by Aiden Bates
He gritted his teeth as he pulled me back up onto his lap, my thighs squeezing against his hips. “Remind me to thank them later.”
“More pressing matters to attend to right now?” I asked, grinding the bulge in my jeans against his saliva-soaked cock.
“Pressing…” He shook his head. “Doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
He rolled me again, drawing a trill of laughter from my throat. Max had me pinned as he tugged my jeans off me, taking my boxers with them. His cock rested against the little valley between my hip and my pelvis, brushing against my own dick with a healthy throb. There wasn’t any technical pleasure to be had just rubbing our dicks together like this—but fuck, it felt good just the same. Primal. Animalistic. I’d been a virgin for too long before I met Max—and now everything, experimental or not, felt like an awakening that had been bottled up in my core until he shook it so hard, the pressure blew the top right off.
He took my thighs in his hands, caressing them as he spread them apart. My body both wanted to tense up and melt into a puddle as he settled his tip against my ass, rimming my hole with his precum and my own saliva. My arms wrapped around his neck, urging him in.
I wanted to howl as he entered me, but all that escaped my lips was a hissing breath followed by a whimper. Max’s cock slipped inside me, stretching my ass taut around his thickness as it plunged into my depths. I tensed around him, meeting each of his thrusts with a buck of my own hips, milking him with convulsing flexes that felt entirely out of my control.
I looked into Max’s eyes as he fucked me, my lips pouted in desperation. He was taking me slow and easy in a way that made my face flush, but the little snarl on his lips and the focus of his brow told me he wasn’t going to be gentle for long. In a sudden burst of roughness, he doubled his pace.
I didn’t pretend to understand every part of Max. That would come later, over hot cups of herbal tea as we watched a thousand sunrises from his rooftop and candlelit dinners at his table as that same sun lowered beneath the horizon again. We’d been thrown together, spiraling and twisting—our worse halves fighting it, our better halves seeking something in each other that had let us down when we failed to find it in anyone else. I didn’t know the full extent of the darkness that lay behind those icy eyes of his, but I knew I liked him. Loved him, even. I’d meant it the first time I said it, and I meant it when I said it again as he buried his cock so deep inside me I couldn’t imagine a point in time when I’d feel any more whole.
“I love you,” I cried out, panting as my chest swelled and collapsed. He was getting close. I could tell in his own ragged breath, in every jerk of his hips and in the way his fingers clawed against my shoulders, beaded with sweat. But I was closer. “I love you, Max.”
“Then come for me. Give it to me, Riley.”
“Fuck—” My body stiffened, then spasmed, contracting and relaxing at a pace so fast and so far out of my control that it made me dizzy. Heat rushed up and down my nervous system like wildfire.
In the embers and ashes of my orgasm, Max held me tight, pumping into me with his teeth bared in a snarl.
“I love you too,” he growled—then he moaned with me, filling me with his seed just like he had on that first night. Only this time, he did it with meaning. With a need that went beyond whatever pain had driven us together.
I belonged to him now.
I was his.
And he was mine.
I twined my fingers with his as he collapsed on top of me, his breathing no less ragged than before. Dragging one hand toward my face, I went tender. Kissed his knuckles, then brought his thumb to my mouth and sucked it like I’d sucked his cock just a few moments before.
“Fuck—no, none of that. You’ll have me hard again.” He laughed tiredly, tearing the thumb from my mouth to replace it with his lips.
“Is that a problem?”
“Mm. In a few minutes, no. But for now…just let me enjoy the way this feels.”
.
18
Max
It was there in the weight of his head on my chest, the humidity of his breath clinging to my chest hairs, bathing me in damp heat.
“I love you,” I told him. I’d said it more times than I could keep track of that night. I’d say it a hundred more before the night was through.
He cooed, stirring gently. Riley’s eyes were closed as he looked up at me. When he opened them, it was lazily—as lazy as the smile on his lips.
