Page 65 of Nine Months to Bear

It’s like the world narrows to this one point of connection. I stretch around him, taking him deeper and deeper. I’m achingly full, but I still buck up from beneath him, rolling our bodies even closer.

“Look at me,” he commands.

So I do. I melt into his eyes and give him all of me. Maybe even more than I intended, actually, because I feel like something opens up between us, some link, some chain, and it drags something out of him that he maybe didn’t intend to give me, either.

That’s what makes me come. Well, yes, his dick inside of me helps, obviously, but it’s the feeling that we’re pouring into each other that sends me tumbling over the edge.

My breath stutters and catches in my throat as the orgasm rips through me. Stefan fucks me through it, though he’s clamping down on his lip, too.

He opens his mouth and says my name—just that, just “Olivia,” so softly that I’m not sure he wanted me to hear it.

I hear it, though. I reply in kind.

“Stefan!” I gasp, his name streaming from my lips, no possible way I could keep it hushed.

That’s what makes him come, I think. With a guttural roar, he buries his face in my neck and unleashes. He fills me and fills me and fills me until, little by little, his thrusts slow, and we end up lying tangled on the mattress, neither one of us daring to breathe.

We stay there—until we don’t. Until, without a word, he rolls me onto my stomach and enters me again.

“Stefan—”

“Hush. I’m not fucking done with you yet.”

I’m not sure what happens after that. I’m a blur of oversensitized nerves, of gasps and moans and pleas and whimpers. Heresponds with roars and grunts and the frenzy of our fucking. It’s endless hours of coming together and coming apart and coming up and coming down.

Finally, mercifully, our bodies quit on us. The silence that follows the last orgasm is the heaviest yet. Like a weighted blanket smushing out all of the anxieties that want to spring up in my head.

I look up at the ceiling. In the daze of my exhaustion, the shadows in the popcorn stippling rearrange themselves into an imaginary shape.

The shape of my name, actually. It saysOlivia Asteron my ceiling, scrawled in my own handwriting.

Just like it says at the foot of the contract we left marooned on my kitchen counter.

Tomorrow, there will be a price to pay for what I just did. There will be consequences to face, ethical lines to redraw, rational explanations to formulate.

But tonight, sleep beckons.

The second-to-last thing I register before consciousness slips away is how his hand comes to loop across my waist in the darkness.

The very last thing is the steady rhythm of his heartbeat against my back.

For something so dangerous, it’s strangely comforting.

27

STEFAN

Going back for more was a mistake.

But it’s a mistake I make over and over.

In the shower, we fuck.

When we get back into bed, we fuck some more.

When we both wake up in the gloom of the predawn hours, we find each other and fuck like we’ll never get the chance to do it again.

In between, we doze. My dreams are half-real and half-remembered: a flash of teeth against my shoulder, nails carving crescents into my back, Olivia’s voice trembling as she comes apart beneath me.