Chapter Fifteen

By the time we reach my apartment, my fingers are trembling with the anticipation, fumbling with the keys like I've never seen the door before. Levi only makes matters worse when he presses his chest to my back, settling a hand on my stomach to pull me closer against him, grazing my ear, my neck, my shoulders with his lips.

That's it, then. The next headline about us. Revenge Exes Fall Off Spiral Staircase to Their Horny, Unsuspecting Deaths.

My eyes flutter shut, my knees near to the point of buckling, and I decide if the universe takes me out like this, it will be one hell of a way to go.

By some miracle that certainly doesn't have anything to do with me, the door opens, and we spill through it. Levi uses the hand on my waist to pivot me, uses his other to slam the door shut. He backs me into it, pulling away from my face to take a long, slow, satisfied look at me—it's the first time we've been truly alone all night, and in that one look I feel some last barrier burn out from under us, ignite the sparks between us into an open flame.

He settles his hand on the underside of my jaw, using his thumb to skim my cheek. He leans in just close enough for our foreheads to touch, but holds my face there, not letting me get close enough to kiss. Just drinking me in and taking his time.

"You," he says, his voice low, "are so beautiful."

I almost hold my breath so I don't laugh. He catches the quick, self-conscious quirk of my lips, and uses that same thumb to brush the bottom one. Whatever breath I was tempted to hold is knocked right out of me by the gentle way he parts my mouth, by the instinctive way my teeth graze against the pad of his thumb, my tongue skimming over his salt and earthy sweetness.

"I mean it, June. Everything about you."

He finally tilts my head up to kiss me again. I'm held in the sweet, aching pressure between Levi and the door, so rapt with the feeling of his lips on mine, with the hardness of him pressed against me, that I could go boneless with want right now. I don't recognize a single one of these demanding, searing impulses coursing through me. It's like my entire life, I've only ever had the taste of something described to me, and now I'm finally taking my first juicy, absurdly rich bite.

I reach my hand up to the back of his neck, digging my fingers into the heat of his scalp, tangling them in his curls. He lets out a shudder of pleasure and I feel it echo into me, landing square in my chest.

We come apart, catching our breath, and when I open my mouth to speak, I'm nowhere near as eloquent as he was. There's nothing in me except the raw, bare truth: "I want you so badly I might die."

His pupils are near blown out when he kisses me again with an entirely new urgency, leaning back from me just enough to hook his hands under my thighs and lift me onto him. With him so flush against me, I can feel his own want throbbing all over my body, so overwhelming that it feels like my blood is simmering just on the verge of a boil. He's pressing his lips into my neck, my shoulder, my collarbone, and then I'm being lowered onto my own bed, slow and gentle and easy, and I'm staring up at Levi and thinking to myself I could see every edge of the world a hundred times over and never see anything half as beautiful as him.

It isn't just that it's Levi. It's Levi with those curls of his mussed from my own hands. It's Levi with his lips red and raw from my mouth on his. It's Levi with his gaze roaming my body, settling his eyes on mine, tender and burning and dark with want. It's Levi undone, Levi unspooling, Levi who is giving me every part of him in this moment before I take the rest.

I ease myself up, taking in the full sight of him. He steps forward, settles the tips of his fingers at my hairline, running them through the remnants of my messy braid.

"You have no idea how many times I've thought about this," he tells me.

There's a boldness surging through me, and it's so solid and demanding that I ask, "Like when?"

He leans in, his knee coming down beside me to press into the mattress. "When we were dancing that night, and you were wearing that red dress, and all I could think about was…" As if to demonstrate, he uses his other hand to slowly take one of the straps of my crop top and slide it off my shoulder.

"I didn't realize you liked it so much," I tease.

"Oh, I hated it," he says. "Because every time you moved in it, all I could think about was getting you out of it."

My chest blooms with a slow, satisfied warmth as he traces the line of my collarbone with his knuckles.

"I thought about it that afternoon in the ocean," he says, coming closer. "How easy it would be to just—lean in. Kiss the salt water off your lips."

This time he does just that, a slow, aching kiss. One unlike the others that have come so far, exploratory and gentle. Just as we sink fully into it, he pulls away, grazing my lower lip with his teeth as he goes. Then he kneels between my legs, pressing his hands to my thighs.

"I thought about it when you were running toward us on the beach. Before all of this started," he says, kissing the sliver of skin between my top and my jeans. "You run like—like you were born to do it. Like you have your own gravity. Like you're flying."

