Delicate

by K. L. Cottrell

  “I really am sorry,” she murmurs back. “You had such a stressful day.”

  “Yeah, but you helped me. Like you always do.”

  One of her palms settles against my chest, warm even through my shirt.

  It takes her a bit of time to say, “I love being able to do that.”

  I want her to feel me for real, like she did the other night, with her hands on my skin. Want to feel her for myself again—and even more than then, too, because we belong together.

  Since my arm is still encircling her, my fingertips are free to skim up her back until fabric stops being in the way of skin.

  Another light tremor ripples through her body. I feel chill bumps come up on her.

  God, I love that it’s because of something I did.

  Now I feel both of her hands going up to the back of my neck, feel her breath coming closer to my lips, warm and begging to be stolen.

  She’s too alluring.

  My playfulness dwindles as I belatedly respond to her words. “You love being able to help me or touch me?”

  The answer is, ‘Both,’ and I know it.

  Still, her whispered confirmation is satisfying as hell.

  I find her mouth with ease, it’s so close to mine.

  But just like a minute ago, I realize I can’t resist traveling her. My kisses take on that tentativeness as I trail them down her neck to the tune of our skipping inhalations; hers go slightly sharper when I finally get my lips on her shoulder. It’s bare enough with only that strap on it, but I still give in to how badly I want the thing gone. And once I’ve swept it away and down, at last I let myself lay an open-mouthed kiss where it was.

  She tries not to moan too loudly; I swear I can feel how much of the sound gets trapped in her chest.

  Same thing happens to me when her hands slip down and under the front of my shirt.

  I’m addicted to the way it feels for her to touch me. For her to want to know me, to want me closer.

  The sweet havoc is twining itself around me again, along with one of her arms and legs, and again I’m dying to let it have me.

  Maybe I will this time.

  Just a little bit.

  Maybe I’ll abandon the rest of the world in favor of her embrace, just while we’re in these shadow-cloaked sheets and I’m suspended with her between what’s behind us and what lies ahead—between yesterday and today, between everything we’ve struggled through and everything we’re moving towards.

  The more I taste her skin, the more breathless we become, and the more I notice the tremble taking over me from deep, deep down.

  I can hear it in my murmur of, “I think you spread your fault lines to me.”

  Her hips come forward against mine in a way that scorches my already-chaotic veins—it must scorch hers, too, because her moan is slightly louder than the last one, same as mine.

  We hasten our mouths together.

  ‘Quiet,’ we seem to agree while we become even more of a tangle of arms and hands.

  ‘Closer,’ comes next with how her body is suddenly halfway beneath mine, her neck tucked into one of my arms, her fingers back outside my shirt and fisting the front of it, her chest lifting with a muffled gasp to push her half-covered breast into the caress of my hand.

  She echoes my weak hum into our kiss. Tries to pull me even closer. Takes my breath away with how perfect she feels against me, in my hand, on my tongue past parted lips.

  And I can’t keep up with the snowballing moments, so I just live in them.

  I always live with her in ways I’ve never lived with anyone else.

  It’s like having found heaven on earth when I thought I was doomed to various shades of hell.

  The kisses end with our shaky sighs. One of her hands lands on mine and flexes around it, causing mine to do the same to her soft flesh—both of us audibly love it. Then she urges my hand down her body, until it’s just between her hips.

  Jesus.

  She has already had my heart racing, and this quickens it that much more.

  I can’t pretend it doesn’t.

  I can’t resist her.

  Candid words spill out of me, low and jagged with desire. “Do you want my fingers, Ellie? ‘Cause I wanna feel you on them more than I wanna breathe.”

  “Yes,” she confesses in kind. “So badly, Beckett, please.”

  She doesn’t have to beg me, but I love that she does it.

  Her hand abandons mine as I work it beneath her clothes. Her arm goes around my neck and our mouths brush, on the edge of pushing into a kiss, and….

  “Fuck,” escapes me on a weak breath because holy fuck, the way she feels even under the brush of my fingertips….

  As her body arches into mine, she lays the loveliest, most honest sound of liking on my lips.

  It’s dizzying.

  All of this is. It does something crazy to my chest, makes me hard for her, sends my affection for her spiraling hotly down my spine.

  I never would have thought I’d be the one responsible for the heat in her.

  But I am, and I won’t leave her wanting. I’ll never leave her wanting for anything.

  I get that perfect sound from her again, as drawn-out as the languid slip of one of my fingers into her. Then I drop my mouth onto hers for a hard kiss she instantly returns.

  We are swept away.

  We tremble together because I’m only just starting in on her and it’s already intoxicating, already overwhelming, as if we’re doing more than this, as if we’re both giving more than this—even though it’s also exactly this. It’s a slow thrust into something we’ve never shared before, an experience so gripping there’s no way to not be devoured by it. Our muscles are tightening and our breaths are hitching again and again, somehow growing thinner and heavier over my simple movements. The deep shadows around us are closing us in, intensifying it all.

  And in this way, she teaches me something new about what being in love means.

