Page 121 of Better Hate than Never

I nod. “So good. Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”

He kisses me, and his hand curves around my backside, drawing me down on him, filling me. “There. That’s it, honey. You’re there.”

I gasp, tears pricking my eyes as I feel the weight of his body, fully inside me, not out of pain but out of sheer, heartrending joy.Before he can worry about those tears, I wrap an arm around him and pull him tight to me, my mouth finding his hungrily. I need to be as close to him as I can be, I need his body to be a part of mine and mine a part of his.

Slowly, he starts to move, each stroke inside me uncoiling spool after spool of molten pleasure.

“Kate,” he gasps, drawing me close, kissing me deeply, our mouths open and panting, our tongues like our bodies, working in a rhythmic, hazy, hot glide.

His hand slips between us and his thumb rubs me gently, quickly pulling wetness from what our bodies are making. “Christopher,” I tell him. “I’ve come twice, you don’t have to worry—”

I’m kissed into silence. He shakes his head. “Need you with me.”

His eyes hold mine as those words echo through me.Need you with me.

“I’m with you,” I tell him, giving him his own promise, laid at his feet, “for as long as you’ll have me.”

He breathes roughly, then crushes me to him and rubs me harder, kissing me frantically, teeth and tongue and gasps of air. Settling more of his weight on me, he starts to move faster, deeper. His eyes find mine.

I feel it then, this place inside me that I didn’t know, that I hadn’t discovered, but he has. And, entirely out of my control, a sharp, desperate cry wrenches from my throat, then another. I can’t speak, can’t say how beyond anything I imagined this is, but he knows. I see it in how he looks at me, in how his mouth falls open, too, and harsh, rough sounds leave him, too, sounds I’ve never heard, that say unbearable pleasure and need and losing himself to the mercy of his body with mine.

My eyes flutter shut, but he pulls me closer, his hand tight in my hair. “Stay with me, Kate, please.”

I open my eyes as I feel him thicken inside me, hear him call myname and hold us together as I fall apart, as my release pours through me like liquid light, a pyrotechnic shower of sparks, glittering white-hot as they course through my body in time with him as he moves, as he shouts my name and fills my body in hot, wet punches of his hips.

The wake of the moment is the silence that hangs after a fireworks grand finale, ringing ears, chests echoing from the beauty that lit up the dark and shook the world.

Ragged breaths, gentle hands, we touch each other, see each other, and kiss once, long and slow. And then it’s the intimacy after intimacy—naked walks to the bathroom, lying on the bed afterward, watching his big bare body move, warming water in the sink, wetting a washcloth, gently cleaning me between my legs as he kisses me.

After that, he’s back under the sheets, pulling me close, weaving his legs with mine. The world is dark and still but for the faint firelight glow, its silent dancing flames. I wrap my arm around his waist and sigh deeply, staring into the fire.

His fingers stroke softly through my hair. He presses a kiss to my temple. “Penny for your thoughts,” he says.

I peer up at him. “For once, my mind is blissfully blank. No sight of my brain’s typical chaotic twenty-five open browsers.”

His fingertip drifts down the slope of my nose. Down, over my cupid’s bow, around my lips. “Blissfully blank or practically overheating, I think your brain is pretty wonderful, Kate.”

“You do?”

I hear his swallow. His fingertip sweeps up my cheekbone, landing gently on my temple, which he circles. “I do. I used to be afraid of—well, I probably am, still, but I’m working on it—how bold it made you, how brave and uncompromising. How you’ve always known what you believed and spoken your mind anddonesomething about it. Now I just see what chickenshits most of us are, compared to you. How I wish the world was filled with Kates.”

“Even with their chronic inability to stay on top of their laundry? Their propensity to lose their phone weekly? Their restless legs and regular struggle to stay in one position or place for longer than five minutes? You’d really want a world filled with Kates?”

“Especially with all of that,” he says quietly, kissing the tip of my nose. “There’d be Christophers in the wings, to keep things running smoothly.”

My heart does a wild leap in my chest. “Christophers do laundry?”

“Christopherslovedoing laundry.”

“And finding phones?”

He shrugs. “They bathe nightly in money and have time on their hands, after inventorying their empire. It’s no big deal to buy a replacement or go on scavenger hunts to find them.”

A bittersweet lump thickens my throat. “And are Christophers patient when Kates get wiggly and desperate for adventures?”

He’s quiet for a long moment. “Christophers want Kates to wiggle their wiggles and have their adventures... even if they take them far away. So long as they try their very best not to fall off cliffs or get in vans with questionable strangers. Whatever makes Kates happy. It’s all worth it, for a world filled with Kates.”

My heart swoops and dips, then settles like a bird that’s danced the day through the air, finally landing on its branch, settled its feathers for rest, at long last, content. I snuggle into Christopher, sighing happily as he tucks me tighter against him. “A world filled with Kates,” I whisper. “There’d be a doughnut shortage of catastrophic proportions.”

---