I'm blushing, burning all over my body, the words seeping somewhere deep under my skin. I have so many words of my own, so many things I want to tell him. But I'm so overwhelmed that I can't put any of them in order. There's just Levi kneeling on my carpet, saying the kinds of words to me I stopped imagining him saying a long time ago, and my head is swimming trying to keep up.

I lift my hand and press it into the crook of his neck, leaning down to kiss his temple, his cheek, the soft shell of his ear. He shivers, and I tell him, "You shouldn't have told me about that dress. I'm going to use it against you."

He lifts his head to look at me and says plainly, "June. You could use anything against me."

And for some reason these are the words that hit home, that strike something in me so tender that I can't help myself from saying it. Suddenly, I need him to know.

"I've thought about this, too," I admit. "Dreamed about it, even."

He eases himself back up, sitting on the edge of the mattress beside me. "And what happens in those dreams?" he asks. He gently tugs at the hair tie at the end of my braid, starts coursing his fingers through it, unraveling it.

For the first time in the night, I feel self-conscious. For the first time in the night, I wonder if I'm a little bit out of my depth here. I know Levi inside out and backward, but the truth is, I'm not so sure I know myself that way.

The truth is—the truth Levi must know, even if neither of us will say it—I've only ever been with one other person. And only now that I'm more undone by the mere start of this with Levi than I ever was in my entire relationship with Griffin do I understand just how much I was missing out on. Just how many things I never thought I was capable of feeling, never even imagined were possible to feel.

And now I'm feeling them all at once, and it's so alternately overwhelming and freeing that it feels like all the years I missed out on are colliding in me at once, demanding a satisfaction I'm not even sure how to ask for.

"June," he says gently, stirring me back.

I tilt my head to look at him. "Those dreams… everything that happened in them was almost abstract," I confess. "I don't even necessarily know what we were doing in them. Just that you were there, and I was looking at you, and—and I could feel you. All of you." I swallow hard. "I never felt that way when it was actually happening."

Levi watches me, his hands still coursing through my hair. "You have all of me," he says. "However much you want."

And my throat aches almost as much as the rest of me then, because it's one thing to know it, but another thing to hear it. Sweeter than dreams, sharper than hope. I lean in and kiss him again, on his lips, the curve of his jaw, the plane of his cheek, anywhere I can reach.

"Good," I say. "Because I want every piece."

His teeth graze his lower lip as he stares at me, as his fingertips skim the hem of my top and then pull it off with a slow reverence. He settles it on the edge of the bed, taking in the black bra underneath. Then he leans down and presses his lips to the top of my breast, and then to the other, making me shiver with the warmth of his mouth against my cool skin. He reaches for my right breast and kneads it slowly, deliberately, tucking his thumb beneath the underwire to stroke my nipple.

It's such a small touch. Such a subtle, little thing. But even that sends a tremor through me that feels like an earthquake in comparison to anything I've felt before.

Levi reaches to unclasp the back of my bra, and by then I'm aching for his hands on my breasts, for the fullness of his palms against them. But he's still moving with that tantalizing slowness, savoring me so openly that I forget my own nakedness, forget that this is a part of me few people have ever seen; forget to feel anything but the flush of satisfaction at the way he's staring at me right now.

He cups my breasts, and with him so close, the heat of him so compelling, I am all at once fixated on having more of his skin against mine. I find the hem of his shirt with my fingers and he leans back just enough to let me pull it up, lifting a hand to yank at the back of the neck and pull it over his head, and there he is. A torso I've seen plenty of times. He never lost that lankiness he had growing up, still all lean hardness and quick ease. I set a palm on his chest, trailing my fingers down to his stomach, feeling him tense under my touch.

"You know, when you run," I say, relishing every dip and plane of him against my fingers, "it's like you're made of something else entirely. Indestructible. Determined. I've always admired that."

I put my lips to his collarbone, sucking gently as my hand works my way down to the hem of his jeans, undoes the button.

He sucks in a sharp breath and says, "Is that why you were always so intent on kicking my ass?"

I smirk into his shoulder. "Someone had to keep you humble."

"Believe me, June," he says, his voice hoarse, "you'll never have to work to do that."

He abruptly hooks his hands under my arms, pulling the rest of me onto the bed, hiking me all the way up so I'm propped against the mountain of pillows. He eases himself up to meet me, lying beside me and angling his body into mine. I move in close enough that our noses touch, and we're just on the precipice of a kiss when I feel the tips of his fingers against the space between my breasts, and I let out a quick gasp. He undoes the button of my jeans, watching me carefully as his hand dips low into them, past the seam of my underwear, into the throbbing heat between my legs.

