There he is.

My beautiful boy, hidden behind the rock wall Justice erected between us all these weeks.

There he is.

Vulnerable and still loving me so much I can see his hurt like a wound left bleeding out.

There he is.

Watching and waiting for me to reject him like I did before. But I was a girl then. A little girl confused by the strength of my emotions.

That little girl is gone.

I don’t bother responding to what Justice said. I reach up to the tiny buttons holding my blouse together, teasing them loose one by one. My belly is a bowl of gelatin inside, all wobbly, but you’d never know it by the steady fingers pushing my blouse open and down my arms. I shimmy my way out of my skirt and panties, emboldened by the heat fogging up Justice’s eyes sliding over my bare legs. His breath is heavy by the time I toss my bra to the floor.

“What are you—” Justice pulls his tongue over his bottom lip and bites it for a second before continuing. “What are you doing?”

A laugh rolls up my throat, confident and seductive, verging on wanton. A sound I’ve been holding back all my life.

“Now, Justice. I think you know how this works. I’m not the first girl you’ve seen naked.”

I take the few steps separating us until I stand right in front of the bed. He runs his eyes from my shell pink toenails, over my long, tanned legs, and all the way up to the dark hair hanging around my shoulders, covering my breasts.

“No, not the first.” Justice say softly. “But the most beautiful.”

Barkley told me I was beautiful in more ways than one tonight, but it didn’t feel like this. Like I was made for his eyes alone. For his pleasure alone. And it isn’t the lust in Justice’s eyes that has me blinking back tears. It’s the awe. The reverence in the not-quite-steady-fingers brushing along my cheekbone. Acres of naked flesh on display for him to play with, my breasts at eye level, and Justice starts by touching my face. He looks into my eyes and makes sure he has my attention.

“We don’t have to do this, Fi.” He wraps that look around me until everything on edge inside of me steadies.

I sit beside Justice on the bed, naked as the day I was born, and brush my lips over his mouth. I leave the kiss chaste for only a moment before opening my mouth over his, pulling his bottom lip between my teeth. Sucking his tongue hard, I make a wet, sloppy mess of the kiss I can’t get enough of. I cup his face between my hands that tremble with the promise of his skin. I slide my fingers into the cool, rain-damp hair at the back of his neck and tug until we are staring into each other’s eyes again.

“Shit.” His breath huffs into the tiny space between our lips. “Fi, it’s not too late to stop.”

I tug the Stanford t-shirt over his head. Fine, fair hair arrows between the stacks of muscle cording his stomach. His skin, summer gold, is smooth and heated beneath my palms. I brush my fingers across his nipples, relishing how they harden at my touch.

I hear him swallow. See his fists clench on the bed behind him. His eyes, when they lock with mine, are violent ocean blue.

“Are you sure about this, Fi?”

I barely nod before he pounces, pressing me back until I’m stretched out on the bed, completely open to him. He has shaken off the passion-induced stupor that allowed me to take the lead. Now all aggressive male, he pushes his tongue into my mouth, his hunger, voracious. His hands slide down my arms until he laces our fingers together. He pushes my hands over my head and into the pillow behind me, dusting kisses down my neck and between my breasts, before taking one nipple between his teeth. A moan slips out before I can stop it. He slides one hand back down my arm to toy with the other nipple, twisting and pinching until it is hard and puckered.

He takes his time with me, exploring my body like I’m a sugary treat he can’t help but savor. He garnishes my skin with kisses and strokes me until my body bucks with the pleasure of his touch.

He licks into my belly button, circling it with kisses before trailing down to the sensitive skin inside my thighs. His eyes carry an unspoken request. I know what he wants, but can’t even nod my agreement. The thought of him kissing me there hollows my stomach and shoots adrenaline straight into my heart.

The first brush of his lips between my legs is so faint I barely feel it.

“Did you know you have a beauty mark right here?” His tongue brushes the tiny cove between my thigh and the mound of flesh he looks ready to eat whole.

I manage to shake my head. The space is so tiny and hidden, I never knew. What else will he teach me tonight about my own body?

“It’s mine now.”

He whispers the words against my sensitive flesh, using his mouth and tongue as gentle weapons against me. Stretching my legs open wider, he groans and nibbles and sucks at me with such focused hunger I feel like the only meal he’s ever eaten. And then like the storm outside, thunder rolls through my body. Pleasure bursts and flashes like lightning behind my eyelids. Every inhibition crumbles under the force of that storm. I grip his shoulders. I pull his hair, raking my nails across his scalp, grasping at the straws of my sanity. Driven a little mad with the sensations tremoring through every inch of my body.

He doesn’t give me time to recover before he’s beside me, kissing me. Hovering over me, spreading me. Settling between my legs. Through a fog, I hear him ask a question.

“Are you still on the pill?”

“Huh?”

I open my eyes, noticing the strain on his face. The full lips disciplined into a firm line. He’s barely holding on, and I feel a surge of power that I’ve left him grappling for control, too.

