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“Wasn’t planning to.”

“Don’t talk, don’t stop to talk, why are you–” I press my tongue flat against him and he loses the sentence entirely. His fist bangs the mattress once, helpless. “God. Okay. Yes. Talking is fine. Talking is – there – encouraged–”

I open him up with my mouth until he’s begging in fragments, then with slick fingers, one and then two, curling exactly where I know to curl, and he clenches around me and moans something that started life as my name. He’s rocking back to meet my hand now, wrecked and greedy and completely without shame, and the sight of him – Preston York, the most composed man in any room, coming apart on my fingers with his hair ruined and his knuckles white in the sheets – is doing things to me I couldn’t chart if I tried.

“Now,” he gasps. “Luke. Now. I mean it, I have never meant anything more, I will put it in writing–”

“Turn back over.”

“Make up your mind–”

I flip him myself. He lands laughing, breathless, pupils blown wide, and pulls me down by the jaw and kisses me deep and desperate while I slick my length and settle between his thighs.

“Look at me,” I say.

He looks at me.

And then I push into him, slow, and everything stops.

His breath. Mine. The whole city, as far as I can tell. He’s wrapped around me, heat and grip and the long line of his throat as his head tips back, and I hold still – all the way still, deep as I can go – because this is the part I’d keep if I could only keep one thing. Preston, wordless. Preston, undone. His eyes find mine in the dark and there’s no performance left anywhere in him, and nobody sees this but me. That was the vow under the vows. The pudding, the socks, the unconditional everything – all of it was code for this: I will be the only one for you, and you the only one for me.

“Okay?” I ask, against his mouth.

“So far past okay.” His hands slide down my back, grip hard. “Move. Please. Move.”

I move. Slow first, long and deep, drawing it out until he’s cursing me in two languages – he only has one; he’s improvising – and then faster, because he’s begging for it and I’ve never once been able to refuse him anything he asked for in that voice. We find the rhythm we’ve spent two years perfecting, the headboard keeping time against the wall like it’s finally learned the tempo, and he’s loud now, gloriously loud, a running litany of yes and harder and right there, don’t you dare stop–

“Not stopping.”

“Promise–”

“Promise.”

Sweat and breath and his legs locked around my waist, his heels driving me deeper, my name falling out of him in pieces. I know his body the way I know my own hands – the angle that makes him arch and swear, the pace that makes him claw at my shoulders, the exact moment his breath goes ragged and everything in him gathers and tightens and asks–

“Luke – I’m–”

“I know. Look at me. I want to watch you.”

He looks at me. He comes apart with my name in his mouth and his nails in my back – spilling hot between us, untouched, striping both our stomachs, shaking, magnificent – clenching around me so hard my vision whites out. I follow him over half a breath behind, buried as deep as I can go, emptying into him in long pulses with his name on my teeth and the whole weight down at last.

The bed survives. Barely.

After – his heart still going hard against my ribs, the two of us warm and sticky and tangled in bed – his hand finds the centre of my chest. Fingers threading into my chest hair.

Then he lifts his head just far enough to survey the damage – the mess cooling on both our stomachs, the sheet half off the mattress, the general crime scene of us – and makes a deeply satisfied sound.

“You realise,” he says, “if I were a woman, I’d have been pregnant since the honeymoon. Long since. We are extremely good at this. Your mother would have her grandchild and both blankets would be finished and we’d already be onto the next.”

“Can we not talk about Mamá right now? Besides, if we had one kid either you’d be getting your tubes tied or I’d be getting snipped. I don’t think I could handle two of them.”

“Noted,” Preston replies, before letting out a yawn and snuggling into my chest. “Goodnight, I love you.”

“I love you too,” I say, leaning down to press a kiss onto his forehead before laying back and feeling my eyes grow heavy.

Moving day is a military operation, and the general we get isn’t the one we expected.

Mamá arrives at 08:00 with a label maker, three rolls of packing tape, Elena, and a system. Every box gets a room, a number, and a contents list in her small, exact handwriting. She labels a box KITCHEN – 4 OF 9 – KNIVES, DO NOT LET JAX CARRY, and when Jax arrives twenty minutes later and reaches for it, she takes it out of his hands without a word and gives him the couch instead.