The care in his question makes my heart swell. Even now, with desire evident in every line of his body, he's checking, making sure. This is Nate—always has been. He's always been my safe space, the one person who makes me feel protected rather than controlled or used. Who asks rather than takes.

I nod, unable to form words.

“When you say stop, we stop, yeah?"

The tenderness beneath his intensity makes my heart constrict even as every nerve ending in my body hums with electric need—pleasure and anticipation twisted together so tightly I can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

"Do you want me to stop?"

I shake my head, stepping closer to him until I’m pressed up against him, my fingers tracing the muscles of his shoulders until they find their way to his jaw line and lips.

"Don't stop," I whisper against his mouth, the words more breath than sound.

His eyes don’t just look at me—they devour me. Dark and starving and somehow still gentle. My heart kicks against my ribs when his hand slides under the soft cling of my panties, deliberate and purposeful. Fingertips graze heat and slickness and I swear, I whimper—a sound I didn’t know I could make.

God. I ache for him.

The first real touch pulls matching gasps from our throats—his low and wrecked, mine sharp and wreckless. The sound hangs in the charged space between us like something holy and broken. His forehead presses to mine, and he watches me with this intense, quiet reverence, like he’s learning me by feel, by breath, by every little quake under my skin.

"You’re so wet for me. It’s fucking beautiful,” he murmurs. “You’re fucking beautiful.”

Something inside me cracks open at that. Any fear or awkwardness just burns away, gone like mist in fire. I can't speak—only feel, only burn—as his fingers find this perfect, torturous rhythm that scrapes the breath from my lungs.

“Do you have any idea how long I’ve wanted this?” he breathes, voice soaked in hunger and something almost… desperate. “Wanted you?”

And then his mouth is on mine, and it’s not sweet—it’s starving. He kisses like he means to carve himself into me, like I’m the only thing that’s ever made him feel real. He starts slow, yeah—but it’s the kind of slow that unravels you. That owns you. Like worship, but wilder. More raw.

I melt for him. And somewhere beneath the softness, something wild in me starts to stir. Starts to howl. Because no one’s ever touched me like this before—not just my skin, but me. All of me.

And now I don’t know if I’ll ever let him stop.

I know, with bone-deep certainty, that nothing will ever be the same again.