“I’m clean, but are you on the pill?” He says the words slowly, but his hands gripping my hips are urgent. “Do I need a condom?”

“Oh.” I ghost my fingers over his mouth, smiling at all the intimate things he learned about me sharing a bathroom for years. “I’m clean, too, and still on the pill.”

“Can we…I mean, do you mind if we…I want to feel you.” He presses his forehead to mine, his breath warming my lips. “I understand if you have reservations. I don’t have the best track record, but I’ve been tested and I—”

“Justice.” I place a finger over his rambling mouth. I entwine my calves with his, running my hand over the plane of muscles in his back. “I want to feel you, too.”

He runs his nose up and down the curve of my neck, clenching his eyes shut.

“Thank you.” He whispers the words so softly I feel more than hear them.

He eases himself inch by inch inside of me. Pain arrows out from the place our bodies join. After such mindless pleasure, I’d forgotten about this part. I bite my lip to stifle a cry, but I can’t stop the tear that runs down my cheek. God, this hurts. I turn my head into the pillow, discreetly wiping my face against the soft linen.

“Baby, you’re so tight.” Justice’s sleek, muscled strength trembles against me. “God, it’s never felt this good.”

I force a smile, though it hurts every time he scrapes in and out of me.

“Are you crying?” Justice freezes above me, still buried deep.

“I’m fine.” I sniff back the stupid tears, and my body actually is starting to adjust to the size of him.

“I don’t-what’s wrong? Am I hurting you?” He looks so distressed at the possibility that he’s causing me pain that I have to confess.

“It’s okay. I’ve heard it only hurts the first time.”

I whisper against the smooth skin of his shoulder, but the words drop into the quiet like boulders in a bathtub.

“First time?” He pulls back, still joined with me, but leans up on his hands so he can see my face. “But it’s not-what-what do you mean?”

“I was a virgin, Just.”

He shakes his head, eyes never leaving mine.

“No, Fi. I thought-but Barkley…I saw with my own eyes. I saw you with him.”

“You saw me chickening out at the last minute.”

“You lied to me?” Anger snaps in his eyes, crackling between us like an electric storm.

“I didn’t lie.”

“You let me think that you…that he…for five fucking years, Fi?”

He starts pulling out, leaving me empty and cold. I grip his thigh, pulling him back, thrusting up to force him deeper. He groans, closing his eyes and burying his head in the pillow.

“Shit.” His voice is a tortured rasp into the hair fanned out behind me. “We need to talk, but, baby, if you do that, I won’t be able to stop.”

“I don’t want you to stop.”

“We have to talk about this.” He leans up to look at me, need and concern warring across the strong lines of his face.

“We’ll talk. I promise, but please…”

I don’t know how to finish that sentence. I only know that I need to do this. Need to please him. Want him to have me as no one else ever has. I raise my legs, bracketing his hips with my knees. I rock into him, really having no idea what the heck I’m doing, but it’s starting to feel good again. After that first sting of pain, the delicious friction of him pulling out and pushing in has set a small fire inside of me. Pain is a speck on some distant horizon, and I only see this building, consuming, wrenching passion like the fist of clouds that starts a tornado.

If the first orgasm was thunder, this is an avalanche. Thoughts, words, emotions – everything makes a torrential, inevitable slide downhill, collapsing into a slushy pile of nonsensical moans and monosyllables. And Justice slides with me. Muffling his groans into the pillow by my head. His body shakes with the force of what we share; He jets into my body, hot and wet. I tighten my arms around his shoulders, afraid if he moves, this perfect moment will shatter all around us.

For seconds we lie there, and I believe, even with his vast sexual experience, that Justice is stunned. As clichéd as it sounds, our souls touched. I harbored him in the deepest parts of myself, and he left particles of his soul for me to hold onto forever. I love the traces of him wetting my thighs, marking me as his.

He rolls away, pulling me into his arms against his chest. He drops a kiss on my hair, laying his jaw against my head.

“Talk.”

I swallow the trepidation swelling the muscles in my throat.

“I did what I thought was right.”

He stiffens, but doesn’t loosen his hold on me or otherwise move.

“Fi, I haven’t been in many myself, but I’ve heard that in relationships, people actually decide together what’s best for the two of them.”

“We weren’t in a relationship.”

“Your choice, not mine.” His voice falls flat between us in the silence that only moments ago had been filled with our moans.

“I thought you’d be happy that I didn’t sleep with Bark.”

“You have no idea how it feels to be your first…but five years. Baby, we lost five years.”

“We didn’t lose them. We both did what we were supposed to do; focused on what we should have been focusing on. You were starting college. Mama needed my attention when she got out.”

I give him a pointed look. “And you told me not to come after you. You said you needed space.”

“Space. Not five years.”

“You could have contacted me,” I remind him.

Justice rolls up to sit on the side of the bed, facing away from me. I stare at the tanned, muscled terrain of his back stretching up and out from his narrow waist.

