Page 18 of Glass

He lifts his hand. The enormous hand that lifted me off my feet last night. He doesn't go for my body. He goes for my hair.

I haven't let anyone touch my hair in over a decade.

I don't move out of the way.

His fingers slide in. Careful. Not gripping, not directing, just present at the back of my skull, warm, resting there. The touch isn't asking anything of me. It is just contact. The pads of his fingers against my scalp, the slow drag of them through my hair, the weight of his hand cradling the back of my head like something he's proud to hold.

Something in my chest pulls tight and lets go.

We shift toward each other without either of us saying go. I roll from my side onto my back. Teddy moves over me, slow, huge, careful. The sweet kid is back inside the alpha body, the one who was always there. I understand this now. He settles between my legs without pushing them apart. I open them.

His hand stays in my hair.

His other hand slides down my side. My ribs, my hip, the soft inside of my thigh where my slick dried earlier and is already thin and warm again. Back up. He's touching me the way you touch a person. I know how that sounds. I've had hundreds of hands on my body in this club, in scenes, in beds, in the back of cars in my twenties. None of them touched me like this. None of them touched me like they were paying attention to where my skin was.

He reaches between us. Guides himself to my entrance.

I'm still wet. My body didn't fully come down after last night. He slides in slowly, inch by inch, his eyes on my face the whole way. The stretch of him is different this time. Not the controlled slide from the bench, not the feral shove against the wall. Something else. He fills me the way water fills a glass, slow and even, and I feel every inch of him settle into me, and when he's all the way in my breath leaves me in a long, shaky exhale I didn't know I was holding.

He pauses. His forehead rests against my temple. He doesn't move.

He says, barely audible: "Can I."

I say, "Yes."

I don't know what he was about to ask. I'm not going to refuse it, whatever it was.

He begins to move.

Long, slow strokes. His hand stays in my hair, fingers threaded through, his palm warm against my skull. The other hand grips my thigh lightly, just holding. My own hands come up and find his back. I'm not guiding. My palms are flat against his shoulder blades, and I can feel the muscle of him working under my hands with every stroke, the slow roll of his shoulders, the shift of his spine. I haven't touched an alpha's back this way in this club. I have maybe not touched an alpha's back this way in my life. The nail marks I left on him are under my fingertips, raised and warm, and I trace one of them, and his breath hitches, and he slows for a stroke, then resumes.

My cock is hard between us, pressed to my stomach, his belly sliding against it with every stroke. The friction is enough. His rhythm is slow enough that I feel every stroke go through me, all the way, from my hole to the base of my cock to the pit of my stomach. I'm going to come. No one's managing it. No one's pacing it. It's going to happen because my body wants it, and his body wants it, and we're in a bed at four forty-seven in the morning with nothing to prove.

His breath is ragged against my temple.

He says, quietly: "I'm not going to last."

I say, quietly: "Come."

Permission. Welcome. Something in the word that I didn't use this way before tonight.

His knot starts to swell.

This one is different from the others. Not the surgical lock I ran an hour of scene-pacing around. Not the feral lock his rut drove into me. It seats into me slowly, the base thickening in a gradual swell that I can feel opening me, and when it locks, it locks into a stillness both of us have been moving toward rather than fighting. He comes with a low, broken sound against my temple, his hand tightening once in my hair and then easing, and the knot pulses inside me in long, warm waves. My own orgasm rolls through me seconds later, untouched, my cock spurting between our bellies, and I come around him in waves that match his, my walls clenching on the knot in a rhythm I can't control and don't want to. The third time I've come around this cock. The first time I've done it without any structure around it at all.

We breathe.

The knot holds.

His hand, still in my hair, slides once, slow, through. Then rests.

The knot holds for fifteen minutes or twenty. Neither of us speaks for most of it. His forehead stays against my temple. My hands stay flat on his back. Something has happened that I don't have a framework for, and for the first time in my whole life I'm not scrambling to invent one.

I just lie under this enormous careful alpha and breathe.

My attention drifts back to what he said. Nobody looks at me. You looked at me. It comes back whole and clean. I don't push it away this time. I don't have the energy.

I realize a second thing: I did look. I have been looking all night. The looking was supposed to be what I always do — fast, confident, done. I looked at this kid and did what I always do, and something in the looking broke what I always do. I don't know where it broke, or what the looking was doing by the end, or when I stopped being able to tell the difference.