What are we doing here?

I come up for air, feeling a flutter of insecurity. It’s too much. Too intense, suspended here in the darkness like this. I look around for distraction, my eyes falling on the guitar.

“Show me how to play something.” I reach for it, feeling the unfamiliar shape of worn wood and taut strings. “Teach me one of your songs.”

Dex breaks into a smile. “Sure you don’t want to pick something good?” he says, self-deprecating. He shifts me, so I’m sitting in his lap, his arms around me, my back pressed to his chest.

“Hush, I heard you just now. It was great.”

“That’s just something I’m messing around with.” Dex sighs, and I feel the motion against my back. “I don’t know if it’ll be something.”

“It should be.”

He slides his hands over my bare arms, all the way down to my hands. I shiver from the touch as he adjusts the guitar, moving it into position with one hand on the neck, and the other resting against the strings. Dex intertwines his fingers so our hands move as one, and then strums a chord, a low, deep note that echoes through the room. Another, until we’ve picked out a familiar melody I’ve heard on the radio a dozen times.

“You miss it, playing,” I say quietly, leaning back into his embrace. “I could see it, when you were up on-stage.”

Dex strums my fingers across another chord, moving our other hands to tighten across the strings at the neck.

“I do miss it,” he admits. “When I was up there…” He pauses, but I already know what he means. It’s where he belongs, where he’s most himself.

I ease out of his lap, curling my legs under me so I can watch him. “What’s stopping you?” I ask softly. “It’s not just Connor, is it?”

Dex swallows. “I want it too bad,” he answers, hoarse. “I can’t take the risk, watch things go to shit the way they did before.”

“But it’s different now,” I argue.

He shakes his head. “I felt the same, on stage. That hunger, the rush. It’s just like before, and I can’t go back to that, Alicia. You don’t know what it did to me—to the people I love. I won’t do it again.”

“No, you won’t.” I take his hand, folding it against my chest. “Because you’re not the same man anymore. You’ve changed, you’ve learned from what happened. It would be different this time.”

I can see the turmoil in his eyes. How much he wants to believe me—but how terrified he is that he’ll fall back into the old scene again, with all of its damage and excess.

“You don’t have to decide now,” I murmur, lifting his hand to my lips. I kiss it, every callus and knot, every soft inch of his palm. “Just think about it. You need to have faith in who you are now, the man you’ve become.” I pause, meeting his eyes again. “Because I do.”

Dex stares back, his gaze glittering with emotion. “How did you find me?” he whispers.

“You found me.” I correct him, smiling at the memory. “You found me, and you kissed all my troubles away.”

He reaches for me then, sliding his hand around my cheek to pull me into his kiss. Our lips find each other, our mouths drink in the taste, our tongues slide over each other in a slow, hot caress.

I moan against him, and then his hands are on me. His body. This time, it’s not fierce or raw, but effortlessly tender. I slip beneath him, arching my body up to cradle him between my thighs, losing myself in his kisses as his hands rove slowly over my bare skin, teasing my nipples, swirling over my trembling stomach. My shirt falls away, his jeans are discarded on the floor. The moments melt together, a deep breathless haze of gasps and movement and need until I’m shuddering under his exquisite touch, crying out at the feel of his wet mouth on my breast; the hardness of his body rocking against the ache between my thighs.

He stills, poised above me. I clutch at him, panting, but he holds still, slowly stroking his head against my entrance until I’m crying out for more: everything in me spread wide open and waiting for him to fill me, consume me, complete me.

Dex cups my cheek, holding my gaze as he slowly slides into me, inch by gorgeous inch.

Oh god.

I can’t breathe, the feel of him is so good, surging deep inside me. He’s everywhere, every part of me, and when he starts to move, so slow, too slow, I hear myself whimper, rising up to meet him, losing track of where he ends and I begin. I fall deep, deeper into the velvet darkness of his eyes and his blazing touch and God, the thick, relentless drive of his cock, so slow I’m gasping, writhing in his arms. But Dex won’t break, he doesn’t give in, just continues his maddening rhythm, igniting my blood with white-hot fever, rocking against me, driving me all the way to the edge.

“Dex,” I gasp his name, shuddering beneath him. “Oh God, please…”

He slowly plunges into me again, so deep I lose myself. I’m nothing but nerves and feeling and whispers and skin. God, the slide of his body, the hard rasp of friction where our bodies meet, pressing deeper, stardust and electricity, stringing my body taut and shimmering in the dark. He shifts his hips, rolling into me with a new shudder of intensity, and now I’m sobbing, clutching at his shoulders, digging my nails as I beg for the end, the beginning of everything.

I can’t take it, his dark stare burning into me. I surrender, to everything he is as he thrusts inside me one last time, hard and deep, and oh, I fall apart, spinning out into the darkness as the pleasure breaks through me in a crescendo of sensation. I cling to him, lost and reeling, and I wonder,