He kisses each spot, licking and sucking until my skin shines, and I’m on the verge of screaming. He drags my hand up so I can feel each small indentation. “Touch them,” he says, dragging his teeth down over my shoulder, to my arm. “Tell me how it feels when I lick you.”

The tiny grooves remind me of the rope marks, but are more intimate somehow. These red marks that tell the room and the sky and the swollen moon outside for only a tiny trip of time: I belong to him. My body is his.

I don’t want them to disappear, and can tell he doesn’t, either, returning to the first one, pushing his possession back into my skin.

I need his body pressed to mine, covering my breasts so the puff of his breath across the peaks won’t make me cry out, and I want the wet, soothing slide of his tongue over the sensitive bite marks. I feel cracked open, devoured and hollowed out, filled with a desire so consuming and deep I can sense how warm and soft I am beneath him, ready to pull him down onto me. Into me.

He sucks at me while his hands are busy elsewhere and I hear the crinkle of a condom wrapper and the wet sound of its lubricant as he rolls the latex down his length.

“Tell me if it’s too much,” he says into my skin as he positions himself and then presses his chest to mine, sliding into me in a long, smooth stroke.

I might be screaming or cursing or begging—I don’t know. My skin is aching for friction but terrified of it all the same. It’s a divine torture. The bite marks pulse and heat, and my chest is so wet Finn slides across me, groaning as he moves in and out. Oh God. The drag of his skin across my breasts burns and aches, pleasures and soothes, and when he lifts his chest away I need it back. Pulling him down over me I beg for faster.

Please . . .

“Tell me how it feels,” he rasps.

“It feels . . . it feels . . .” My breasts are pulsing with every heartbeat and so sensitive I’m sure he could drag his tongue across the peak and—

Finn bends and presses his flattened tongue just below my nipple and drags it up just as he shoves in deep and begins fucking me in these tiny perfect jabs. I cry out, clutching him.

It feels like I’m yours.

His tongue soothes the burn but makes me arch, makes me beg and beg for his hips to move faster and his mouth to make my breasts wetter and for him to please

please

please

please make me come.

He makes a noise against my skin right when I jerk beneath him, gasping. His sound is half laugh, half thrilled groan and in a flash he draws my hands up over my head, pinning me, working me with his hips and his mouth until I’m thrashing.

I’m filling with pressure, climbing, skin flushing hot and wet, and then I’m screaming his name, consumed by the silvery, pulsing of pleasure until I can’t differentiate any particular touch. It’s only Finn over me and the pleasure tearing through me and his soft hoarse sounds of encouragement: “That’s it. That’s it. Oh, fuck me, you’re coming. Oh fuck.”

It’s strange to lose one’s mind, but it’s what he does to me—in these moments of wild bliss, when I’ve just come and he’s losing himself in me—everything else in the world disappears. The stars could fall, the ocean could take over the land, and I wouldn’t even realize it until long after Finn slows his hips and runs his hand up my leg and along my side, until he reaches my jaw, cupping it and telling me he’s never wanted anything the way he wants me.

IN FACT, IF the world ended tonight, I suspect we wouldn’t hear about it until morning. Finn gets out of bed only long enough to get rid of the condom and come back with a wet cloth, wiping the lubricant from my skin so he can do some of the most wicked things with his mouth between my legs.

His tongue laps at me, he grazes me with his teeth and growls like a wild animal, spreading my legs apart with one hand gripping my thigh, fingering me with the other. I feel the full depraved meaning of the phrase eating her out. He is devouring.

And then, with his eyes pinned up the length of my body, he slides his fingers lower and does something so unexpected, the only way he knows I like it is the way I scream when I come harder against his mouth than I think I ever have before.

Finn kisses my thigh, my hip, my navel, rasping, “Fucking hell.”

And then he pulls me down the mattress, setting my feet on the floor so he can bend me over the bed.

“You sore yet, you dirty fucking girl?” he asks quietly, tearing a new condom packet open with his teeth.

I turn and look at him over my shoulder, lifting my chin in challenge. “No.”

“Good.”

Because when he positions himself and pushes in so deep I collapse against the bed, I know he’s going to fuck me, dirty and hard.

It’s Vegas all over again: rowdy, with his palm on my ass and his other hand digging so hard into my hip I look forward to the tiny bruises I know I’ll find tomorrow. But I finally recognize Vegas for what it was: It wasn’t his “usual” stranger fuck, Finn being domineering and rough. It was Finn unbound, Finn laid bare with me, his perfectly matched stranger. All at once I know with someone else he would have been careful that first night—slower-handed, softer words, easy, rolling hips—but with me he couldn’t be.

He could only do rowdy because he felt what I felt: that whip-crack unleashing that comes when you meet the person who frees you.

Finn lowers us to the floor, running his hand down my sweat-slicked spine, and then I feel his own sweaty chest press into my back as he curls over me, entering me again and immediately riding me fast and smooth, his greedy hands cupping my breasts.

He’s insatiable on the floor, against the wall, back up on the bed with my legs on his shoulders. It’s like this, under the firm touch of his fingers, that I come apart with a scream and his teeth bared against my ankle. I can tell he’s close to his own release but he slows his thrusts, humming into my leg.

“What do you want me to do?” I ask, running my hand down his sweaty chest and lowering my legs to his sides.

“It feels fucking amazing,” he says through heavy breaths, bending to kiss me. “I want to come, but I also don’t.”

“There’s no rush,” I purr, pulling him down so his chest presses all along mine.

“I got a taste of you bare, earlier,” he admits quietly. “Do you have any idea how good you feel without this fucking condom? I can’t stop thinking about how warm and sweet you were.”

How is it possible I’d forgotten what we’d done in the car? A mixture of longing and anxiety shadows my thoughts.