At the glory of taking him, having him become a part of me, I closed my eyes.

Snap stroked his hands down the backs of my thighs, pulling them up as he went, until he reached my knees. He positioned them high at his sides, all this while he moved inside me.

Snapper Kavanaugh was a gentle lover. He liked slow. He liked taking his time. He liked building things until they were burning bright. He liked to be in the moment, not lost to it. And he guided me there right with him.

So he moved inside me, deliberate, leisurely, making sure I felt it as I took every inch of his length again, then again, and again, all the while watching me.

Finally, he started kissing me and then he worked my neck and he continued to hold the backs of my knees to control me, hold me back from careening into a place he didn’t want us to be, and he made me just feel it. Feel us. His weight. Our bodies’ movements. Our connection surging and retreating. Surging and retreating. Surging.

Through this he tuned to me, built it in me, in both of us, but he knew when he got me there. The kisses became less gentle penetrating strokes of the tongue, light tastes in the mouth. They drew deeper, twining and joining. But it was never ravishing. Snap didn’t tongue fuck my mouth. Snap didn’t fuck at all. With Snap, it was about being fully aware of the togetherness we were sharing and savoring it in every detail.

It was when the kisses heated up that the strokes of his cock got faster, the intensity built. Then he released my knees and let me go to devour him, biting and sucking his neck, his lower lip, sinking my nails into his flesh, digging my heels into his ass to get more of him, and more, and more, more, more until I flew high, anchored by his body, his love, his safety.

Which was what happened, or a version of it, no matter if he was on top, I was on top, I was on my knees, I was against the wall or bent over the back of the couch or whenever and wherever we did it (and once the gates were opened, we did it a lot).

Totally, if Snap was a different kind of guy, the Sting version of a biker, he’d go tantric. For real.

But he wouldn’t make me do that.

And by the time we got there, no…by the time he took me there, he was so wound up by what I gave him, but I sensed it was more what he’d given me, that his explosion was—there was no other way to describe it—immaculate.

Muted in noise, concentrated in feeling, his fierce hold on me, the way he stilled buried deep inside me, it was like he reached out and drew the edges of the very air around us close, forming a little shell where it was only him and me and making love and finally climaxing.

Shy was an amazing lover.

Beck was no slouch either.

But I’d never had this. I didn’t even know this existed.

What I knew now was that I couldn’t live without it. Not just the “it” of it, sharing that “it” with Snapper.

“You good?” he whispered, nuzzling my neck.

Was I good?

The way it was at all times with Snapper, I knew now I’d never be bad.

No matter what life threw at us we’d always make it.

Because he’d make it so we would.

“I’m good,” I whispered back, nuzzling his neck too and holding him to me in all the ways I could, even after he naturally withdrew from inside me.

If he finished on top, he always gave as much of his weight to me as he sensed I could bear, and fortunately with my ribs close to fully healed, I got to take more and more of him.

But once he did that, he didn’t leave me.

This was something else Snap did. I didn’t know if he preferred the sex or the intimacy of snuggle time after (okay, he was a guy so it was the sex, but the other was a close second).

He didn’t rush either.

We didn’t talk much. But we touched. We kissed. We held. We nestled and cuddled and caressed and squeezed.

But even if we didn’t talk much after sex, make no mistake, Snapper Kavanaugh was a talker, and he spoke in two languages, the one where he just used his mouth and the one where he used absolutely everything.

But even good things had to end, so that morning, like every morning we’d had when we took what was between us where it was meant to be, had to end.

“I gotta get going,” he muttered.

“’Kay,” I muttered back.

He pulled his face out of my neck. “You’re dinner shift tonight, yeah?”

I nodded. “Be home around eleven.”

“You still on to go look at that property with me tomorrow?”

I grinned up at him, excited to be in on the ground floor of one of his investments. “Definitely.”

“Good,” he replied, dipped in, gave me a gentle but thorough kiss, then he rolled off of me.

I shifted to my side and watched him walk naked to the bathroom.

He had his Chaos emblem tat on his back and the Chaos scales with its reaper drifting up from one plate of the scales, the blood dripping from the other that I knew all the men had wherever they wanted to put them, his was along his ribs on his right side.

And down his left side, ribs to waist, in a simple, small, no-nonsense font, he had Henley’s Invictus inscribed.

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.