“I think I drifted off there for a minute.” He yawned, arching against me, then snuggled in closer. “So tired…”
“That’s pregnancy for you.” I wrapped my arm a little tighter around him, holding his body as close to mine as I could. “You’ve had a big night.”
“So have you.”
I watched his shoulders rise and fall with shallow breaths. If I didn’t keep talking, he’d probably fall asleep again. Part of me wanted to let him. He was sweet when he slept, mumbling nonsense and winding the sheets so tight around his legs that by morning, they were a tangled mess. I didn’t need to trap him here, I realized with a smirk. He trapped himself in my bed with those sheets every night like a merman diving willingly into a fisherman’s net.
But the other part of me—the part of me that still felt that tinge of guilt for what I’d put him through—that part of me was so full of words that I couldn’t fight it back.
“Do you trust me, Riley?”
“Mm.” His eyelashes fluttered against my skin. “Trusted you from the moment I met you, Max.”
“And then?”
“And then I didn’t. Things got…complicated. I was scared.”
“Yeah. I was scared too.”
“Takes a big man to admit that.”
I grinned. “You already know that I’m plenty big, sweetheart.”
“You’re right. The perfect size.” His fingertips trailed along my side, the slightest hint of a tickle. “There’s not a modest bone in you, is there?”
“I don’t need one.”
“Mm. Suppose you don’t.” His fingers stopped at my hips, pressing against the bone there, rimmed with muscle. “I always imagined it would be like this, you know.”
“Like what?”
He rolled his eyes. “Like this. Me. My Alpha. Lying in bed together, completely exhausted. Completely in love.”
I brushed his hair down over his temple. It was still damp with sweat from our lovemaking. Darker brown than normal in the way it crowned his forehead. “You do a lot of imagining before you met me?”
“God, you have no idea.” He rolled off me, giving me a shiver as the cool air fell upon the freshly bare skin of my chest. “My parents are in love like this, I think. I could always tell. The way they moved around each other, even when they were just doing something conventional. Making dinner. Doing laundry. They moved like they always knew where the other one was headed. Like a planet and its moon.”
“Mm. Happy family.” My voice caught in my throat. “Sounds nice.”
“Your parents weren’t happy?”
“My parents barely knew each other.” It wasn’t an easy story to tell. Not one that came easy for me either—but Riley was mine now. He’d given me things I’d never even dared to dream of, let alone expect for myself. He had a right to know. “Mom inherited a little family farm from her parents. Deep in debt from the moment they bought the land until the day she buried them in it.”
“Max…you don’t have to…”
“No.” I pressed my finger to his lips. “Just listen. I want to tell you.”
He nodded, shifting back on his pillow and resting his jaw on his hand. Watching me. Waiting.
I took a deep breath. “I don’t know all the details. She didn’t really like talking about them. From what I’ve pieced together over time…one day, some man from the bank comes around. Finance men—I’m lucky you trust me, Riley. Men who deal with money are rotten to the core, more often than not. It was up to him to decide whether to give her a little more
time on the place before it went into foreclosure. My guess is, he offered her the kind of deal men in power ought to respect their positions enough not to make.”
“And she took it,” Riley breathed.
“Nine months later, I was born.” I laughed, bitter as overbrewed coffee served black. “She lost the place eventually anyway, of course. It’s not a system that she was ever set up to win in. I think she tried to track him down as I got a little older, but never turned anything up. Men like that are good at disappearing if they don’t want to be found.”
“God…so when I told you I was pregnant…You asked for a paternity test…”
I grimaced. “I was scared. Shitless, in fact. Either I’d done you the same wrong my father did my mother, or some other sick fuck had. It was a kneejerk reaction. Too much time spent around Hayward, maybe.”
“We can still get one, you know. I don’t mind.”
“No. Don’t worry about that. You trust me, Riley. And me—I trust you too.”
