Page 54 of Room for Us

Maybe her voice is my own.

My eyes fill with tears, but I don’t close them. Despite the risks—or maybe because of them—for the first time, I show all of myself to a man.

“I can’t get pregnant. One hundred percent infertile according to the best doctors in the country.”

Shock reverberates down his body, pressed flush against mine. “Zoey,” he chokes. There’s miles of compassion in my name, spoken from the heart of a parent who can’t imagine life without his child.

I shake my head, smiling even as a thick tear hits my cheek. “It’s okay. I’m okay. Please, Ethan, make love to me.”

He kisses my wet cheeks, drinking the salt water from my deepest wound. Slowly, his kisses find my neck, my collarbone, and my breasts. I gasp, my head thudding against the wall as his mouth, then teeth, tease my nipples. My hips seek his, my hands finding the waistband of his boxers and pulling them carefully over his erection. Then the hard, silky length is in my hands. I tug—he groans.

“Stop it,” he whispers.

“No.

“You’re distracting me.”

“I prefer to think of it as focusing you.”

Another groan, half-laugh. A firm hand seeks between my thighs. I spread my legs, welcoming the fingers that first tease, then sink into my center.

Words come out of my mouth, mostly profanity, as he nips my earlobe and whispers to me how tight and wet I am, that he can’t wait to be inside me. My response is an ineloquent demand. His answer is yanking my right leg around his hip and tilting my pelvis toward his.

“Look at me, Zoey.”

My eyelids flutter open, then shut. It’s too much. The sight of his glorious body, the wildness in his eyes, the fierceness of his frown.

“Uh-uh. Open them.”

I do—just in time to capture the wonder on his face as he eases inside me. Slowly and carefully at first, then a hard thrust he can’t control. His knees almost buckle. My entire body trembles, a tree branch in a thunder storm.

“Holy shit,” he whispers, eyes closing. “Holy fucking shit.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be a writer?”

He’s smiling when his mouth shuts mine, when his hips begin to rock. When my left leg can’t hold me anymore, he palms my ass and lifts me. I wrap my legs around his waist and lock my ankles instinctively. The new, deeper sensation sets my bones afire—they melt entirely when he begins to thrust in earnest.

He chants my name in a hoarse whisper until I grab his face and kiss him. Devour him. I consume and am consumed in turn. The friction between our bodies sparks a dark, sucking sensation inside me that grows, and grows, until it turns molten hot and blinding bright. Can an orgasm kill you? I almost ask, but I can’t tell where my lips end and his begin. And really, I don’t care.

I throw myself into the storm.

And he joins me there.

30

“What are you thinking about?”

Ethan’s head turns lazily toward me. “Nothing, which is a miracle.”

We’re sitting on the cold tile floor, our backs to the wall, naked and sweaty and spent.

“That doesn’t happen often, does it?”

His smile turns wry. “Very rarely. Oops, here comes a thought.”

I grin. “What?”

“Who was that young Brad Pitt wannabe you were talking to today?”

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