Page 68 of Travis
“They don’t hurt anymore.” His voice was quiet. “Most of them, I barely feel.”
“That’s worse.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then his hand left mine on the scar and found the hem of my sweater. A question inthe gesture, not a demand. His fingers resting against the fabric, waiting.
I pulled it over my head myself. Unhooked my bra and dropped it on the tile.
My body was not Naomi’s. I was a lot softer, rounder, built for desk work and data analysis. Fuller breasts, wider hips, and arms that lacked the definition from years of combat training. He had touched my sister’s body for over a year.
He knew what lean and athletic felt like under his hands, and I very definitely wasn’t that.
The thought sat in my chest like a cold stone. I wanted to cross my arms and cover myself. I wanted to reach for the sweater on the floor.
I didn’t. I stood there and let him look, even though every part of me braced for whatever his face would do next.
This was what I had. He could see all of it.
Travis looked at me. Not a glance, not a quick sweep. A focused, unhurried attention. His gaze moved across my skin, and what I saw on his face wasn’t comparison. Wasn’t evaluation.
It was hunger, plain and uncomplicated, and it landed on me like something warm poured over a cold place.
He touched me with steady hands. They traced the curve of my waist and settled on my hips. He pulled me closer. Skin against skin for the first time, the heat of his chest against my breasts, and I felt his breath catch against my hair.
His thumbs traced slow circles on my hipbones. Then one hand slid up my ribs between us, cupping my breast, his thumb brushing across the nipple. My head tipped back, and his mouth found the hollow of my throat, and I stopped thinking about anything except the path his hands were making across my body, unhurried, learning me like terrain he intended to memorize.
We shed the rest of our clothes without ceremony. He reached into the shower and turned the water on, and steam began filling the space, then expanding out into the room. The humid air opened my lungs the way it always did, the bronchial tubes relaxing into the warmth.
Of all the things to register while Travis pulled me under the spray and put his mouth on my neck, my body cooperating for once was the detail my brain chose to file.
The water ran over both of us, hot enough to flush my skin pink. His mouth moved from my neck to my shoulder, tasting the water off my skin, and his hands mapped the same slow path they’d started outside the shower. My waist. My hips. The curve of my ass, where his fingers spread and pulled me tighter against him. I could feel him hard against my stomach and the reality of that, the physical proof that he wanted this, wanted me, cut through every doubt I’d carried into this room.
I pressed him backward until his shoulders found the tile. He let me. I kissed the line of his neck and tasted clean water and salt.
I was careful with his left side. When I pressed too close and he flinched, I adjusted without asking. When my fingers found the edge of the stitched wound, I redirected. Learning the geography of his damage by touch, mapping the places that hurt and routing around them. His ribs on the left were off limits. The shoulder needed a wide berth. Everything else was mine.
I wanted to touch every scar on his body. Not to fix them or learn their stories but because they were his, and he was here, and four years of wanting him had turned into warm water and his skin under my hands, and I was shaking and it had nothing to do with the temperature.
He felt it. He must have, because his hand came up and cradled the back of my head and he kissed me in a way that made my knees dissolve. Slower than before. Deeper. His mouthasking me something his voice wouldn’t, and my answer was to press closer and slide my hands up his chest and into his wet hair and hold on.
Then his hand slid between my thighs and my brain went blank.
His fingers found my clit and I gasped, the sound bouncing off the tile. I grabbed his shoulder with one hand and his arm with the other and held on because the world had just narrowed to the exact point where he was touching me, and nothing else existed outside of it.
“Travis. There,” I managed. “Right there.”
He watched my face. Those green eyes locked on mine while his fingers worked, and I couldn’t look away, and I couldn’t close my eyes, and I couldn’t do anything except stand there with the water running down my back and let him take me apart.
I’d imagined this. God help me, I’d imagined this so many times, lying in the dark in my apartment, hating myself for it. The reality made every late-night fantasy I’d ever had feel like a pencil sketch of a sunset. Close enough to recognize. Nothing like the real thing.
I came hard and almost without my permission, my whole body seizing, my face buried against his neck, my nails digging into his arm. His other arm wrapped around my waist, and he held me up.
“Sera.” My name, quiet against my wet hair. Just my name. Like it was the only word he had left.
My legs were unreliable, and he kept one arm around my waist while I steadied, his forehead resting against mine, neither of us in any hurry to separate. The water was still running, and after a moment he turned me gently under the spray and smoothed my hair back from my face with both hands.
I reached between us, barely grazed the tip of his cock, but he caught my wrist.
“Not here. I won’t last three seconds.” His voice was rough. He pressed his mouth to my temple, and I could feel him hard against my hip, feel how much the restraint was costing him. “Come to bed with me.”