“Where…where is she now?” There was a brokenness in Riley’s eyes that told me he’d already guessed that this story didn’t have a happy ending.
“Died a while back. Breast cancer. Diagnosis came too late.” I reached over, slipping my fingers into the spaces between his. “She’d met someone else by then, though. He treated her all right. Gave her a daughter—my baby sister.” I smiled genuinely as I looked over to the painting on my wall, the colors swirled together like fall leaves caught in the wind. “They painted that together. Samantha’s in art school now—I’m putting her through it. About half the sculptures here in the apartment are hers.”
“And the other half?”
“My mom’s. Got a storage unit downtown with about fifty more of her pieces, but you know how it is. Even penthouses in New York have a limit on space.”
Riley pulled my hand over onto his stomach suddenly, smoothing my fingers down over his skin. Maybe I was imagining it, but it felt a little like he was starting to show. The slightest roundness to his belly. A warmth beneath it that I never wanted to stop feeling against my skin.
“I think it’s a girl,” he admitted. “Don’t ask me how I know. I just…”
I pressed against him a little harder. “A girl?”
He nodded. “I just know.”
It did my head in, that knowing. One minute, the world was calm and comfortable and still. The next, it was exploding in a sea of emotions. Like I’d been living my whole life in black and white for so long, and now it was blooming out in Technicolor.
“A girl,” I repeated again. “We’re having a baby girl.”
Riley blushed. “I wasn’t sure if I should tell you or not—it’s still too soon to be sure, really, but—”
I rolled over, kissing him deeply and cupping his jaw in the palm of my hand. “We’re going to need to go pick out paint, you know.”
“For what room?” Riley laughed. “I can’t exactly ask you to give up your office, Max.”
I pulled away, looking down at him with a smile that I couldn’t seem to fight back. Hell—I didn’t want to.
A daughter. We were having a daughter.
It gave me an idea.
“You should rest,” I told him, caressing his cheek. “You’re gonna want to be up early in the morning.”
His eyes narrowed with delight. “Morning sex, huh? Too tired to go again tonight?”
I laughed. “Not in the slightest. But…there’s something we should do. Bright and early. First thing.”
“Breakfast?” he asked hopefully.
My grin widened. “I’ll take you out to brunch after. But first…there’s something we need to get out of the way.”
“Whatever you want, Max,” Riley purred sleepily. He cuddled against me again, wrapping a leg across my hips and tangling his fingers in my hair. “In the morning, your wish is my command.”
19
Riley
We spent two blissful weeks of breakfasts together. As it turned out, I never could hold out until brunch.
“This is amazing,” I moaned, mouth full of flaky pastry dough as we strolled down the sidewalk one morning. “What is this?”
“Half donut, half croissant.” Max chuckled, guiding me around a living statue street performer. The man tipped his hat to us as Max dropped a twenty in his cup. “I think they’re calling it a cronut.”
“Ugh. Sounds gross. Tastes delicious.” I took another bite, revealing a surprise chocolate center. “Holy shit. Half donut, half croissant, half pain au chocolat?”
“Your math is atrocious,” Max said absently, checking the map on his phone.
“Good thing you’re balancing our budget, huh?” I elbowed him gently, but he wasn’t listening. Whatever big thing he had to show me was taking up all of his attention—had been all morning. I think he’d given in to stopping at the bakery on the way to our destination just so I’d fill my mouth so full of baked goods that he could focus. “Are we almost there?”
Suddenly, Max smiled and looked up from his phone. “Not almost.” He nodded at the building we were standing in front of, and I turned to look.
It was a massive old brownstone, the kind that was old enough and pretty enough someone had taken the time to restore it instead of knocking it down for a high rise. Five stories high, with a metal fire escape zippering down its side into the alleyway next to it. On one side, there was a little Italian restaurant that looked like it had been pulled straight out of Naples. On the other, another bakery, the scent of fresh bread wafting out its doors.
