Page 108 of Give & Take

I’m losing this battle in my heart. I’m barely keeping myself above water.

Because how can this thing we’ve created ever be over?

Raph pulls out and when he brings us back together, I force myself to focus only on the sensation of us joining. On the fun part of being with him.

It’s not hard. This is the best time I ever had.

It must show on my face, because Raph smiles. Which makes me laugh and then him laugh, and then we’re laughing and he’s thrusting and we’re in this rhythm that feels like a car, racing up switchbacks.

This is a high I’ll never come down from.

From somewhere in the cosmos I hear Raph in my ear, like I’ve somehow curled up inside his chest. He says, “Are you ready, Sunshine?” like we’re standing at the top of the road together, like over the edge is the wild unknown.

“Yes,” I say, and the moment the word comes, my climax does too. It comes head on, like a train with no brakes. “Raph,” I cry, my voice lost to the storm. I hold onto him like I’m drowning.

It’s only when I come to the blistering reaches of the wave that the word he said before forms fully in my mind.

When I saidbe with me.

Raph said “Always.”

Chapter 29

Lana

“I’m a changed man,” Raphael says.

We’re lying on our sides in his bed, facing each other. I texted Chris a while ago, and she told me the girls were sleeping over. Aurora was already asleep. “It’s too late to argue,” she said. I could practically hear another Chris-cackle through the text.

“Mark this occasion,” Raphael told me. “This is the one andonlytime I’m happy the girls aren’t here.”

Raph’s dark hair falls in a sexy swoop on his forehead now. It’s sometime in the early hours of the morning, and I find myself obsessed with the details. His necklace, pooling on the pillow by his tanned throat. His broad hand gripping my hip possessively under the sheet, kneading me every so often with a thumb. It’s like a ‘turn-on’ button.

I’m still coming down off the high of my last orgasm, and my heart is doing this weird swelling thing, where I’m trying to get it to chill, but it’s like a piece of paperI’m trying to form into a ball and the paper’s too thick to stay put.

“What do you mean, changed?” I ask, just to keep myself distracted.

Raphael plays a hand lazily over the side of my face, skating his fingers over my skin; brushing my hair off my shoulder. “I’m not the same man I was when I woke up this morning. You’ve altered my whole identity, Sunshine.”

“All it took was sex?” I ask, testing as always.

Raph rises up on his elbow. His opposite hand is still on my hip, but now he’s tracing circles against the slope of my pelvis. I want to melt into the sensation.

“That wasn’t just sex.”

“Oh no?”

Raph shakes his head, biting the corner of his lip with his teeth. “Nope.”

“What was it?”

He sighs, rolling onto his back and pulling me with him. I’m caught off-guard, and though the wheel in my head keeps threatening to spin, somehow this makes it find its equilibrium.

“I think that was what they call transcendence,” he says, into the sudden, utter stillness of my thoughts.

I think this is what surprises me most about Raph. Or, what surprises me aboutmearound him. He’ll do something that should make everything worse. When I’m panicking about something, he’ll crack a joke about it. Right on the nose. When I’m feeling like we need to be serious, he’ll say something ridiculous.

Or he’ll flip me on top of him, making life a game.

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