Page 38 of The Twelve-Hour Rule
He winks, then his hands find my inner thighs and he pushes my legs open. “I’m starving, but I’ll let you pick.”
He moves fast, and his tongue is on my clit before I can utter a single word. It’s urgent and needy and like we haven’t seen each other in weeks, even though we’ve been apart for a few days only. A moan escapes me, and Ben groans in response, sucking and lapping at me desperately.
“Still so sensitive,” he murmurs, half in awe.
“Please,” I say with a gasp as he sits on his haunches and watches me. His cock is impossibly hard, and he takes it out of his underwear and jerks a few times. Everything slows down, and I study him as he takes off the remainder of his clothes. It’s not sensual at all, just desperate and hurried and familiar.
”Please what? Use your words.”
I love that this is what we’ve become—familiar without losing that vacation spark, messy without needing to explain. His hands find my things again, steady and warm, and there’s no urgency, no need to rush. Just the rhythm we’ve fallen into, the quiet kind of intimacy that grows when you know someone’s seen every side of you and stayed anyway.
He leans forward, resting his forehead against my stomach, his breath slow, ground. “You okay?”
I card my fingers through his hair, the gesture automatic now. “Yeah,” I whisper. “Better than okay.”
He takes a deep breath and then his mouth is back on me, licking, teasing, eating, sucking. “Fuck,” he says as he slips two fingers in my pussy. The only thing I can do is look at him, and my body starts to coil in response. It’s so attuned to him, that only a few strokes of that tongue are enough to undo me.
“Cock,” I finally say, and I don’t even have to finish saying the words before I feel the stretch of him, hard and fast and all the way in. “Yeah, like that.”
He grunts. “How is this real life?” he manages between thrusts, his voice rough, uneven.
I laugh, but it comes out shaky, swallowed by the rhythm of us, by the heat that builds between every word.
He presses his forehead to mine, our noses brushing. “You’re going to ruin me, Sunshine,” he whispers, and the way he says it—half awe, half disbelief—makes something inside my unravel completely.
“I’m coming,” I breathe, and his answering groan vibrates through me, low and rough. Two more rolls of his hips and I’m gone, the sound tearing out of me as he follows, breath hot against my ear, heartbeat wild against my skin.
“God,” he says, and it sounds far away even though he’s right next to me. I haven’t fully come down from that, but I manageto turn my head to watch him. His eyes are closed and he has a half-smile on his face. “I can’t believe I get to do that with you.”
I find his mouth and kiss him because, same.
We end up sitting on the couch and eating directly from the containers two hours later. He talks about his week, the meeting he had, the snow up in Massachusetts. I tell him about my day, the final walkthrough we had today at the site, and the conversation I had with a contractor about the meaning of “urgent” in our field of work. It’s domestic and quiet and maybe a little boring to anyone else, but to me, it feels like breathing.
His words fill the silence that I felt for such a long time in my previous relationship, and it’s startling how simple it feels to just listen, to exist next to someone without needing to perform, to prove, to keep the air light.
He’s talking about something totally mundane—how the hotel’s duvet was too warm—when I realize it’s not noise filling the quiet. It’s him. His voice, his presence, the steadiness he’s been giving me since I met him three months ago.
“Ben,” I say softly.
He looks up from his noodles, chopsticks paused midair. “Yeah?”
The words are in my mouth before I have time to second-guess them. “I love you.”
His eyes widen just slightly, and for a heartbeat, the room goes still. Then he sets the container aside and leans forward, elbows on his knees, studying me like he’s trying to make sure I mean it.
“Say that again,” he whispers.
“I love you,” I repeat, a little firmer this time. “I don’t know when it happened. Definitely somewhere between landing back in New York and now. But I do.”
He exhales, a shaky sound that makes something inside me unclench. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to hear that.”
I smile. “Weeks?”
“Try every day since the island,” he says, and then he’s kissing me—slowly, reverently, like we have all the time in the world.
When we finally pull apart, I press my forehead to his. “You don’t have to say it back.”
He laughs softly. “In what universe did it ever occur to you that I’m not saying it back?” His voice drops to a whisper, barely above a breath. “I love you, Sunshine.”