The ground floor of the building Max was staring at was empty, though. I could see inside through the front windows, glossy and clean. Its walls were mirrored along one side, pressed in by a ballet bar. The floors were wood, polished to shine. In one corner of the window, a FOR SALE sign was perched with a number beneath it. Across the sign was a sticker, canceling out the sign’s original meaning. SOLD.
“Help me out here, Max,” I said, unable to tear my eyes away. “What am I looking at?”
“Funny you should ask,” he answered, pointing upward. “Third floor is an art gallery—or it will be. Recently purchased, of course—so the lucky new owner will have to spend a little time refurbishing the space. Fourth and fifth are an apartment. Pretty big one, actually.” When I glanced up at him, there was a wistful grin on his face. “Whoever bought this place must’ve had one hell of a severance package.”
I tried to take a breath in, but it was like my lungs couldn’t hold enough air. “And the first floor?”
“Mm. See, I was hoping you’d ask that. The first floor’s my favorite part. Wanna go inside?” He produced a key from his pocket, jingling it in front of my face.
I snatched it from him and rushed to the door, jamming the key toward the lock with such speed that I missed it the first two times I tried to slip it into its spot.
Inside, it smelled like resin and vanilla. The space had been cleared out by its previous owner, but I knew enough about what I was seeing to know what it had been.
“A dance studio,” I said softly, walking over to the bar and running my fingers along its cold, shiny metal.
“Ballet, actually,” Max corrected me. “Last owner left to perform in Moscow. Wanted to make sure that its next owner would use it well.”
“What…Max, what’s all this about?” I asked, furrowing my brow.
“You haven’t figured it out yet?”
I held up a finger. “I have. But I want to make sure that you’re not toying with me. I need to hear you say it.”
Max shrugged, his hands in his pockets and sunshine in his eyes. “I bought the building, Riley. This whole place—it’s ours.”
“When?” I couldn’t believe the first word out of my mouth sounded so much like an accusation—it was just that it still didn’t seem real.
“Early this morning. You were still snoring in bed.” He came to me, touching his fingertip gently to the tip of my nose then holding me by the hips. “Bank was happy to wo
rk with me. Guess they’ve been trying to get this place off the market for a while.”
“And it’s…it really belongs to you?”
“To us, Riley. You said so yourself—there wasn’t room for a baby in my old place. That was a bachelor pad.” He pulled me a little closer, until his lips were barely an inch away from mine. “This is a home.”
“The studio?” I asked, still reeling. “It’s…it’s ours too?”
“Yours, actually. If you want it.” He looked around the space, eyes shining. “Thought you might want to start teaching some classes. There’s space upstairs for it too.” He laughed. “There’s even. Hmm. Several poles up there, if you feel so inclined.”
A dance studio. A gallery for all of Max’s mother’s work. And not one, but two floors of apartment space for us to raise our kids in. Or, well—kid. I shouldn’t have been getting ahead of myself like that.
It was just too fucking perfect. Getting ahead of myself seemed like all I knew how to do just then.
“So that’s how this is going to go, then. You see if you can get a job with Sterling…”
“In a while,” Max said with a shrug. “Like I said, the gallery’s going to need some renovation work. Thought I might tackle it myself. It’s been too long since I’ve done something useful with my hands.” Suddenly, his grin turned wicked. “Outside of the bedroom, anyway.”
“And I teach—what? Barre downstairs, stripperobics up top?”
“If you like. If not, you don’t have to work at all. I’ve got money saved away for a while…You could just relax, if you wanted. Be a home—”
“Don’t say homemaker,” I said with a laugh. “My mother tried that. Drove her crazy. A studio would be perfect, Max.”
“So you like it then?”
I beamed. “I love it. God—I love you.”
I threw my arms around his neck, claiming every inch of his face with a new kiss until my lips found his. The taste of chocolate mingled between our tongues, sweet and light.
