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“Yes,” she said. “Please.”

He undid it slowly and eased the zipper down, and she lifted her hips to help him, and then there was nothing left between his hand and her at all. He touched her the way he had kissed her, patient and attentive, watching her face, learning what made her breath break and doing it again, and again, unhurried, like a man who had all night and intended to use every minute of it. She held on to his shoulders. She stopped trying to be quiet. When it happened, it took her completely by surprise, rolling through her in long, shuddering waves, his name coming out of her in pieces, and he held her through every second of it and kissed her temple and murmured something low that she would realize later was only her name, over and over.

Somewhere in there, the rest of their clothes ended up on the floor.

When she could think again, she found his jaw with her hand and said, “Wait. Do you have...”

“Yes.” He reached down for his jeans on the floor without taking his eyes off her. Then, a little rueful: “Since about October.”

She laughed, helpless, and he kissed her through it, and there was the small, ordinary sound of a wrapper, and then nothing about the night was ordinary at all.

When he finally moved over her, settling between her thighs, she reached up and pulled him down to her, not because she was impatient, just because she needed him closer, needed the full weight of him, the reality of him, and he came willingly, his forearms braced on either side of her, his face close to hers.

He looked at her.

“Are you sure?” he asked. Quiet. His voice still rough but his eyes careful, the careful that was all about her, about making sure.

She held his face in both hands.

“I have been sure,” she said, “for months.”

Something moved through his expression, the weight of it, the truth of it, and then he kissed her once, deeply, and she felt him against her, and then inside her, and she made a sound into his shoulder that she felt him absorb, his whole body responding to it.

He moved slowly at first. Learning this too, the same way he learned everything, with attention and patience and none of the hurry that made things feel disposable. She felt every moment of it. The warmth of him, the solid certainty of him, the way he watched her face and adjusted and paid attention in the way that was only his, that she understood now was just how he did everything that mattered to him.

She was not going to survive this man.

She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him closer and he groaned, low in his chest, and the sound of it moved through her like something essential.

His pace built slowly, deliberate, him watching her the whole time, her name in his mouth occasionally, just Allison, like a question and an answer at once. She answered every time. With her hands in his hair and her mouth against his jaw and eventually with sounds she hadn’t known she made, sounds that came from somewhere below conscious thought.

“You feel...” he started, and didn’t finish. He pressed his forehead to hers and said her name instead, like that was the end of the sentence.

“Don’t stop,” she heard herself say. “Shane. Don’t you dare stop.”

He didn’t.

“Look at me,” he said. Quiet but rough. A request that was also a little bit a command.

She looked at him.

At the face she’d been looking at since August. The face that had gotten better every single time. The face that was looking back at her right now like she was the only thing in the world worth looking at.

She felt something crest, the heat of him, the warmth of it, four months of almost finally given over, and she made a sound that she felt rather than heard.

“Come with me,” he said against her hair. Low and certain. Please.

She gave in completely.

He was right there with her (she felt it, the way he said her name one more time, fractured and certain at once) and it was. There was only one word for it.

Yes.

* * *

Later, the candles burned to stubs, the storm gone, the cottage deep in the quiet of December midnight, she lay with her head on his chest.

His arm was around her. His heartbeat under her ear, steadying, the composed evenness returning the way it always did with Shane, everything settling back into itself. She lay in it and felt, in her chest, something she’d been waiting for without knowing the shape of it until now.