Page 56 of The Deals We Make

The wooden floors turn into a plush rug around his bed, and then I climb in beside him.

I’ve barely had time to adjust to being horizontal when he tugs me to him, rolling me so I’m on my side, my back snug against his chest. His heat hits me immediately, and I can feel his thickening length pressing up against the cheeks of my ass.

He’s naked and wrapped around me.

It’s overwhelming. Too many sensations to process. His lips brush my ear. His breath warm against my skin. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you back then, babe.”

I know what he means. My confession about the tender and all-consuming feelings I had for him.

“It’s okay,” I whisper.

“You don’t mean that,” he says, mirroring my own thoughts.

It wasn’t okay. It hurt painfully as a young adult trying to figure out what to do with confusing feelings.

“How did you know?”

His palms slide down my body, pulling me closer, gripping my hips. I can’t help but press back into him, his cock now fully erect.

The speed at which he’s managed to arouse me is shocking to me. I’m sure if I asked him to, he’d have sex with me. My clit throbs in anticipation.

But it would only compound how terrible my decisions have already been tonight.

“Doesn’t matter how.” He nibbles my earlobe, then kisses a line down my neck. “The only thing that matters is I see you now.”

“You’re about fifteen years too late.” I want to kick myself for answering with snark.

His hands stop moving immediately. “Am I?”

My head is a morass of conflicting thoughts. I appreciate the checking for consent. I hate that his hands aren’t roaming my body anymore. And worse, I miss the brush of his lips and the whisper of his breath against my skin.

“We don’t have a future,” I say. How can we with everything between us?

“But we have tonight, Calista. Let’s see what we’ve been missing.”

I turn in his arms and can make out his eyes in the darkness of his room. “I feel like that’s a recipe for heartbreak.”

“Is your heart in one piece right now?”

I think about everything that’s happening in my life and shake my head. “I guess not.”

“Mine either,” he says, cryptically. “Maybe tonight we should just pretend we made different choices. That this is our life. We chose this. We chose each other.”

I can’t make sense of all the warning signs in my head, but I listen to the green light coming from my body and kiss him.

It’s the first one I initiated, and everything about his lips on mine feels like coming home. Like this is how it’s always meant to have been.

The first brush of lips is soft and overwhelming. The second takes my breath away.

There is nothing rushed or hurried. He pulls me close and kisses me like I’m cherished. Like this is more than a one-night stand, a friends-with-benefits thing.

Like we’re real.

Like the two of us were meant for each other.

Like this is the future I dreamed about when I was young.

The intensity takes me under like a riptide I can’t get out of.