RUSH (City Lights, #3)(104)

Noah groaned, tilting his head back in the purest expression of ecstasy I’d ever seen, and gripped my hips hard, his fingers digging into my flesh. I rolled my hips slowly, torturously slowly, and bent over him. I brushed my lips against his with feather-light licks, until he uttered feral growl of frustration. He tangled one fist in my hair and crushed my mouth to his, and I felt a surge of heat race through me at the rawness of his kiss.

When he broke for air, I sat up, my hands on his chest, my back arched, taking him in and out of me in deliberate, languid movements, until he obliterated my slow pace with his own bucking hips. I writhed. I lost myself, and then Noah sat up, his mouth on mine again, and I immediately moved to wrap my legs around his waist.

I’d never been this close to another man. His skin was flush with mine, there was no air, no space between us. I was bound to him every way as moved in tandem that was at once rough and lustful, and yet more intimate and tender than anything I could have imagined.

His hands clutched me, lifted me onto his thrusts. I rolled my hips forward each time, taking him so deep inside me I wanted to cry.

When my climax came, it ripped through me until I was nearly dizzy. I heard my voice scream his name and then I fell against him, my head on his shoulder, ecstasy crashing over me and through me and leaving me drained.

But his need was still burning hot, and he took my face in his hands and kissed me, as if I had drowned and needed resuscitating. And it worked because his tongue in my mouth, demanding and desperate, started everything over again. I became as hungry for him as I had been moments before.

I kissed him back, tilting my head to deepen that kiss, savoring the taste of him as he bucked beneath me, thrusting up as I came down. But it wasn’t enough. He wrapped his arms around me and rolled me to my back, and I cried out at the beautiful sensation of him sliding even deeper into me than I’d thought possible.

Like this, he let go, his gorgeous body pistoning against mine, so perfectly rough and hard. My body was still throbbing from before and the pleasure began to build in me all over again.

“Are you close?” Noah managed. “Yes, I can feel that you are. You’re right there…”

I couldn’t speak because he was right. Another orgasm rocketed through me a split second later and he groaned as if it were his release. It was what he’d been waiting for; he’d held back for me, and now let go, shuddering against me as his own climax surged through him and left him heavy and sated.

“I don’t want to ever be apart again,” I said, even before we’d caught our breath.

He shook his head. “I don’t either. But if we were, I know I’d find my way back to you. Always.”

And I knew then why he’d left. To make his words true. To create a partnership between us where there was nothing left in our way.

Love, real love, wasn’t empty, grasping hands, or lies that felt like truths. And it wasn’t perfect or neat or always easy. It was a rising sun on a new day.

It was endless possibility.





Epilogue


Noah

November 1st

My birthday. Charlotte leads me up the winding, leaf-choked path, the same that I walked alone four years ago. My hand is on her arm but she walks slowly. It’s dark. Not yet dawn. I can feel her muscles tense under my fingers. She’s nervous in these strange surroundings, but she doesn’t stop. She’s brave, my Charlotte.

We walk to the peak and I feel the open air. It’s hot and sticky, even though the sun has yet to rise. But it will and she will be ready when it does.

I sit on the stony ground, my knees drawn up, while Charlotte crouches beside me. I hear the click of her violin case and my chest tightens in anticipation. And love.

God, I love her. I love Charlotte with every fiber of my being. I love her so much that the thought of going one more day without asking her to be my wife seems ridiculous; there’s a small ring box tucked into my luggage back at the hotel. I know we’re young, but like a wise man once told me, certainty is its own kind of peace. And I can ask her now because the anger and hate and raging sense of injustice have all been laid to rest. They will never rise up again to hurt her. I did what I set out to do and made myself someone who could be her partner in all things. I’ve left all the bitterness behind.

My life is very different from the one I’d led before. When I was first told that I would be blind forever, my mind concocted a list of things I would never see or do again. Now, I see beauty in other ways: I hear it in Charlotte’s laugh, her voice, her music. I smell it in a burnt match, in ground coffee, at a barbecue at my parents’ house. I feel it when I touch Charlotte, when I hold her and make love to her; when I dance with her, her head tucked under my chin, so perfectly…I feel it in the braille I’m painstaking learning as I type my book, the book I dictated while making my arduous way across Europe.

I’m writing a memoir. Is there a more pretentious word? I doubt it, but that’s what it is. A memoir of my accident and everything that’s come after. Of struggling across Europe on my own, and of traveling across the world with Charlotte, as she plays to sold-out houses in gilded concert halls. Of our life together that is fuller and more rich than anything I’d known before the accident.

Yuri wants my book and I may give it to him, but right now I don’t care. It doesn’t even have a title yet but it has a dedication. To Charlotte. Of course, to Charlotte. Without her, I’m hunched in a musty room, listening to other people read and dying a little bit inside every day. I’d like to think I might have found my own way out of that pain and grief, but I don’t want to think about it. I don’t need to. I don’t have to curse and scream and shake my angry fist at the big empty sky. Not anymore.