainty.

The kiss was nothing like I had imagined, not urgent or demanding, but slow, deliberate, and grounded, as if he were mesmerized by the taste of me.

A small sound escaped my throat when his hands slid into my hair.

I’d been kissed plenty in my life, but never like this, never with this strange combination of precision and passion, like he was lost in the moment yet completely present in it.

His mouth moved against mine with the confidence that melted my remaining hesitation and lingering doubts about his recent distance.

My hands found their way to his shoulders, feeling solid strength beneath his shirt.

Jules pulled back slightly, his eyes asking mine for permission.

I answered by shifting and swinging my legs off his lap to straddle him instead, bringing our bodies flush against each other.

His hands settled at my waist, steadying but not controlling.

“Are you sure?” he asked, his voice rougher.

“I’m sure I want you. We can figure out the rest later.”

He smiled before kissing me again, deeper this time.

Clothing became a barrier that we took off piece by piece, his shirt first, revealing the tribal sleeve tattoo and its full glory, black ink stark against his skin.

My T-shirt next. His breath caught as I pulled it over my head.

Each exposure felt like a question and answer all at once.

There was something reverent in the way he touched me, as if I were something precious yet powerful. His lips traced a path from my mouth to my neck to the sensitive spot where my shoulder met my collarbone, and I arched into him, wanting more of this, more of him.

When his hands found the waistband of my sweatpants, I lifted my hips, giving him silent permission, and then helped him shed his own pants until we were skin to skin, breath to breath.

What happened next was less like sex and more like a communion, a physical conversation that we’d been having since he showed up at my door.

I opened my mouth, welcoming his tongue against mine, tasting the sweetness of the strawberry soda he’d had with dinner. I pulled the band from his locs so I could massage his scalp. Underneath me, Jules was as hard as steel.

Unable to hold out any longer, he lifted me onto him. He groaned into my mouth as I slid down, my juices instantly flowing, allowing me to accommodate his girth.

He let out a low “fuck.”

I rocked back and forth, creating a sweet friction as gentle pressure turned into a heavier pounding. My body responded with its own dialect of sighs and tightened muscles. Jules nibbled and sucked my nipples with gentle tugging.

“How are you this damn wet?” Jules groaned.

My hands moved back into his hair as I brazenly rocked on his dick. We moved together. Sometimes his movements were deliberate and slow, and then urgent, and my responses matched his.

“Ooh, right . . . there! Aaah, yes, . . . yes!” My clit throbbed, and when my release came, it wasn’t just physical. Something emotional broke inside me, a dam I’d built without realizing it.

In response, Jules’s hands gripped my ass as he pulled me down harder and faster until he held me down, gripping my hips. I didn’t move, but my pussy responded by throbbing in a second release.

“Goddamnit, what are you doing to me?” Jules slurred.

Afterward, I collapsed on his chest with him still inside me. Jules held me against his chest, my head tucked under his chin, our legs tangled together on my small couch. His heartbeat gradually slowed beneath my ear.

Eventually, we moved to my bedroom, the sheets cool against our heated skin. We went in for another round of pleasure.

He fell asleep first. Mama Tilda always said if a man went to sleep first, he was at peace around you. I was struck by how perfectly he fit in my bed, in my space, alongside the ecosystem of my plants, books, and crystals that made up my world.

I watched him sleep, tracing his profile with my eyes rather than my fingers, afraid to wake him. What happens when I fall too fast for someone who doesn’t know how to stay?

I knew this feeling, this rushing, this falling sensation that came with a new connection.

I felt it before, only to watch it crash and burn when reality set in.

The other person couldn’t match my depth or fled from my intensity when they saw the real me beneath the balanced exterior Jules so accurately named.

I pushed the fear away, focusing instead on the present moment, the weight of his arms across my waist, his breathing, and the way my bed no longer felt too big with him in it.

Tomorrow would bring what it brought, questions would need answers, and patterns would either be repeated or broken.

But tonight, I’d allow myself to believe in timing and fated connections and all the things I wrote about for others but rarely experienced myself.

Tonight, I’d choose to trust, and maybe the stars had finally aligned in my favor.

I curled against him, fitting my body to his like puzzle pieces designed to connect, and allowed sleep to claim me. Dreams waiting on the other side that, for once, might be less vivid than my waking reality.