Page 174 of Gamebreaker

A flicker crossed her face, surprise and then heat, and then a kind of joy. She'd expected me to lie back and hand it over. I could see it.

"You're still in charge," she said. "Even now."

"Even now." I slid my hand around the back of her head, over the satin, and held her there. Not pulling. Never her hair. Just holding. "That's who I am, Harper. You wanted all of me."

Her eyes went dark. "I did."

"Then take it."

She lowered her head and put her mouth on me, and I breathed out hard.

She was good at this. She wasn't tentative, and she wasn't performing effort. She was genuinely good, paying attention the way she paid attention to everyone she cared about, learning fast, changing when I made a sound or shifted. She moved her tongue over my clit in long, firm strokes, and I felt the heat start at the center and spread outward.

"Slower," I told her.

She went slower.

"Like that. Good girl. Just like that."

She made a sound against me that I felt everywhere.

"Fingers," I said. "Just one."

She pushed a finger inside me, and I heard myself make a sound that a year ago, six months ago, three weeks ago, I would have swallowed. I would have managed it and locked it away. It came out of me now without any attempt to stop it, helpless and honest. Harper made that same sound against me again, like it was the answer to a question she'd been asking for weeks.

"Curl your finger," I said, and my voice was going. "There. Right there. Don't stop."

She didn't stop. Her finger curled inside me, finding the place that made my vision blur at the edges, and I felt it coil tighter and tighter, and I didn't try to control it. I didn't step back from it. I didn't manage how fast it came. I had been managing every part of myself for twelve years.

I was not managing this.

My hand tightened on the back of her head, holding her there, and she moaned against me, and I felt it like a match strike.

"Look at me," I said.

She looked up at me from between my thighs, her eyes dark and wet and full of love, and that was it. That was what did it.

"Harper," I said, and her name came out of me low and ragged and nothing like the captain or the floor general or any curated version of myself I'd ever handed the world. It was just Cam. It was just the person I was when no one was watching, except now she was watching, and I let her. "Harper. Don't stop. Please. I need..."

"I know," she said against me. "I've got you. Let go."

I let go.

It wasn't violent or abrupt. It was total. I felt it in my whole body, all the way out to the edges, and nothing in me held any part of it back. I made sounds I had no control over and didn't try to take back, and her name was in all of them, and she stayed with me through every second of it, steady and present and not asking for anything.

When it finally eased, I was shaking.

I realized it in pieces. The trembling in my hands. The way I couldn't control my breathing. The tears that had come at some point in the middle of it. They weren't dramatic. They weren't grief, exactly. They were overflow. Twelve years of wanting with nowhere to go, finally finding somewhere, and there wasn't enough room in me for all of it.

Harper crawled up my body. She didn't say anything about the tears. She just took my face in her hands and looked at me with her whole self showing, and then she lay down on my chest and wrapped her arms around me the way I'd held her. Both arms. No caveat.

I held on to her like she was the last solid ground in the world.

I pressed my face into her neck and breathed.

For a long time, neither of us spoke.

The city was fully quiet now, deep into that four in the morning silence when even the traffic goes away, and there's nothing between you and the inside of your own life. The string lights still sent their gold line under the door. I could hear her breathing, slow and coming down, and mine matched it a little at a time.