  Turning her arousal into pleasure is every bit as important to me as making her happy and keeping her safe. The twinge of low-quaking half-shyness still buzzes in me, but I’m not afraid of it, because it doesn’t have the power to stop me. It only makes me appreciate this more.

  “Oh my G-God,” she exhales. Her arms hug my neck, my waist—two waves in a sea of pleas for me not to stop learning her like this.

  More begging that she doesn’t have to do.

  “I got you,” I promise in an unsteady whisper. “Baby, I got you.”

  She nods.

  She knows.

  She loves me too.

  It’s all over her, right here and now, as it has been in countless other minutes.

  And it’s in the fact that no one else has kissed or touched her in forever. She hasn’t opened herself up to anyone else, hasn’t given the writhe of her hips to anyone else or clutched anyone else so close. It’s just me. I’m the only one she trusts, wants, needs.

  “I can’t….” Even in a whisper of her own, the depth of how moved she is stands out to me. “Beck, I can’t tell you how good you feel.”

  I pull a kiss from her lips, her jaw—pull another gorgeous sound from her.

  “You are telling me,” I murmur. “You always are. You never stop telling me how good I feel to you. It’s my favorite song.”

  Her breath out is sharp. After a fumbling moment, she gets my face in her hands, draws my lips onto hers, pushes her tongue past them. It’s hard to hush ourselves as the kiss consumes us, but we try.

  Have to try harder the longer this lasts.

  As my one finger turns into two.

  As, with a blush I can feel for myself, she tells me what feels good and I happily give it to her.

  As her thumb caresses the scar on my cheek so tenderly it tightens my throat.

  The reverence between us is tangible.

  With every bit of me, I absorb how new and intense it is, how sweet and smoldering, how quietly confident, how fucking deep—like being claimed. She and I are
both being claimed by every fucking heartbeat of this.

  She’s everything.

  She’s sincere beneath my touch, soft on my mouth, important to my soul.

  We aren’t just friends anymore. We can’t be. Those days are gone.

  We belong together.

  Yes, it’s damn hard to stay quiet. But we have to, lest we risk ruining our privacy.

  That can’t happen. It can’t. I’ve been welcomed into the perfect warmth of her, and I can’t leave it until I’ve eased the ache she only has for me.

  It’ll happen soon.

  I know her end is approaching fast because her body tells me so—breaths, hips, hands.

  I want to hear it from her voice, too, so I whisper to her, “What do you need from me, Ellie?”

  The only words I get are half-formed, lip-brushing stammers—‘touch’ and ‘please’ are all I hear. But I don’t mind because her answer comes through in how she reaches down and fumbles with my hand.

  I follow her lead, shift my touch to where she wants it. Then I get my kiss on her jaw.

  Her two quick gasps near my ear say it all.

  Her hands grasp down my back as my success crashes in.

  And it slays me.

  It slays me that she comes with my thumb on her most sensitive place and my name on her breaking breaths and my back under the bruising press of her fingertips.

  I’m rocked so hard by it that I feel like I can’t breathe even though my lungs are working overtime in tandem with hers—feels like her fingers are gripping them inside my chest rather than the outside of me.

  I’ve never known a hotter or more heartfelt closeness in my life than that of these seconds with this woman, and it slays me.

  Yet it intensifies still as one of those hands judders around and down my front.

  Her weak plea is breathless: “Let me—please let me give it to you, too, Beck.”

  The heat rushing through me is unbelievable.

  I don’t know how I would survive that from her, yet I still pull my fingers from her so I can take hers and guide them into my pants and boxer briefs. It’s something else I can’t resist with her.

  And God Almighty, she may have finished quickly, but I still won’t last half as long as she managed to—I know it as soon as my hand wraps her soft one around the hard heat of my arousal.

  The moan she lets out turns me on impossibly more.

  We start with a low gasp, a shiver I can’t contain, a shift of her gaze up to mine.

  There’s just enough gray morning light now for us to see each other by. Her hair is a dark mess against the pillow, cloaking the arm I still have under her head. Her adoring eyes are dancing all over me, sated and wanting at the same time, full of that reverence we’ve built up only with each other.

  She wins at being the most beautiful thing I’ve ever beheld.

  “I’m—” I take a jagged breath, “—I’m yours. I’m so fucking yours, do you know that?”

  I catch her nod and the breath of my name from her lips, and then the rest of her words slip away from me. My own release is rushing up fast beneath our strokes.

  But I am staggeringly aware of her whispered, “Oh, love,” hitting my lips just before we seal off my unstoppable moan with a kiss.

  Her free hand finds my pounding heart.

  I lose myself to her in this new way.

  And there are no words for how any of it feels.

  - 22 -

  N O E L L E

  now

  There have been times when it was painful for my engagement ring to be on my finger.

  Right after Cliff died, it seemed to weigh a ton.

  Right after I first kissed Beckett, it seemed to burn my skin.

  However, not counting when I decided to move it from my left hand to my right one, I never considered taking it off. No matter how badly the presence of it made me miss him. No matter how much guilt the sight of it filled me with.

  I still haven’t taken it off.

  The thought is with me, though.