"Jesus," he murmurs low, and only then do I realize I'm achingly, desperately wet for him. That I wasn't exaggerating before. That if I don't have him tonight, all of him, it may very well be the end of me.

I'm wriggling out of the jeans, cursing the high-waisted trend for the first time I can remember as it takes the longest few seconds of my life to free myself of them. Levi's hand dips even lower, making sweet, slow circles with just enough pressure to drive an ache that spreads up and out, loosening my entire body. I lean forward, reaching for the waistband of his jeans again, desperate to return the favor, but Levi shifts closer.

"Let me," he says.

"I'm—" I put a hand to his forearm and he stills. "It's not going to—I mean, I—don't know if that's going to work."

Which is to say, the few times Griffin tried, it never did. It always took so long that we would either drop it or move on to something else.

"Do you like it?" he asks me.

I barrel past the question. "I don't want you to have to wait on it, or think it has anything to do with you if it doesn't work."

"Do you like it?" Levi asks, this time slower, closer to my ear.

"Yeah," I breathe.

And he picks up the pace again and says, "Then let me."

He slides a finger in and I'm already so wet that I barely feel it happening until he curls against me and my hips buck at the slight pressure, every part of me already aching for more. He settles his other hand on the back of my neck, bracing me, catching every tremor between his fingers. I lean in, desperate for any part of him I can taste—I breathe deeply into his neck, leaving a gentle, sucking kiss that makes him let out a low groan I can feel humming in my own lips. He slides in another finger and I gasp at the surge that follows, the demand , my body sinking into his hand as deep as it will go.

Every inch, every steady, rhythmic bend of his fingers feels so dizzying that I'm already breathless, like I've been sprinting for miles and never want to stop. It almost feels illegal to feel this good. Like I've accessed some part of the world I'm not supposed to know exists, because now that I do, there won't be any going back. There won't be any forgetting that I can come apart like this, that there are places all over my body I've never even thought could burn this bright.

"Levi," I say, and then I surprise myself: "I need you inside me."

It's the first time I've ever been so direct in bed. The first time I've ever actually said the word need and meant it. Everything before has felt so performative, like I've been going through the motions, but now everything else is moving me —like I'm in a tide that's pulling me along, dipping and rolling and cresting.

"You're sure?" Levi asks into my ear.

I press my hand against his jeans, feeling the hard length of him through the denim, relishing the quick gasp that leaves his throat. "I got screened after the breakup. So both my IUD and I are very sure," I tell him.

His lip quirks, something devilish in it. "I did, too. And good," he says, deliberately curling his fingers even deeper. "Because I could keep doing this all night."

I let out a keening noise, but I know what I want. I know myself. It's not that I'm worried this will take too long, or that Levi won't want to take his time. It's that I really, truly need it—it feels like some part of me is so open, so ready, that if it isn't full of him now, I'm going to burst.

"Please, Levi," I say.

He pulls his fingers out slowly, watching me the entire time, watching my mouth drop open at the loss of pressure. I ease myself up to work on the waistband of his jeans, trying to be like him—trying to take my time, trying to savor every moment of this. But I'm greedy. Almost desperate. Glad that Levi promised all of him, because anything less isn't going to be enough.

Once he's down to his boxer briefs, I press my lips just above them, threading the tip of one finger under the waistband and tracing the edges of it, feeling him shiver under my touch. I hook my finger and pull down slowly, releasing the length of him, and oh . My mouth is actually salivating, my heart thrumming with an anticipation so wild it doesn't know what to do with itself. My lips find the tip of it, licking softly, savoring the salty, bittersweet taste.

"Jesus," Levi murmurs.

He shifts so he can press his thumb between my legs again, continuing with those slow, tantalizing circles. I give another slow, exploratory lick up and down the length of him, digging my hands into his hips, anchoring myself as they sink lower.

"Okay, okay," says Levi, his voice barely more than a breath, "that feels—so good that you're going to have to—stop, if the two of us are going to…"

I take my mouth off him, using it to aim a wicked grin into his face. He responds to it in kind by pulling me farther up onto the bed again, then maneuvering himself until he's sitting upright and staring down at me, the blue of his eyes uncharacteristically dark as he roams every curve and dip like he's making a map of me.

My hips shift up in silent protest at the loss of his touch, and Levi only smiles softly and says, "Let me look at you."

There's too much colliding in me at once. This feeling of being seen without any other feeling accompanying it—without wondering if I deserve it, or if he really means it. Of letting myself enjoy this moment of being appreciated, of being cherished, and letting the feeling settle in my bones.

