Page 52 of Faultline

"Not yet," he says.

I can't answer. His fingers curl inside me, finding a depth that sends sparks behind my eyelids, and the orgasm builds from somewhere so deep it bypasses every defense I own on the way up.

He withdraws his fingers. The loss wrenches a sound out of me that's closer to fury than need.

He hooks my thigh over his hip, notches the head of his cock against me, and pushes inside in one unbroken stroke that stretches me wide enough to white out the edges of my vision. The fullness borders on too much. The thick pressure of his cock fills me completely while the timber holds me in place and he pins me from the front.

He holds there. Buried. Every tendon in him rigid with the effort of not moving, letting me feel every inch while my body adjusts and my breath comes back in uneven pulls.

Then he starts to move.

Not carefully. Not the measured control of the kitchen table. He drives into me with a pace that's hard and relentless, each thrust pushing me up the wall, his hand on my thigh the only thing keeping me where he wants me.

The friction builds in a rush that replaces coherent thought with raw sensation. His hips slam forward and I feel him so deep it registers in my spine. Each withdrawal leaves me hollow and desperate, and each return fills me so completely that the boundary between him and me blurs into something I can't separate.

He's proving he's alive. Every stroke is evidence.

"Don't stop," I hear myself say, and my voice sounds like someone I've never met.

His response isn't words. His free hand drops between us, his thumb finding my clit, and the force he applies is relentless.

The orgasm rips through me without warning. My body locks around him, spine bowing off the wall, legs clamping tight, everything seizing at once. What comes out of my mouth is his name, broken and repeated, stripped to a single syllable that tears loose from somewhere beneath my ribs.

The contractions pulse through me in waves that I can feel clenching around him inside me, and he doesn't stop. His thumb keeps working, his pace keeps driving, and the overstimulation crosses from pleasure into something rawer, something that strips me to nerve endings and his name and the wall holding me up because nothing else will.

His control breaks. His forehead drops against my shoulder, and he goes rigid. He buries himself deep and holds there.

I feel him pulse inside me, feel him come, the wet heat of it spreading through me while his arms shake. The air leaves him against my skin in fragments that sound like surrender.

A groan tears out of him that I feel in my collarbones. His hips jerk forward once more, twice, involuntary, chasing the last of it while his hands dig into me hard enough to leave marks I'll carry for days.

The hallway is quiet afterward. His weight holds me against the wall. My legs are still locked around his waist, and nothing in my body remembers how to hold shape.

His breathing is ragged at my throat. Mine isn't steadier. The sweat between us is cooling in the draft from the door he shouldered open and didn't close.

Through the gap I can see the porch, the gravel, the tree line beyond it. A thin column of smoke still rises from the wreckage of his staging area.

We're not pretending anymore. Not that this is practical. Not that this is proximity and adrenaline and the convenient math of two people who share a cabin during a crisis.

His hand comes up and cups the back of my skull, and the hold is absolute, no intention of letting go. Something I armored a long time ago finally gives.

"I lost you in the smoke," I say. My voice is raw, scraped hollow. "For a few seconds, I couldn't find you."

The fingers in my hair tighten. "I came back."

"You better keep doing that."

He lifts his head from my shoulder and looks at me.

His eyes are stripped open in a way I've never seen, the careful structure behind them laid bare. The control is gone. The calculation is gone. What's underneath is raw, and what's underneath is terror. Not of Cascade. Not of the fire.

Of losing me.

He doesn't say it. He doesn't need to. His hand stays in my hair. His body stays inside mine. The cabin creaks around us in the cold morning light while the smoke from his burned property drifts through the open door.

Nobody closes it.

Somewhere beneath the silence and the smoke and the weight of him still holding me against the wall, my advocacy brain does what it always does. It keeps working.