It wasn't until I was halfway across campus that I realized I hadn't brought anything with me from my dorm.

There was no way that I was going back to face Franny yet again, however, so there I stood in the middle of the quad with indecisiveness playing across the features of my face.

My plan to have an easy semester away from home filled with studying and peace was quickly going up in flames. There was no way that I was going back until Franny apologized for what she had said.

It was hard enough to cut Colby out, especially after all the past history we had together, but at least I still had Franny. At least I still had her parents, their support in helping me with my father, but now?

Now it was as if I was just an outsider peeking in on the fringe of their family, nothing but a nuisance of a friend that the both of them had just been waiting to dump out of their lives for good and this was just the most convenient excuse to do so.

The late afternoon sun was blaring down on my skin, sweat prickling at my temples as I stared back at my dorm and the football house only a few yards away.

The decision was made for me as my feet started moving of their own accord, some intrinsic and invisible tug yanking me towards him, towards Kalen.

I didn't know where it had come from, this connection between us that was so powerful it knocked the breath out of me.

A physical connection was easier to explain--because of course he was gorgeous in every definition of the word, all dark hair and smoldering eyes, angular cheekbones and thick corded muscle that roped around every inch of his body.

It was easy to dismiss this undefinable attachment that had grown for him in the short amount of time that we had known each other as just something that was purely physical, lust and desire born of an affection I held for his body, for his face and his rainwater eyes.

The harder pill to swallow, the more honest truth...well, was the fact that even though our past was interconnected with darkness and pain, with suffering and abandonment, it didn't change the fact that it connected us all the same.

So yes, I strode toward Kalen without an ounce of doubt in my mind that even though I might not have loved him quite yet, he was well on his way to burrowing into my heart, where he would no doubt remain until all of his presence was eradicated, be that by heartbreak or indifference, I couldn't know.

I didn't knock on the door of the glorified frat house. I didn't meet the eyes of his fellow teammates as I took the stairs two at a time up to his room.

I didn't even have to announce myself, because his door was propped wide open, his body perched on the edge of his bed, his head and his hands with his dark charcoal hair splayed through his fingertips as he stared down at the ground.

"Kalen..."

His head jerked up in alarm as if he hadn't quite heard me right, as if he couldn't believe that I was actually there.

And, God, he was so fucking beautiful, something like a tragic wonder crossing his features as he looked me over, those navy blue eyes so full of storms and strife pinned on me as if looking away meant that I would disappear.

There was a charged silence in the room, as if our breaths intermingling were the pitter patter of raindrops in the beginning of a deluge, the electricity surging between our bodies a lightning strike ready and poised to make land fall there on the ground in his bedroom.

I couldn't be sure which of us moved first, but one moment he was on the bed and the next he wasn't.

One moment I was standing in that threshold between the hallway and his room, and the next the door was shut and I was pressed against it, his breath sweeping my strands of hair away from my face as he peered down at me, his full attention and focus unwavering and wholly on me.

"Gracie..."

His voice was raw, thick with an emotion I couldn't have deciphered before that day, but after his rushed confession, suddenly it all made sense.

"So...love, huh?"

His throat bobbed, the only sign of his nerves as he placed two hands on either side of my head on the door behind me, my body shaking slightly beneath his as he pressed himself into me.

I could feel him everywhere, his stomach pressing into my chest, his leg wedging between my own, his heart racing and thudding so heavily against my skin.

"Yes," he said so fearlessly, not an ounce or figment of doubt or reluctance melting into his tone.

"Does that bother you? That I'm already there?"

"W-why would it bother me?"

I cursed my voice for shaking, for the stutter that he caused in me.

The intensity of his dark stare pinned me to the spot, a dull roar filling my ears as the full force of his attention was placed directly on me, on where those words had just spilled from my lips.

"Are you there yet?"

My head dropped forward, thudding against his chest as my hands went to grasp him around the waist.

"I don't know, I know that I want you. I know that I want to be with you. I know that, for some reason I can't figure out, I'm not freaked out by the fact that you are already there. I'm not freaked out by the fact that I can see myself almost there too, that I can picture myself telling you those words even though I've never said them to anyone else before."

"I haven't either."

His confession had me staring up at him in shock, eyes wide as I took in his demeanor, the calm and steady way in which he brought a hand to my cheek and caressed it, his touch treating me as if I was something fragile to him, something precious.

"You haven't what?"

"Said those words to anyone else before, not in the romantic way. Not in the way that I feel it with you--it's different, it's so fucking different and I can't figure out why, can't figure out how it happened so quickly, but what I do know is that I wouldn't take it back, not for anything."

His eyes shimmered in the golden shafts of late afternoon sun that came bearing through the parted curtains of his room, transforming his irises into the glittering blue surface of a still pond on a cloudless day.

But he looked at me like I was the sun--hard to gaze upon for too long, but impossible to tear your eyes away.

Just like before, I couldn't tell which of us moved first-- it was like the both of us knew what would happen before our minds could catch up with us.

His movements were like water, his touch a languid, leisurely brush on my skin as his lips met mine.

This Kiss wasn't like those that had come before it. It held all of that same passion, that heat, but instead of the frantic overwhelming need to consume one another, there was nothing but mollifying relief, like it was the soothing balm pressed against a never ending ache that had finally found a cure.

All the hurt from my fight with Franny dissipated in a cloud carried away on a wind sent by his hands as they wound around my knees and pressed me up against the door.

The ever-present aching guilt from how I had left things with my father on the phone was swallowed up by a thick wave of serene resolute pleasure, my mind finally loosening its tight grip on my grief and my anger and my shame to finally allow me to feel the emotions that I had cut myself off from feeling in the first place.