But my entire body feels like a live wire. If I can't touch Levi again, I'm going to implode.

"All right," I say, "you've looked."

And then I pull myself up and grab him by the shoulders, pushing him to the other side of the mattress, using the momentum to straddle him between my knees. Levi's pinned under me, all of him deliciously on display—the rise and fall of his chest, the planes of his torso, the open want glinting dark in his eyes. I push my fingers into his hair, pinning his head to the pillow, saying, "My turn."

It's a strange thing, to feel this present. This powerful in my own body. And this used to it, like this was in me the entire time, just waiting for the right person to bring it out.

And here he is—staring up at me, equal parts awe and appreciation, like he's never felt anything like this before, either. Like we've both been waiting to feel it for a long, long time.

I lean down, meeting his lips and deepening the kiss until we're chest to chest, skin to skin. I can feel the warm, pulsing length of him teasing my entrance, the first ripple of pleasure before a breaking storm. I sink farther down, easing him into me slowly, relishing the hum of his groan into my mouth, and then the sound of my name, "June, June ," like it's something precious, something holy.

I take the full length of him and the feeling of it is so complete, so overwhelming that for a moment, I don't even breathe—for a moment, I'm not fully a person. Like basic biology doesn't apply to me anymore. There's just this feeling, this abstract feeling from a dream now made so sharply, beautifully real that already, I feel it knocking everything I thought I knew out of order. Already, I feel it burning the ground of all the lesser experiences I've had in its path.

I press my hands to his chest, steadying myself as I rock forward and back, adjusting to the fullness. To the sensation of wanting this to last and last and last, in a way I never thought I would. Levi murmurs my name as he cups my face, stroking my cheeks, my jaw, and when I pick up the pace, I let out a gasp, the two of us shuddering so in sync I can't tell whose body it began in or where it ended.

"I had no idea," I say out loud without meaning to. "I had no idea it could feel like this."

His hands are roaming farther down now, landing on my waist, following the rhythm of me as I ride him. I feel him hit that impossibly sweet spot in me and have to close my eyes, have to throw my head back for the way it stuns me, the delicious friction of it, the way it's building so steadily that for once, a resolution isn't an if , but a when .

The feeling is startling enough that I slow my pace, and Levi eases himself up and says, "Can I…"

The pressure of his fingers tightens around my waist and I nod, already shifting before he moves me, settling me down with my back bare on the mattress. There's an excruciating moment when he slides out of me and I am aching with the loss of it, but then he's on top of me, then he's sliding back home, and my back arches up to meet him with a new kind of shock. From this angle, he's hitting that sweet spot and then some. From this angle, I can feel the friction of him so thoroughly that it feels like he's reached into all of me, pulled me apart like something juicy and ripe.

He presses his finger just above my entrance again, and this time there's nothing light or teasing in the pressure; it's constant and relentless and perfect bliss. He picks up the pace and I stare up at him, and the sight of him in total and unmistakable rapture seizes in me, stirs every part of me, the feeling familiar but utterly foreign at the same time.

"I'm gonna—" My breath hitches, overcome with the heat pooling in my stomach, with the dizziness in my head, with the utter, bone-deep disbelief. "I'm gonna…"

Only a handful of times have I ever come from sex. Every true peak and valley I've ever felt has been self-given, in the minutes after sex or whenever I pleasured myself alone. I thought I knew what the buildup felt like—the mild disappointment and milder relief—but that… all that was nothing. A hiccup. A series of blips. Nothing compared to the heat coiling so deeply in me that it is awakening something that's never been touched, something that growls in me low and deep, both satisfied and angry to have been kept waiting so long.

I'm desperate to give in to it. Desperate to know what kind of bone-quaking, earth-shattering feeling might come on the other side, even knowing that I am going to lose myself in a way I have never been lost before.

Levi's next thrusts are slower, deeper. More deliberate. He presses himself into me, his teeth grazing my earlobe just before he says into my ear, "Tell me, June."

The way he says my name just then blazes straight through my body. The tenderness and the heat of it. The possessiveness and the freedom in it—the way I know deep down, further than any of this goes, that he is the only person I ever want to say my name like that. That I could hear it a million more times in that tone of his and it would have the exact same searing, near-damning effect on me that it does right now.

"Oh, god," I say, my words coming out in a strangled gasp. "You're gonna make me come."

His face is burrowed in my neck, his mouth sucking ruthlessly against the sensitive skin, his fingers digging into my shoulders—all of it grounding me so thoroughly into this moment that I am more present than I've ever been in my own body, feeling every inch of myself at once, from my swimming head to my curling toes.

