“Jesus fuck,” he said, pistoning his hips faster now, each thrust pushing against something inside me that had me seeing stars.

I reached up, fingers grappling for the headboard, needing something to hold on to. Each snap of his hips pushed me further up the mattress and deeper inside that place in my head where static roared and the growing tension inside my lower belly—the friction and heat between my legs—became impossible to ignore.

“Will,” I breathed, gasping against his open mouth. I was going to come and I needed to come with him, feel him coming inside me and then again and again, on my breasts and my stomach, my lips.

Will reached for the edge of the mattress and pushed my leg farther into my chest and that was it. Heat exploded between my legs and ricocheted through every part of me. My toes curled, and I was coming so hard I couldn’t cry out or even say his name. He rocked into me one last time, so deep it took the breath from my lungs and I could feel him, muscles tense as he came inside me.

Will fell back to the bed and pulled me with him, cradling me into his side. “Holy shit.”

I blinked up at the ceiling, waiting for my breathing to return to normal. My bones were rubber; air cooled my fevered skin. I looked over to Will before reaching for the clock on the side of the bed. Six hours, twenty-two minutes to go. Not bad.

Sitting up, I filled two glasses from a bottle of chilled water on the bedside table, emptied mine in a single long draft, and climbed up onto Will’s lap.

His eyes moved down my naked body before he took the other glass from my hand. I watched him drink, marveling at his throat as he swallowed, his bare chest, his messy hair. This body? Was mine. Once he’d finished, I took the empty glass and pushed him back down to the pillows.

“Now,” I said, raising a single brow, “about that list...”

Chapter Three

Three

Will

“Are you sure you don’t mind postponing the honeymoon?” On the couch at my side, Hanna turned her face up to me, squinting in the late-afternoon sun that streamed through our living room window. “Are you worried it will feel sort of... anticlimactic?”

A wild wedding, a sleepless wedding night, another interview checked off the list, and there we were: one week later, already back in our apartment, back in our day-to-day life.

There was something reassuring about taking the monumental step but then immediately falling back into pace with the rest of life. It reaffirmed what I’d told Hanna all along: The us beneath it all didn’t have to change. We could still be exactly who we were before. Married folk definitely lazed around in their underwear on a Saturday afternoon.