only took a few more hard, firm strokes, and Jazz was coming with a gasp in long stripes across his belly.
I drifted in a warm, happy daze, with Jazz’s nails scratching pleasantly across my scalp. “We need to clean up,” he said.
I didn’t move. “Five more minutes.”
Five became ten, but eventually I was able to move. After we cleaned up, it was natural for me to slide into his bed next to him and pull him into my arms as I drifted to sleep.
Jazz
I woke up the next morning with Tex’s limbs slung over me like a possessive octopus. He was still deep in sleep, making those familiar snuffling noises I was used to hearing through the wall. I’d halfway expected him to have freaked out in the middle of the night and returned to his room to sleep alone. But he was still here, sprawled over me like we did this all the time.
I slipped out from beneath his arms, careful not to wake him. He hummed in his sleep and rolled into the warm spot I’d left behind. He looked calmer in sleep, younger, and my heart clenched with fondness.
In a way it still didn’t feel real, even as I watched him drool onto my pillow.
I slipped into the bathroom and turned on the shower. I tilted my face up into the hot water and sighed with pleasure as it sluiced through my hair and down my back.
Last night had been… almost unreal.
I’d dreamed about it countless times, in countless iterations over the years, imagining what it’d be like. Would he be rough, or sweet, or desperate, or nervous, or somewhere in between? I’d imagined him in every scenario: in bed, in the garage, at the old ranch, in showers, in motels. But the fantasies couldn’t prepare me for the real thing.
I’d never had sex like that before. It was so—
I was used to sex with guys I didn’t know well. Sex that was hot, athletic, all about getting each other off quick and hard. Sex with Tex had been… different. It was slow, because he was worried about my injuries, but it was familiar, for all that we’d never done it together before. And it was fun—we knew each other so well. Sex didn’t change that. The familiarity made sex easier. He knew my body, my limits, even if it wasn’t in that way yet, and it was so easy to tell him what I wanted.
I hadn’t expected Tex to make such a dramatic shift, and certainly not so quickly. I was almost afraid to believe it would stick. What if he woke up and realized what he’d done, and decided he didn’t want it again?
I knew what my feelings were—I’d known for years. I was completely in love with Tex; I’d accepted that long ago. But he was just beginning to face his own feelings, if he was even ready to accept them at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if the fear and the unfamiliarity overwhelmed him and he changed his mind. I was almost too afraid to believe otherwise.
Because now that I’d had Tex in that way, how could I let it go?
The shower door slid open behind me, jolting me out of my reverie. “You didn’t wake me up,” Tex murmured grumpily as he slipped his arms around my waist. His voice was still low and rough with sleep, and he tipped his face into the crook of my neck, and then kissed my shoulder.
I folded my hands over his, where they were interlaced on my belly. “You looked too comfortable.” The nerves that had been building in my chest suddenly eased, like a tight knot loosening.
I turned my head and caught his lips in a good morning kiss. He tightened his hold on me, pressing his chest to my back, and the hard curve of his morning erection pressed into my lower back—not insistent, just present. Tex deepened the kiss, and the solidity of his body against mine, the rough scratch of his beard, and the warmth of the water was intoxicatingly good.
I broke the kiss and pulled back enough to look into Tex’s sharp green eyes. I didn’t know what I expected to see—uncertainty? Regret? But all I saw was a kind of solidity. Something like determination.
I kissed him again, lighter this time, and then pulled his hands away. I turned around and stepped back so we were both in the warm spray of water. “Listen, Tex…”