Doubt tries to creep in, cold and dry like a stone in the pit of my gut, and I do my best to slam the door on it, shutting it out. Blake’s eyes narrow, his brain working behind their heat.

Finally, he reaches for the nightstand once more. Coming back with the wooden figurine, he holds it between us. I’m confused at first, wondering if maybe he got it for some weird Pinocchio sex thing I’m blissfully unaware of, but then I realize what he’s offering me.

I touch the figurine for luck, and he smiles as if it’s cute and not weird as hell to do this mid-sex. I can’t help but answer his smile with one of my own when he tosses the figurine to the pillow. “Finally.”

“Yes,” I promise. He thrusts forward, entering me an excruciatingly pleasurable inch at a time, and the word comes out again, stretched out like warm taffy. “Yesssss.”

Once settled deep inside me, a shudder rushes through him, releasing a sigh of relief from his lips. I feel it too. Something bigger than him, bigger than me, and like Aristotle said, we’re creating something greater than the sum of our parts.

How could I have turned my back on this in fear?

He takes my hands, holding them over my head and looking me straight in the eye. There’s no turning away from this, no pretending this is casual. There’s no chance this is a booty call. I’m too much work for that. Work he willingly put in, tiptoeing through the minefield of my past and my irrationalities.

“Come back to me, Zo,” he says, pulling me out of my mind. “Be here with me. Nowhere else, just here, now.”

I am.

Vulnerable and exposed, afraid I’m simultaneously too much and not enough, but Blake simply smiles the smallest, sweetest smile ever. “There you are.”

I see him too.

He’s confident, bold, a believer in love, but he’s also human, and like us all, he has his own weaknesses. Ones he covers with his charm and easygoing nature, but he wants to feel wanted and accepted as much as I do.

As much as anyone does. “I’m here, Blake. With you.”

The whisper releases his inner barriers, and with our hands entwined and eyes locked, he finally fucks me. Our hips buck together in a beautiful, frantic tempo, weeks’ worth of build-up rising to the surface quickly.

I bend my legs, planting my feet on the bed to give him deeper access. I want him everywhere—in me, on me, around me. His breath goes jagged, and I whine with every powerful stroke until he tenses, on the edge for a magnificent moment where his face scrunches up in pleasurable agony.