Page 165 of Before We Were

"Is this okay?" he whispers, his voice husky with restraint.

The care in his question makes my heart swell. Even now, with desire evident in every line of his body, he's checking, making sure. This is Nate—always has been. He's always been my safe space, the one person who makes me feel protected rather than controlled or used. Who asks rather than takes.

I nod, unable to form words.

“When you say stop, we stop, yeah?"

The tenderness beneath his intensity makes my heart constrict even as every nerve ending in my body hums with electric need—pleasure and anticipation twisted together so tightly I can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

"Do you want me to stop?"

I shake my head, stepping closer to him until I’m pressed up against him, my fingers tracing the muscles of his shoulders until they find their way to his jaw line and lips.

"Don't stop," I whisper against his mouth, the words more breath than sound.

His eyes don’t just look at me—theydevourme. Dark and starving and somehow still gentle. My heart kicks against my ribs when his hand slides under the soft cling of my panties, deliberate and purposeful. Fingertips graze heat and slickness and I swear, Iwhimper—a sound I didn’t know I could make.

God. Iachefor him.

The first real touch pulls matching gasps from our throats—his low and wrecked, mine sharp and wreckless. The sound hangs in the charged space between us like something holy and broken. His forehead presses to mine, and he watches me with this intense, quiet reverence, like he’s learning me by feel, by breath, by every little quake under my skin.

"You’re so wet for me. It’s fucking beautiful,” he murmurs. “You’refucking beautiful.”

Something inside me cracks open at that. Any fear or awkwardness just burns away, gone like mist in fire. I can't speak—only feel, onlyburn—as his fingers find this perfect, torturous rhythm that scrapes the breath from my lungs.

“Do you haveanyidea how long I’ve wanted this?” he breathes, voice soaked in hunger and something almost… desperate. “Wantedyou?”

And then his mouth is on mine, and it’s not sweet—it’sstarving. He kisses like he means to carve himself into me, like I’m the only thing that’s ever made him feel real. He starts slow, yeah—but it’s the kind of slow that unravels you. Thatownsyou. Like worship, but wilder. More raw.

I melt for him. And somewhere beneath the softness, something wild in me starts to stir. Starts tohowl. Because no one’s ever touched me like this before—not just my skin, butme. All of me.

And now I don’t know if I’ll ever let him stop.

I know, with bone-deep certainty, that nothing will ever be the same again.

“Fuck, Len... you have no idea what you do to me,” he rasps, voice thick with something jagged.

His hands map every inch of me like I’m made of secrets he’s been dying to uncover.

Slow. Merciless. Intentional.

Each touch sets off tremors under my skin until I’m gasping—needy, unmoored, half-feral.

“You’re going to ruin me,” he breathes against my mouth, and then hetakesit—kissing me like the words alone weren’t enough to bleed the truth out of him. Like he’s trying to drown in me.

I let out this broken little laugh between kisses, the sound raw and tangled in everything I feel.

“You ruined me a long time ago.” I grip the back of his head like I’ll fall apart if I don’t hold on, burying my fingers in his hair.

His eyes lock onto mine. “Lenora Kennedy Wells, you will be my greatest undoing.”

And then his fingers quicken, dragging me toward the edge of something I’ve never stepped off before. Something that feels like dying and living all at once.

“Now let me watch you come undone for me.”

I crash into him, kiss him like it’s the only language I know, like I can pour years of love and ache and longing into the heat of his mouth. My body arches against him, chasing the rhythm, chasing release. His free arm slams against the wall beside my head with this raw, explosive force that makes me flinch—andwant—in the same wild breath.

Then his eyes—fuck, those deep eyes—pin me in place.

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