Page 70 of Give Me Strength

“Come for me, Ash.” My hand lifts off her nipples to cup her chin, forcing her eyes off the mirror and to me. She moans my name as she tips over the edge, and I crush my lips against hers. I swallow up her screams, her pleasure with my own mouth as her pussy contracts around my fingers, hard and fast.

Her legs give out, and I’m right there to catch her. She’s trembling in my arms, and I’m kissing her still, my fingers relentlessly driving into her as I fuck her through her orgasm until her body finally begins to relax.

Her lips are puffy when I pull away, her eyes searching mine.

“Look, baby. See what I see.”

She turns, and our eyes meet in the mirror. The sight of her, wide-eyed and flushed, disheveled and panting, only makes me ache for her even more. She’s fucking gorgeous.

Slowly, I ease my fingers from her, then pull my hand out of her tights. With our gazes locked, I bring my hand to my mouth and take my time in licking all of her sweet juices from my fingers. The pink hue that coats her cheeks spreads like wildfire, covering every inch of skin — exposed and otherwise.

I’m in trouble. She tastes like honey and feels like heaven pressed against me, but her blush will be my undoing.

“Vous êtes plus que suffisant, mon amour,” the words spill out before I can filter them in. “Tu es tout pour moi.”

She licks her bottom lip, then drags her teeth over it. “In English?”

“You are more than enough, my love. You are my everything.”

Her green eyes go wide, frantically searching mine for the truth of that statement. I let her find it. I’ve spent the last few months trying to keep this under wraps, and I’m done hiding.

“You are my home, Ash. That will never change. But ballet comes first, always. Your career comes first. You belong on stage. The bigger and gander, the better. It’s okay to be unapologetic and selfish about it. In fact, I need you to be selfish about it.”

Her throat shifts. “What about you? What about us?”

I cup her cheek. “Ash, I belong to you.” It sounds corny as fuck, but it’s the best I can come up with. “I spent the last two decades prioritizing my career over everything else. Now, you come before everything else. Where you go, I go. If the Antarctica Ballet Corps recruited you today, guess what? I’ll follow in a heartbeat.”

She blinks once. Then twice. And a few more times after that. “What about your practice?”

“Let me worry about that.”

She doesn’t seem convinced. “Gil?—”

“I want what’s best for you. And what’s best for you is to go to Bayard. But right now, you need sleep. We need sleep.” With that, I stand, help her up before scooping her into my arms. Her hands go around my neck, like an anchor.

“My legs work.”

“I know. Indulge me, please? And I’ll tell you a boring story in the meantime. It’ll put you right to sleep.”

Her eyes light up at that. “Nothing you say is ever boring.”

Shaking my head, I press my lips against her forehead, and then we’re moving, making our way back to her bedroom. “When we were eighteen, Rachel and I left North Dakota to chase our dreams. Well, depending on who you ask, we ran away from home in the dead of night. We didn’t have much — no money, no clear path — just the clothes on our backs and a fierce determination to build something better for ourselves.”

I take the stairs two at a time. “Rachel had some friends here in Chicago, so we settled down here. They took us in while we got our bearings. A month in, we got married because it was convenient. We moved into a tiny apartment and we both worked multiple jobs for a year, saving up as much as we could while applying to schools around the country. She got into Bayard and I got into Cornell. Both offered us scholarships to cover tuition, so we moved to New York. And because we were married, we were able to stay together, in subsidized student housing for married couples.

“Freshman year was rough, though. I suppose that’s what happens when you underestimate how much things cost to live in New York. At least our tuition was covered, since we could barely make ends meet outside of that. But we did what we needed to do in order to survive. In addition to school, I still worked multiple jobs to make ends meet, and Rachel took on every dance gig she could find, often with little or no pay. We managed it because we believed in each other. There were days when we were so exhausted we could barely stand. Nights when we had to choose between eating and paying rent. But we kept pushing forward because we knew it would be worth it.”

“Then how did you go from living together to living apart?”

“I got recruited by the CIA in our sophomore year, that’s how. The money was good, so we were able to drop all the other jobs and just focus on school. Plus we got a stipend for housing, so we were able to move to someplace slightly bigger. Having privacy was nice too. But the job came with travel. Not a lot at first, but it gradually increased. And by then, we were… codependent.”

“How come?” she asks, when we get to her room and climb into bed together.

“The classified assignments were going to start after graduation. It meant being off the grid for indeterminate lengths of time. The plan was to do that and med school concurrently. It would’ve taken longer, but money wasn’t a issue since it was all on the CIA’s dime. But then Rachel was recruited by Royal Danish Ballet around the same time, and she didn’t want to go. She was going to give up ballet and follow me around the world.”

She laughs as she nestles into me, placing a hand on my chest. “That doesn’t sound like the Rachel I knew.”

“That’s what I said! But she was scared, understandably so. I would be too, if our situations were reversed. She was my best friend. We supported each other through every hardship. I can only imagine the amount of stress I was putting her through — not knowing when I was leaving next, how long I would be gone for, or if I’d come back to her alive or in a body bag. So, I made a promise to her, that I would always come home. Alive. That she was my anchor, and home was wherever she was.

---