“I love you so much,” he groans.

He’s so close, closer than he’s ever been before, sharing my body in ways I never dreamed were possible, and the faster he goes, the more I hope this never ends. After this, I can’t go back to living and breathing and walking around without him inside me.

I don’t have to ask him to hold me, to kiss me, because he does, and we move together as one, twisted up in his bedsheets, Jack a veritable god as he moves his hips with assured precision. I scream in ecstasy, my body shivering with a fullness I’ve never felt before, and it’s almost too much to bear as I bite down on my bottom lip and my head gets light. He grunts as his brows furrow. I clutch his back as he finishes then collapses onto me, shaking, his arms jellied as they try to prop him up and fail.

He picks his head up and kisses the tip of my nose. “My turn.”

“Really?”

He barely smirks before I roll over on top of him and pin his arms to the headboard. I gently kiss the space between his ear and his neck.

His legs open for me, and at first, I do what Jack did, but an animal fervor leads me down farther, using my tongue to get him ready. Instantly, he moans, and it’s so primal that it makes me go harder.

“I need you, please,” he begs. “Fuck me.”

There’s something about the way he bites his bottom lip, the same lip I’ve kissed maybe hundreds of times now, that makes me want to know every square inch of him, mind, body, and soul. I thought before, when he was on top, that I could never feel closer to him, but now, as I stare into the ocean of his eyes as I enter him and his body trembles as his fingers grip my arms, this is a whole different level of intimacy.

As I find my rhythm, I can’t help but whisper everything that’s in my heart, exquisite paintings I can’t verbalize as anything but “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Afterward, when we’re both spent, sweaty messes, and neither one of us wants to go back to my suite for the party, Jack puts on my shredded Prince Eric shirt and picks up James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. It’s so achingly hot how the fabric that touched my body is now draped around his. I watch the muscles in his forearm pulse as he turns to a new page. I haven’t the strength to get dressed. All I want to do is watch him read.

His Moleskine notebook is open on the nightstand.

“What’s this? A new poem?”

“Just some ideas I scribbled when you went to the bathroom,” he says.

“Can I?”