“I was so angry with you. So disappointed.” Justice glances over his shoulder, his eyes running over my face and hair and the sheet I’ve pulled up over my naked breasts. “This is the picture I’ve carried around of you in my head for five years, but with Barkley. And now to find out it was a lie…”

I sit up, clutching the sheet under my arms. I run my hand over his shoulder, down his arm until I reach his hand. I raise our hands together and kiss his knuckles.

I could defend all night. Could detail how Margo and I schemed to convince him things should remain platonic between us. Could go through every moment of that night when I’d actually thought I could give myself to Barkley; that it wasn’t a big deal, only to think of Justice every time he touched me. But I’m just so ready to get past it now. I’m finally ready to be with Justice like a woman can only be with a man. Ready to leave those conflicted days behind.

“Please forgive me, Justice.”

“That’s it?” He turns, one leg off, and one knee bent on the bed between us. “Forgive you? It’s that simple?”

“It’s not that I think it’s simple. It’s just all that matters. Either you’ll forgive me and we can move forward in our relationship, or you won’t.” I pluck at the sheet covering my legs, unable to meet his eyes for the next sentence. “And I guess we’d go back to being whatever we were before.”

Justice moves so quickly I barely register it until I’m flattened back against the pillows with him on top of me, positioned between my legs. Even with the sheet separating us, I feel him semi-hard and pressed into me.

Already. Wow.

“Now see that’s where you’re wrong.” Justice leans forward until his nose touches mine, his lips brush mine, branding my lips with each word. “I’m pretty sure I said no going back. That you are now mine.”

I wonder if he can tell I’m getting wetter and wetter between my legs under him. He looms over me with those broad shoulders bunching as he supports himself on his elbows. That silver and gold hair hanging down over the one eyebrow he has raised.

“Fi, do we understand each other?”

The only thing I really understand right this second, is that despite feeling sore and raw, I want him inside of me again. I bite my lip so I won’t beg him to toss the sheet to the floor and pound into me. He must read it in my eyes, though. A miracle of white teeth and full lips sketches a wicked smile on his face.

He leans down until his lips touch my ear.

“You want me.”

I’m too proud to whimper, but it’s a near thing. I gulp down the pitiful, needy sound my body wants to offer up as a sacrifice to have him again. Justice runs his tongue along the shell of my ear. I shudder, turning my head to catch his lips, but he moves back, just out of kissing range. His voice, when it comes, is threaded with the same rough want knotting low in my belly like hot rope.

“Don’t doubt for a minute that I want you, too,” he says, sliding one hand under the sheets to grab behind my knee, pulling it up by his side. “But I want everything, Fiona. Every thought, every dream, every kiss, every orgasm. Every. Thing. And you’ll give it to me.”

I thank the stars above for years of conditioning and my strength as an athlete. As big as he is, I manage to flip him onto his back with almost as much swiftness as he demonstrated. I settle on top of him, my toned thighs straddling his hips, trapping him beneath me.

“And do you think I’ll accept any less than everything from you, Kenner?”

I expect him to fire back some smart ass retort, but he doesn’t. He pushes the hair over my shoulder, baring the breast the fallen sheet exposes. I watch all that was angry, all that was commanding and lusty in his eyes, surrender completely to a tenderness that rubs a salve into any remaining ache in my heart.

“Fi, I’ve always wanted to give you everything.”

I bow at my waist, folding onto him, ignoring for the moment the way my nipples pebble against the stonewall of his chest. I bury my nose in the sinews of his neck, drawing in the scent of ocean air and home that he somehow carries in his skin.

“Do you know why I was so upset when I realized you were still a virgin, sweetheart?”

The endearment slips so naturally from his lips and into every crevice of my heart.

“Because I know how much it meant to you.”

I try to sit back up, but his hand presses into my naked back restraining me.

“Just listen for a minute. To think you had given something so precious to Barkley, and maybe to prove some point or win some argument between us, that hurt so badly, Fi. And then tonight, to know that you were still a virgin…”

I won’t entertain guilt or regret. I wanted Justice no matter what. And now I have him. That is enough for me. Was it not enough for him? Had I misjudged the situation entirely? Next to all the girls he’s had before; experienced women willing to do anything to please him, did I seem naïve? Untutored? Vanilla?

“Did you, um, did you not enjoy it, Justice?” I blink to keep the tears from falling, hoping he doesn’t feel my wet lashes against his neck.

He tugs at the hair spilling down my spine, forcing me to sit back up and look into his eyes.

“I once told you there was a difference between fucking and making love.”

I can’t speak. I’m afraid to. The emotion saturating Justice’s eyes is all adoring possession, and it tethers me to him in a way I’ve never been connected to another person.

“Tonight, we made love, Fiona. And it was my first time, too. What I had before, what I did before, I don’t want it ever again. I want what you and I had tonight.”

He grips my chin, his eyes heating up to fire-blue, holding mine. Burning through any guards I have left against his sweet attack on my heart.

“And I only want it with you.”