Page 26 of The Fall

I dig my fingers into the dense muscle above his hips, bunch the worn denim of his jeans, and pull him closer. We are never close enough.

He tugs my T-shirt up, pulls it over my head and throws it aside.

He trails his touch down my arms, and a slow burn ignites everywhere he touches me.

My hands fumble with his shirt. I should be suave, confident, but Blair strips me down to my rawest parts, peels back the bravado and the bullshit until all that’s left is my yearning.

His shirt joins mine on the floor. He is beautiful in the moving shadows. He’s hard edges and sin, and he’s looking at me like I’m the only thing that matters.

I am undone by the simple pull of his lips on mine.

His teeth catch my bottom lip before his tongue slides inside.

My hands roam the broad expanse of his back, tracing the dip of his spine.

I pull him closer, sealing our bodies together, and he grinds into me, slow and filthy and perfect.

He is exquisite, a landscape of muscle and shadow I could spend a lifetime exploring.

I want to become part of him, so deep he cannot breathe without thinking of me.

He finds my hands with his again and leads me to the bed. “I never used to believe in soul mates,” he breathes. “But you…”

The mattress gives beneath us as he lays me down and settles above me. I cradle his face, feel his stubble catch against my fingertips as I trace the angle of his cheekbone, the curve of his lower lip. “You are my forever.”

He holds my stare and gazes all the way down to my marrow, into all of my cracks and fissures. He sees it all, every broken edge and scarred-over hurt I’ve tried to hide my whole life. My breath hitches as he gazes into me in a way that feels like worship.

My lips crash against his, and I bow into him, craving more, desperate for all of him.

His groan rumbles through my teeth, my tongue as I roam my hands over the hard planes of his chest, my fingers snagging in the coarse trail of dark hair that leads me lower.

I slide down his body, to where his muscle defines sharp edges in his abdomen, where his skin is hot and burns against my tongue.

I settle between his thighs, hands on his hips. In the flickering candlelight, his cock rises thick and heavy against his stomach, dark and glistening at the tip.

A guttural groan rips from his throat as my tongue flicks against his cock.

The sound is a victory. I close my hand around the base of his shaft, feeling the thrum of his blood beneath my palm, and draw him deep into my mouth.

Heat and salt and something so essentially Blair flood me, a taste I know I’ll spend the rest of my life chasing.

He’s hot velvet against my tongue. I worship him, taking him apart with my mouth, sucking him until his muscles are water beneath my hands. There’s nothing else in the world but this rhythm: the whole of him on my tongue, the stretch of my lips, how his powerful thighs quiver.

His eyes are blown wide, reflecting the dancing flames as he threads his hands through my hair. I am held captive in the space between his hitched breaths and the tightening grip in my hair.

“Wait.” His voice cracks. “Not yet. Not like this.”

He pulls me up, and our mouths collide, hungry, messy. He tastes himself on my tongue and growls.

The room tilts as he flips us, and suddenly he’s caging me in, knees around my hips, hands cradling my face.

He grazes his fingers along my cheek, followed by the heat of his lips, branding a vow along my jaw, over my throat, down my chest. His kisses draw a path down my body, teeth nipping, tongue soothing.

He dismantles me all the way down, until he’s between my legs and his hands are spreading my legs.

Then his mouth is on me, and I’m fucking lost.

The heat of his mouth, the filthy, perfect suction of his lips, the sharp edge of his teeth—Christ, he’s undoing me with every lick, every suck, every rough drag of his stubble against my thighs.

I fist my hands in the sheets, in the dark silk of his hair, anything to hold on to, pulling hard as my hips buck into him.

He pops off my cock, sucks a line of hickeys down the seam of my thigh. He lifts my legs and spreads me fully, then buries his face in my ass.

A shout explodes from me as Blair’s tongue drives into me, hot and wet and fucking relentless.

He licks deep, sloppy, devouring my hole.

Every filthy stroke, every rough touch of his lips, has me squirming, my ass clenching.

His stubble scrapes my skin, brutal contrast to the slick glide of his lips and his tongue.

I’m a mess, keening, cursing as he eats me out like I’m his last meal.