  It has been with me subconsciously for a little while, I’ve realized, but now…now it’s really here. It’s firm in my mind.

  As I stand beneath the warm shower water, I cross my left arm over my chest and lift my other hand so I can see the white-gold band and the pretty diamond fixed atop it.

  No longer wearing it would feel strange. And sad.

  Yet when I envision leaving it on, I’m left feeling strange about that too—to the point of being fully uncomfortable.

  It’s not that I don’t still miss him or love him or wish he hadn’t died.

  I will always miss him and love him and wish he hadn’t died.

  But….

  But he did die, and it changed everything.

  I swallow hard and blink my stinging eyes.

  He couldn’t stay with us. We didn’t get a say in the matter. There was no way to stop how suddenly the wreck happened, and he couldn’t be revived after the ambulance arrived at the scene.

  We would have saved him if we could have.

  If it had been within our control, we would have chosen to never have to find out what life without him is like.

  That’s not the way things happened, and what did happen sent permanent change rippling outward.

  My vision blurs. I clamp a hand over my mouth just before a quiet sob judders out of me.

  I do still miss him and love him—

  Just not in the same ways I used to.

  Hanging my head, I let the tears have me.

  This wasn’t my intention.

  It had never been my intention for my feelings for either of them to change.

  Logically, I knew that new happiness could exist between me and someone else, but I never truly imagined there would be a day when I could look at anyone and feel anything remotely like what I felt for him. Now I feel exactly that much for the only person he loved in this world who isn’t me or Theodora.

  Except no, it’s not exactly that. It’s not the exact same feeling. It goes deeper in some ways.

  I shake my head hard at those thoughts.

  They just can’t be true.

  How could they be true? What would that say about me?

  Yet it’s so real.

  The way it felt to be in my bed with Beckett early yesterday morning—the way it felt to experience those hot and honest intimacies with him without fear—was like the epitome of being present, of letting in the beautiful things life has to offer.

  It was like waking up. Like coming alive.

  It was like both of us were where we belonged.

  It made me that much more certain of how I feel about him. I thought I would lose my mind if he didn’t touch me; the instant he did, I knew I didn’t want it to end, knew I wanted even more of him, wanted to be able to share those things with him for the rest of my life.

  I’m awash with heated chills just at thinking about all the ways he handled me, the ways we kissed, how it took my breath away to be able to bring him such pleasure in return.

  Something else that stood out was the way I felt about everything with his mom. He told me some time ago that Theo and I are his sword and shield, and that’s exactly what he was to me in those last moments of confrontation.

  Although the sudden chaos of stepping in front of him did shock and hurt me, I don’t regret it because what I later told him was true: I refused to let that woman harm him. From the depths of who I am as an able-bodied human being, I refused to let her attack him again, even if all I could do was be a shield and not a sword. And seeing his fierce determination to protect me in return only deepened the fact that he’s the safest and most solid thing I know.

  So my certainty hasn’t left me. I still want him, heart and body and soul, for the rest of….

  After I breathe in a jagged, stuffy breath, I rub hard at my eyes.

  I need to talk to someone about this. Someone besides Beckett.

  Should I go to Ceceli again even though I know she’ll say
more of what she said last time? Is that what I need?

  Hell, I don’t know what I need.

  Other than some kind of clarity.

  Almost as quickly as the tears came on, they leave me be, and resolve takes their place. I have someone else I can turn to, so that’s where I’ll go as soon as possible.

  Hopefully today.

  —

  It does work out, actually: all I had to do was text my mom and say I badly need to talk to her about something, just the two of us. From there, she arranged for my dad to pick Theo up from preschool a bit early this very afternoon so they can have a grandpa-and-granddaughter outing. There’s no problem with me leaving work sooner than usual, too, so I do it.

  Once it’s just me and Mom on their couch, I stare at the carpet and try to calm my quick pulse with slow breaths.

  It doesn’t work.

  Not one inch of me knows how to feel calm.

  I can’t even get my words under control.

  “Mama,” I rush out with my hands around my knees, “Beckett and I have feelings for each other.”

  Her breath catches from where she sits at the other end of the couch.

  Squeezing my knees, I nod. “Real feelings. Gigantic ones. And it has been so scary because we didn’t plan—we never thought in a million years that we would wanna be together. We loved Cliff so damn much. It has been so hard to feel like this when—when we still remember what Cliff and I had and how great his friendship with Beckett was. They were like brothers, for God’s sake.”

  “Mmm.”

  “We tried to get ourselves in line for the sake of his memory because it just didn’t seem right. But we couldn’t do it. We tried for three weeks and failed at it. It hurt in its own way, and…. Now things are only getting bigger between us because the way he makes me feel…and the way I make him feel is so….”

  It takes my throat tightening for my words to finally cut off.

  I close my eyes and keep trying to breathe.

  My mom sighs.

  A few seconds of soft noise alerts me to her coming this way. After she’s settled next to me, she rests a gentle hand on my shoulder.

  “I thought that might’ve happened,” she replies just as gently. “Your father and I both did. Can’t pinpoint when we started wondering it, but…we did wonder.”