"Then come," he says, a low, gentle command.

Even the buildup doesn't prepare me for how fast it happens at the sound of his words, as if they cast a spell over me. I am undone, powerless against the shuddering ecstasy of it, the need to press myself closer, closer, closer to him as my breath stalls and I let out a cry of pleasure in a pitch so unfamiliar that I don't recognize it as my own even as it comes out of my own throat.

I'm senseless, weightless. There is only the pressure of Levi's hands roaming my body, the heat of my own clinging on to his back, the surge of mutual oblivion. I am somehow both lost and found, somehow outside of my own body but more myself than I've ever been. The peak of my pleasure shudders through my body with a force that borders on violence, a force that seems to command Levi in turn; he lets out a gasp and a groan of pleasure so intense that I don't just hear it but feel it vibrating in his chest against mine, feel it lingering in the air between us, a sound I seize and know I'm going to hold on to forever. A sound that is wholly and spectacularly mine.

I don't even realize I'm gasping his name over and over until he's murmuring mine back. By then, both of our eyes are wide open, staring into each other's, and we're breathing warm, stunned air in the few inches between us. I stare up into eyes that are somehow achingly familiar to me but startlingly new, like some new depth of them has been revealed, and I am finally seeing into the whole of him. As if he has been waiting to show it to me, or maybe I have been waiting to finally see it.

It's love and it's fear and it's everything in between. It's ancient with understanding and fresh with desire. It's everything I feel reflected back at me, anchoring me in this moment so surely, so steadily, that it feels every bit as shocking to my system as everything that came before it.

But this—it's a gentler kind of shock. A quiet, settling kind. Levi holds my face between his hands, using his thumbs to wipe away tears that somehow slid out of me in the heat of our pleasure, ones that are still streaming out of me even now.

"You're okay?" he says.

"I'm…" Everything , I want to say. I'm everything I've never been, everything I didn't even know to ask for, because I didn't know it existed. This feeling of completion. Of no longer knowing the beginning or the end of me, but not minding one bit, because at the borders of it there was still this: a person who knows me. Who looks at me like this. Who holds my face in his hands and stares at me with such unselfconscious, unselfish care that it suddenly feels absurd to me that I spent so much of my life without it. That I settled for the brief, cheap shine of any other kind of pleasure when Levi has brought me the sun.

"More than," I finally say, my eyes tearing up again. "Levi."

He smiles down at me, the kind of smile I've never seen on him before, easy and slow and dazed. Mine.

"June," he says right back.

He brushes the other tears from my cheeks, then slowly pulls himself out of me. We let out twin gasps at the loss of the pressure, aftershocks to the earthquake of us, but his gaze on me never wavers.

After we've cleaned ourselves up, we ease back on top of the tangle of sheets together, his eyes searching mine, two blue flames in the dark. "Do you want me to stay?"

"I want you to stay," I tell him. And I don't just mean tonight. I don't just mean my apartment. I mean here , in Benson Beach, in my heart, where he's never so far that I can't reach out and touch him like this again.

The new smile of his softens. He presses a kiss that starts at my temple, travels to the tip of my nose, to the edges of my lips. With steady hands he repositions us, shifting his body to the mattress so we're still side by side, still linked by his arms wrapped around me as he gently eases the front of his body to the back of mine. I am so warm with the reassuring heat of him that I forget to overthink the intimacy of it the way I always used to do, forget to feel the sound of my own heartbeat, forget to worry about what he's thinking of me, forget to worry about anything at all.

"Good," he murmurs into my ear. "Because there's nowhere else I'd rather be."

The words are a balm for my hammering heart. I press myself farther into him, taking the hand of the arm that's draped over my shoulder and weaving my fingers into his. He squeezes back the way I knew he would now that I'm leaning fully into this innate trust I have in him, the one I have wanted to let myself feel for longer than I can trace back.

I don't mean to close my eyes. I take in a breath to say something—to talk about what just happened. To tell Levi how much this means to me, in case he didn't already understand.

But I feel it in the weight of his arm around me. The understanding, and the calm in it. The way I don't have to be anybody but myself in this moment, because he understands my heart by touch alone.

For years, I waited and waited to fall asleep second so I could have a few moments on my own. Moments to finish myself off or collect myself, to rationalize the disconnect. But Levi pulls me in with his arms and wraps his leg around me, the weight of his upper thigh pressing against mine, and before I know it, my eyelids slide shut. There is nothing to question. Nothing to overthink. I am heavy, I am fulfilled, and for once, I am entirely still.