His fingers join his mouth, pushing inside.

“Please.” The word rips from me, shameless. I’m too far gone to care. I need him buried inside me, filling me. I need to be taken, possessed, overwhelmed by him.

Blair’s breath hitches, and his gaze locks onto mine from between my legs.

He’s looking at me like he can see straight through to the hollow place inside me that only he can fill.

I can feel his hands shaking as he holds my thighs open, feel the way he’s holding himself back even now.

The air between us is thick, heavy with sweat and lust. I wait, exposed, aching, desperate, for him to give me everything I’m begging for.

He grabs the lube from the nightstand.

That first push against me—Fuck, it breaks something fundamental.

My back arches off the bed, chasing the stretch, the sweet ache spreading under his touch.

My hips roll down, chasing the sweet, stinging heat that unfurls inside me.

He works me until I’m trembling, falling apart under his hands. One finger, then two, then three.

Blair’s eyes are black in the dim light, pupils blown wide enough to eat up the candle glow as he watches me shake apart under his touch. My cock leaks onto my stomach as he curls just right, brushing that spot that makes stars burst behind my eyes.

“You are everything,” he rasps, his voice gravel against the quiet. “You’re every part of me I didn’t know was missing.”

I can’t speak, can’t do anything but reach for him.

Sweat slicks our skin, a fine sheen catching the candlelight.

The beat of my blood thunders, surging through me as he rises to his knees and lines up his thick cock at my tight hole.

He pitches forward, braces himself on one hand, digs his forehead into mine.

My arms wind around the back of his neck. I’m trembling. He’s trembling.

He pushes.

He opens me with blinding heat, a sharp, searing stretch as he sinks in, inch by relentless inch.

My body parts around him until he’s so deep there’s no space left.

I’m split open, my ass clenching around the thick, throbbing heat of his cock.

He stretches me to my fucking limit, and it’s all I can do not to shatter right then and there.

Every part of me is lit up with the brutal, beautiful ache of being filled.

There’s no escaping the way he owns every inch of me right now. I gasp into the damp heat of his shoulder.

He holds still, unmoving. My mind’s a haze, thoughts reduced to the way he’s claiming me, how he is buried inside the deepest parts of me. I rake at his back, desperate to drag him even closer, to drown in the overwhelming burn of him.

“Breathe,” he whispers.

I don’t know who needs to hear that more. My chest heaves, matching his uneven gasps.

Blair rocks forward, a filthy, slow grind of his hips, stretching me wider, filling me to near breaking. The drag of his cock is endless, shoving every scrap of air from my lungs.

“Want you,” I choke out when I can muster enough air, my hands wild in his hair. “Want all of you.”

He’s careful with me at first, then, when he knows I want nothing held back, less so. He worships me.

I tip my head back, mouth open, and let my body rearrange around him, as if it were made for this.

My moans spill into his mouth. Sweat glues us skin-to-skin.

He finds my hand, weaving our fingers tight on the mattress by my head, locking us into one unbroken loop.

Candle shadows merge us into a single writhing shape on the wall.

He moves in long, slow strokes, and I become nothing but sensation.

My hips lift to meet him, greedy for more, wanting him deeper.

We’re heat against heat, kissing harder than breathing.

I’m falling into him, into us. He shifts, angling sharper, and something clenches, a knot of need tightening with every thrust. I hook my ankles around him.

“There?”

My thighs quake as I nod. He captures my lower lip in a kiss, gasping into me as he fucks me harder, right there.

“More.”

He obeys. He hits it again, again, his cock hitting that desperate spot. My own dick throbs between us, leaking and untouched. Blair bends me further, hiking my leg over his shoulder. The stretch bites deeper, and so exquisite. Every thrust flays me open; I’ve never been so whole.

“Blair,” I choke out.

“That’s it. Let go for me.” His voice scrapes against my ear.

His rhythm stumbles. He’s close.

We lock eyes, and I shatter.

Blair surges, a final, possessive thrust. The wave crests, a bright, brutal release fracturing me into jagged bliss. He swallows my scream with his kiss as he spills into me, and I swallow his roar as he shudders and falls apart. He collapses, pulling me tight, his heart slamming against mine.

