and grabbed my hand, locking our fingers together. I brought our hands down to the mattress, braced my arm on the bed.
“I love you,” I whispered as I fucked him. “Do you understand that? I have loved you since the day I met you, and I’m going to continue loving you until the day I die.”
He gasped as I thrust into him. “I’m so close. Fuck, I’m so close. Give it to me.”
I sped up, pumping harder, loving the way he writhed beneath me. Sweat slicked his skin, his body hot against mine.
“Fuck, I’m gonna come,” Connor groaned. “I’m gonna—Julian, oh fuck, Jules.”
He came, spilling onto his stomach. His ass tightened around me as he did, squeezing my cock and, Jesus, it was heaven, being buried inside him. Seeing him like that, vulnerable and open and fucked out of his mind was enough to push me over the edge, too. With a final thrust, I came, releasing deep inside Connor before collapsing down onto him.
We lay like that, tangled and wet, panting together in silence, for God knows how long. I didn’t really care. My sphere of consciousness had been reduced to this bed. To Connor’s body underneath mine, his chest rising and falling, his breath on my neck.
When I finally shifted and pulled out, Connor whined, and damn if that didn’t make my cock twitch all over again. Needy Connor was someone I couldn’t get enough of. I loved how he pulled himself even closer as I slid back in bed with him.
“What did I do to deserve you?” He still sounded raw and ragged. His fingertips traced my shoulder lazily. “I didn’t think the universe granted favors like this. What the hell did I do to finally get to have you?”
“I could ask the same question,” I said, feeling a little drowsy. “But I’m starting to think it might not be the universe at all.”
“Yeah?” He laughed a little. “You’re not telling me that right when I start gaining some faith in the world, you’re losing yours?”
“Not that, exactly. It’s just—” I pressed a kiss to his chest, trying to find the right words. “I kept waiting for something to shift and magically fix my life for me. But nothing actually changed until I was willing to change on my own. I don’t know if that’s God or the universe or random chance. But I think that’s the lesson I needed to learn.”
“I kept saying I wanted you to put yourself first,” Connor said, his voice quiet. “But I never put you first in my life. Instead, I put demands on you that I knew you couldn’t meet, because it felt safer that way. But you still didn’t push me away. Didn’t hate me. You showed me how much more was possible.”
He exhaled, a soft feather of breath, and brushed his lips across my forehead. “I don’t deserve you, but I’m going to do everything I can to try to be worthy of you. Being in your life is what makes mine worth living.”
“My life doesn’t make much sense without you in it either. It doesn’t make much sense unless it’s our life.”
“Our life.” He pulled my arms around him tighter. “I like the sound of that.”
Connor did wake up with me the next morning. Deliciously, gloriously late—by which I mean 7:00 a.m. Still, the sun was up, and for once, he wasn’t sneaking out hoping not to get caught.
We would have gotten up earlier, if Gretchen had succeeded in getting her way. She came into my room at 5:00 a.m. and began clawing at the covers, purring directly into my ear, and batting at my face to wake me up.
Eventually, I did have to drag myself out of bed, just so I could bring her to the other side of the room where Roxie lay snoring, and set her down there. Connor had nipped back to the Wisteria to get her, and Katie had kept Roxie to herself until midnight.
Gretchen tussled with Roxie for a while too, nipping at her ears, but in the end, Roxie’s natural inclination towards laziness won the day, and she convinced Gretchen to curl up with her to sleep some more.
It was an idyllic morning. The sky was a clear, cornflower blue and birdsong drifted in the window as Connor made coffee. I decided to make pancakes. I hadn’t done that in ages, and the sizzle of the batter and splat of the blueberries as they hit the pan filled me with