Page 39 of The Moment You Know

“I need to be inside you,” he said, his voice rough with need.

With him pressed against her, she could feel how hard he was. She nodded her assent, her mind already detaching a little as she let him lead her to his bedroom, which was kept abnormally neat for a guy. Pausing at his dresser to get a condom out of the top drawer, he then backed her up to his double bed and put his hands under her skirt and pulled her panties down with quick efficiency.

As she stepped out of her sandals, he unfastened his cargo pants and shoved them down just enough to free his cock and roll the condom on. They fell to the bed together, moving up toward the middle, where he settled in between her legs for a moment before pushing inside her.

As he sank all the way in, she closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath and forced herself to relax through the initial discomfort.

“Jesus,” David groaned with pleasure, as he moved in and out of her with hard, measured thrusts. “You feel so good.”

“So do you,” she whispered, wishing with all her heart that it was true.

He pulled back a little so that he was looking down at her and Paige felt her breath get trapped in her chest. It was something he was doing more and more often and she knew that staring into each other’s eyes while their bodies were intimately joined should’ve been a romantic moment, but … it wasn’t.

The more he liked to look at her during sex, the more uncomfortable it made her feel.

Her response was to grip both sides of his face and pull his mouth roughly down onto hers in a bruising kiss. She could feel him starting to tremble as he tried to hold off his orgasm, so she brought her knees up and dug her heels into his ass to make it difficult for him to do so. Not long after, when she knew he was nearing the end, she doubled her efforts.

“Oh, shit,” he muttered against her mouth, as he came, hard. She could feel it, the way his cock pulsed inside her with each release and as he drifted down from his orgasm, he continued to push in and out of her with lazy strokes, riding out his pleasure. When he was finally still, he rested his forehead against hers for a moment and then kissed her.

“I love you,” he whispered.

At his heartfelt declaration, her throat grew tight and her eyes prickled with tears. This wasn’t the first time he’d said it, but it always affected her this way and in that moment, she felt whole. “I love you, too.”

They lay together, still joined, for several moments. Because they were mostly clothed, Paige could handle that the room was full of early afternoon light—if they had been naked, she’d have dragged them both under his covers, pretending to be cold.

“So, when do I get to see your tattoo?” she asked, drawing him out of his post-coital haze.

“How about right now?”

While he got up and went to the bathroom to dispose of the condom, she retrieved her panties and quickly put them back on. When he came back, his shirt was off and he looked a little nervous.

“I need you to do me a favor while you’re back there,” he told her. “Can you remove the Saran Wrap and put some of this on it?”

She nodded, then took the container of ointment he was holding, which basically looked like Vaseline. Taking a deep breath, he slowly turned around. Her eyes immediately went to the tattoo, which was clearly visible under the layer of Saran Wrap, and when her brain registered what she was seeing, her heart started pounding in her chest.

“Oh, my God, David,” she breathed, taking in the artistic rendering of her face,with her name above it, in curving, two inch letters. “What have you done?”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s the picture you took of me.”

It was only one of a dozen or so pictures he had managed to take of her in the eleven months, one week, and five days they’d been together. She didn’t like her picture being taken, so most of them were taken without her being aware of it. This one had been taken at a party, when she’d been smiling at something Jules had said, turning her head just enough to be slightly in profile and tilted upward.

“Yes,” he said. “My favorite one.”

“This is what Therese meant when she said I was a lucky girl.”

“I think she just meant because I’m so hot.”

Paige was too much in shock to appreciate his obvious overplay and she stared at the tattoo again. “I can’t believe you did this.”

“Me, either. It hurt like a bitch.”

She swallowed around the lump in her throat and slowly peeled the Sarah Wrap off with shaking fingers. “David,” she said with another deep breath.

“I’m kidding. It didn’t hurt that much.”

“You know what they say about getting such personal things of a … girlfriend … or whatever,” Paige said as she got some ointment on her fingers and began gently applying it to the newly inked, slightly red skin. “No names, stuff like that. You pretty much doubled down on what you’re not supposed to do.”

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