Slowly, the room returns: guttering candles, the grit of sweat on my tongue. His breath steadies against my hair. His lips land on my temple and stay. “Okay?”

I nod against his skin, unable to form words yet. My body has been rewired. I’m more than okay. I am… whole. And I know this wasn’t my first time, but … it also was, in a way.

As long as I have this, as long as I have him, I can face anything, do anything, become anything.

Even myself. So let the sea pull me out past the breakers and into the wild blue; with Blair wrapped around me, I am no longer afraid of how deep I might go.

He is both tide and shore: every wave that threatens to swallow me ends up carrying me home to him.

His thumb traces my jaw. His touch centers me, corralling the scatter of my thoughts, and his blue eyes flick to mine, hurricane-deep, a little unsteady. “I love you. Never forget that.”

A plea threads through those words, ragged as torn skin. Love like this burns hot enough to change everything it touches—my past, my future, the hollow places inside me I have hidden even from myself.

“Say it again,” I breathe into the dark.

His lips find the shell of my ear. “I love you.” Then softer, like a secret: “I love you.” Once more: “I love you.”

“I could never forget you,” I promise.

Free fall.

There’s no ground, no air, only the drop.

I hang, spine snapped into a parenthesis.

The bruised dark teems with suspended glass, each splinter backlit by shattered lights.

A metallic scream threads through the emptiness.

Then water, rising everywhere at once, seals out sound, closes over my head, pours down my throat?—

My eyes snap open. The world shudders back into focus as I sit straight up in bed, gasping, my hands at my neck, dragging in air. Darkness crowds the windows, the room silent but for my heart pounding in my ears. Every breath rasps.

I wait, listening for the echo of the fall, half-certain it will start again if I move. Every muscle screams, taut with a terror that has no name, no source. If I breathe deeper, I feel the fall again. If I close my eyes, the room erodes, and water floods in.

It was a dream, a nightmare.

But the fear remains.

Blair. Where is he? My hand flails against the sheets, cool cotton slipping through my touch, until?—

He’s here, right here, with me.

A muted glow from the lanai spills into our bedroom, painting the corner shadows in cold light.

I draw in a raggedy, trembling breath. I’m home.

Gradually, shapes begin to emerge: the sleek lines of our dresser, the silhouette of our hockey bags slumped against the wall.

The clothes we dropped carelessly hours ago.

And Blair, lying beside me, his sleeping face serene and mashed into his pillow.

The smell of the candles he’d lit, the rustle of the smooth sheets, the warmth of Blair—they all tug at me, try to pull me free from my rancid nightmare, but the edges are still there, refusing to let me go.

I’m awake. I’m alive. I’m breathing.

I’m terrified.

A high-pitched whine shreds the silence, and I’m back there again, trapped in the wreckage of my nightmare.

The taste of blood and fear floods my mouth.

I’m choking on it, drowning in it. Phantom pain sears my ribs.

I can’t breathe. I need to breathe. The images are fractured, shards of a broken mirror. All I know for certain is the fall.

Home. I’m home with Blair. He smells like home, feels like safety. He’s as calm as the ocean after a storm.

But the nightmare isn’t letting go. That smell—that god-awful chemical reek of burning rubber—fills my lungs and throat. A voice whispers, Remember .

A year has been wiped clean from my memory, and I don’t know what’s missing. I don’t know what’s happened to me during that year. I can’t even remember what I’ve lost. Is this nightmare a memory?

No, it was a dream, only a dream.

Beside me, Blair sleeps. The shadows shift, lengthen, but Blair remains.

Solid. Real. The dark in the room deepens, bleeding out from the corners, twisting into shapes that flicker on my periphery.

It’s predatory; it circles me, gnaws at me.

The lapping of the canal against the dock, so steady and soft before, sounds like breakers, like crashing waves, like?—

Focus. Breathe.

Remember.

It’s like picking at a scab. Why does it feel so real?

Blair reaches for me in his sleep, his hand finding mine. The fear recedes.

But something is wrong. The thought hits me, clear and sharp and undeniable. I don’t understand it, don’t want to understand it, but something is wrong . With me. With everything.

But what?