Grip’s smoky words heat the air, and without breaking eye contact, I reach under my dress and slide the wisp of silk off, tossing it behind me farther up the staircase. I tease the dress up my thighs and spread my legs for him.

I’m gloriously wet. Since Zoe died, I’ve been practically asexual. There were days I felt nothing. Even when I looked at Grip, I would feel love, but passion was elusive, like my heart, my body could only accommodate so much emotion at once, and grief consumed everything. Six weeks later, my heart is still broken. There are some places that may never quite heal, but the passion, the want, the scorching need I’ve always felt for this man alone is finally blazing a trail through my body again, and it starts between my legs.

“I want you wider,” he says, his voice pitched low and dark and tortured. His eyes never leave my pussy as he methodically undoes his belt, unbuttons his pants, slides down his zipper, jerks his shirt over his head.

I yawn my thighs open, propping my heels on the step. I’m spread like a buffet for him. He licks his lips, a tell of his hunger.

I run a brazen finger down my slit. He drops his long body in front of me, stretching down the staircase below, elbows propped on the step. His head is between my legs. I reach down, spreading it, serving myself to him. He groans into my pussy, slurping and biting and licking and running his nose through my folds. Arms lengthened down my body as I keep the lips pulled back for him, my head drops to the step behind me. Pleasure long forgotten exults through me, winding between my toes like steam, circling the tense muscles of my calves, the quivery line of my thighs. My spine bows and my hips buck into his mouth. I lift one foot off the step, curling my leg around him, digging my heel into his back and thrusting over his face. Nothing exists for me except the starvation of his mouth against me and his thumb—dammit, his thumb in my ass, working its way into the spindled hole and finding neglected nerve endings.

“Oh, God,” I scream. “Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes. Don’t stop, Grip. Baby, don’t stop.”

Ever since that day I heard Grip’s heartbeat, I’ve been living by proxy, leaning on his heart to beat for mine. Grief handed me a heart of iron, and I rusted it with my tears, a muscle not made of flesh, not pumping blood. Ever since that day I’ve been a lament in limbo, no longer in the dark but not fully in the light, but here, now, Grip’s touch drags me into the light.

I pop, like an incandescent bubble. The pain, the grief, the desolation, the darkness of the last six weeks unfurls from me in a low keening moan. It hums in my throat and explodes until I’m a deranged thing, bucking and flailing and weeping, tearing at my hair, pinching my breasts, scratching Grip’s back, feeling his skin beneath my nails. My body is making up for lost time, demanding satisfaction, expecting its due.

“Fuck me.” The plea trips over my bitten lips. “Any way you want, I don’t care.”

The dark, unspoken demand of his eyes, the shiny wetness on his wicked mouth, the scent of me hanging from his lips leaves me completely willing and wanton.

“Yes, that,” I gasp. “You can do that.”

“Babe, I don’t want to hurt you.” Even as he says it, I see a hot hope, a fantasy coming to life in his eyes.

“You won’t,” I tell him, my voice hoarse. “I want to feel you as deep as you can go, wherever you want to be. Make me feel it, Grip.”

“I have lube upstairs,” he says, his eyes drifting up the staircase.

“I have lube right here.” I run my fingers through my dripping slit. “Work with what we’ve got.”

“Damn, Bris.”

A shudder rolls over the muscled slope of his shoulders, tensing the ridged plane of his stomach. With my feet I coax his pants and briefs over his hips, pushing them down the carved line of his thighs. He shakes them off, his eyes fixed on my fingers at the hidden zipper in my dress. I pull it down the side until the silk falls away, leaving me completely bare and laid out for him, wearing nothing but Neruda on my shoulder and around my neck.

“Flip over,” he rasps. “On your knees.”

Unhesitatingly, I turn over, placing my elbows on the step above and my knees below, my body a perfectly fuckable right angle. He doesn’t tell me what he’s about to do, and the questions, the wondering adds an erotic layer of suspense. He runs his cock through my folds over and over and over, wetting himself with my juices, all the while stretching me out on a rack of sensual torture. I’m mindless, catching his cadence and pumping my hips in time with his. His fingers at my nipples and his lips raining kisses down my back make me whimper. One finger and then another spear my pussy, varying the rhythm from swift to languid, surprising my flesh, keeping me on edge as I wait for him to take me where I’m not sure he’ll fit, but I can’t make myself care anymore. My pussy is convulsing around his fingers and I’m reaching behind me to claw at his neck when I feel the first enormous probe. I tense, but his hand at my nipple and fingers moving inside me scatter my reservations.

“Relax, baby,” he says, even though passion and anticipation tighten his voice. “I got you. Tell me if we need to stop.”

I won’t stop him. I’m so desperate to be penetrated. I need him thrusting into me—I can’t breathe without it. I’m not sure I can endure another second of this empty body. I’m a void waiting to be filled, and I don’t care how. Then he pushes forward in excruciatingly slow, slippery inches. The pressure and the width of him are momentarily unbearable, and I gasp. He goes still behind me.

“Don’t stop.” I drop my forehead to the step above me.

“Are you sure?” His words singe the delicate skin of my neck.

I just nod my head and bite my lip, trusting him to make it good for me.

And oh God, he does. He slow-slides in deeper, all the while working my nipples and thrusting into me with his fingers, stoking me like a fire, tendrils of smoke spiraling from my core and fanning out through my limbs.

Grip’s enraptured grunts and curses in my ear, the rhythm of his body, at first careful and then frenzied, trigger some ancient need in me, and my flight-or-fuck instinct kicks in. I push back into him, opening myself more, spreading my legs, giving him an all-access pass to the inner sanctum he’s been wanting.

“This is so good,” he rasps in my ear, one palm at my breast, the other between my legs. “I want to stay here, fuck your ass all night, but I’m gonna come.”

With every thrust, he abrades nerves I never knew existed, mysteries and sensations my body tucked away and hid from me, but Grip has found them. I’m panting, I’m screaming. My body is an outcry, and he spills his response into me, going rigid behind me, inside of me.

Our harsh, heaving breaths punctuate the quiet as we lay in a sweaty sprawl on the staircase. Grip eases out and gently turns my body over. The lip of the stair digs into my spine, but I don’t care. He rains kisses over my shoulders, suckling my breasts, fingers invading my hair and caressing my scalp.

“Thank you, Bris. God, I’ve missed you so much. I love you,” he whispers over my lips, sending his tongue in to taste me. “I can’t stop touching you. I thought I might lose . . .”

His voice breaks. He buries his head in my neck, and I feel his tears mingling with the sweat sheening my body. He reaches up, looking at me with wet eyes, and brushes away the tears I didn’t realize were streaming over my cheeks, too.

“We made it.” He smiles at me, eyes tender. “I told you we could survive anything together.”

He never doubted us. When I wasn’t sure I could make it, when I couldn’t find my way out of the darkness entombing me, he came for me.

“Don’t ever tell me not to save you,” I say, tears rolling between my naked breasts and over the gold that binds our hearts together. “You saved me, Grip. You came for me.”

He looks at me curiously, like it’s something he can’t believe I’m surprised by, like he wonders if I’m still figuring it out. He bends to lick at my tears and lifts the wild hair from my eyes, the look he rests on me devoted and sure.

“I’ll always come for you, Bristol.”

He said it after eight years of waiting for me. He said it when he came to LA after our fight. He’s said it in a million ways with and without words. He says it with his heart, and I have to believe him because when I was at my lowest and thought all was lost, he found me in hell and brought me home.