Thanks to my team and all of you. I want to put you all at ease a little - Bella arrived at the cabin in September, and the prologue states she's been there a year before The Husband shows up. It's Thanksgiving now, so like I mentioned the other day, they have some happy times ahead of them. Which means, so do we! Yay!
He says so much in only three words.
I'm yours, Bella.
I know he means more than just tonight.
I know because I feel it too. I feel it in his touch, his lips, his kiss. I feel it in my bones, the way I had been left broken with missing pieces he knew how to find and repair.
We're not hesitant as we cross this line, never once looking back to see the road we've taken to get here to this moment. I say goodbye to the pain, the tears, the fear, and I focus on the way my blood tinges with fire beneath the surface. I lose myself in his kiss as we shed the last layers between us, in the way he rolls us so he's on his back and I'm draped across his body.
"Show me," Edward breathes into my mouth. "And I'll follow."
I'll never forget the blast of color, of life, that flashes before my eyes the moment I sink onto him, sheathing him in the barest and most vulnerable part of me.
He leans back against the headboard of my bed, his hands on my hips as he watches me lower myself onto him. Never rushing. Never pressing. Just waiting.
Waiting for me to realize this is what I was waiting for. Waiting for me to show him I'm okay—that I'm ready to press forward.
I grip his shoulders for leverage, to tether me and remind me this is real and not some dream I've made up to combat my loneliness.
He's real. This is real.
And I'm, we're, insatiable.
I probably stay still for longer than Edward can take, but I don't care. I savor how he fills me completely, my muscles hugging and wrapping around him like they've been waiting for him, too.
He's still watching, his eyes never leaving where we're connected, and other than his hands that wander over my stomach, my back, my breasts, he's utterly still beneath me.
That is until I rock my hips gently as if dipping a toe in the pool to see if the temperature of the water is something I can handle. Once I move, his hands come down and grip my hips, pushing me down onto him as he naturally pushes himself up.
The water may be too hot, but there's no way I'm letting it stop me.
"Fuck, Bella," he groans as if apologizing for almost taking over the reins he's given me.
Because we both know sex with my husband wasn't about pleasure — it was all about control. He got off to the power he had over me and never to the power of me.
Which is why Edward lets me set the pace, giving me the control in case it ever becomes too much or too fast for me to take at once.
But right now, as I take him all the way to the hilt and push us apart, only to do it all over again, I think the pace is absolutely perfect.
Too perfect.
He holds me in place with one arm wrapped around my hips, his other hand in a frenzy to trace every area of me he can reach. I lose my breath as each new stroke brings me a little closer to him but also a little closer to a completely different world.
"More," I gasp, reduced to one-word demands as I feel my body begin to coil around him. My head tossed behind me, I arch into his mouth as his lips discover every inch of skin, his teeth and tongue making me dig my nails into his chest as I slam myself down onto him with a force strong enough to tap the headboard of the bed against the wall. "More."
His lips fall from my shoulder, his hands coming down to hold my hips in place, and then he tilts me forward into his chest so he's thrusting upwards as hard as he can.
I find his mouth again, our cries lost against parted lips, until the only sound I can make is his name over and over again as I'm shattering around him. The frenzied pull of my hips onto his and the guttural groan leaving his lips tells me that, he too, has catapulted into another realm at the hand of the other.
And when our breathing returns to normal and the last of the day's light slips into the darkness, my last thought before I fade to sleep is how I've never had as many things to be thankful for until this Thanksgiving.