Because why should I have had to care for so long with no one ever caring for me? Why should I have had to carry those burdens, the responsibilities of a parent at such a young age and never have the opportunity to let them go, to allow myself to finally open myself up to another person and just live in the moment?

My mouth opened on a keening whimper as Kalen's hands dipped beneath my shirt and his fingers brushed the sensitive spot beneath my bra, his thumbs pushing past the material to cup me in his hands.

This was what I had been waiting for, this sensation of exploding beneath another's touch, this desperation of need and want that I had never felt like I deserved to have.

My hands scraped through his hair, pressing myself ever closer against him, my thighs clamping around his waist as a pulsing need chanted through my mind begging for more, more, more.

I moved my hands underneath his shirt to scrape my nails down his back, earning me a slight hiss from his lips.

"Fuck, Gracie."

Then, he busied his lips with something else for a while, trailing paths of wet kisses up and down the length of my neck as I bared it to him.

My shirt ended up somewhere across the room, but I didn't care at that moment. I didn't care about anything except for getting him across the room and onto that bed.

His hands clenched my thighs tightly as he strode away from the door and did just exactly what I wanted him to do.

Kalen watched me with the stillness of a predator as he placed me on the bed before him and slowly eased back from me, unbuttoning my pants as he did so.

His eyes were carved granite as he took in the sight of me before him splayed out and wanting, waiting, desperate for him.

"I want you, Gracie. All of you."

I knew what he was asking.

I was nodding my head before I even knew what I was doing, because I knew what this was going to lead to when I watched through that door, I knew it as sure as the set of my bones when I saw him sitting there like that, with his head and his hands contemplating the words that he had said to me.

I knew what this was leading to the first time he ever kissed me, the first time he touched me. It was all just a waiting game, and I had done my waiting.

A breath of air exploded from his mouth as he saw my expression, my easy acceptance, the eager nod of my head up and down.

He was on me in an instant, a man obsessed, a man desperate, in need.

A man that I could say was all mine.

He unclasped the bra at my chest, throwing it away along with my shirt somewhere on the other side of the room, his eyes feasting upon me like I was nothing but his own special meal crafted specifically for him by a personal chef.

And then his mouth was there instead of his eyes, lapping at the sensitive skin there as my eyes rolled back in pure ecstasy and I writhed against him.

I divested him of his shirt, my hands traveling down to unbuckle his pants just as he was eager to do the same for me, his mouth never leaving my skin as a trail of heated desire flushed all throughout my body.

Soon we were both clad in only our underwear, the sweet torturous touch of fabric the only thing separating the two of us from what we were about to do.

His fingers rested there, right there, exactly where I wanted him to be, but he stilled in his movements and looked up at me, his eyes a molten fire that was so in contrast to the waves and blue rain that I usually saw in them.

"Is this what you want?"

"Yes..."

My answer was ground out of me, a whimper of a sound disguised as a word.

He chuckled against my ear, desire incarnate, a master of pleasure and the dual edged knife of precision.

His fingers slipped beneath the fabric of my underwear and I inhaled a gasp of shocked air as he met no resistance when plunging them inside of me, both of them at once,

"Fuck, you're soaked. Is all of this for me?"

I couldn't hold it in, not as the moan worked its way up through my chest and escaped through my mouth, which was answer enough for him.

He pressed his fingers in to the hilt, but as another sound threatened to carreen out of my mouth, he placed his lips there instead, swallowing the sound whole.

He was hard against me, thick and hot and wanting and waiting, and I was desperate to feel him against me as my hands went to his hips and pushed his underwear down, the last remaining barrier between us relinquishing as he sprung free and my eyes widened at his size as a tiny bolt of fear clanged through me.

"See something you like?"

I gulped, the sheer size of him surely enough to rip me in half. Right? I wasn't all that experienced in these things.

Kalen must have noticed that hesitation on my face because he pulled back and kept my cheek, staring down at me with an earnest love I had never felt before shrouding his features.

He looked at me with adoration, and every part of it immediately relaxed at that loving glance.

Because he would stop, he would reign it all in for another day so long as I was comfortable.

Which was why I steeled my nerves and gazed back up at him with all the emotion and vulnerability I could muster and smiled at him.

"Are you sure it's going to fit?"

He returned that loving smile with a hint of mischief coloring his features.

"You can take it."

I shivered at his words and inhaled softly as he yanked down my panties in one swift movement, and then suddenly there were no barriers between us at all, physical or emotional, and I was as bare before him as I could ever be.

And I wasn't terrified of it at all, not even as he lined himself up to my entrance, slicked himself with my wetness, pressed his lips to mine and slowly pushed inside.

I gasped and whimpered as the pressure borderlined on pain, but Kalen kissed me gently on the lips, on my cheeks, on my forehead, and continued that slow, agonizing pace inside.

My walls contracted around him as he met some resistance and I hissed in pain.

"Put your hands on my back and squeeze as hard as you can if it hurts. Scratch me, cut me up, do your worst."

I nodded as words evaded me and concentrated on breathing steadily through the pain, even as a sensation of a release tightened and then, all at once, let go.

And then he was embedded inside of me to the hilt, the stretch of him a burn and a pressure one in the same.

I hadn't realized I had been clutching his back so tightly to me that his skin gave way beneath my fingernails and I was terrified to look to see if I have drawn blood.

"You're doing so well, baby, just give it a little time to get used to it."

His voice was hot gravel as it rumbled against my ear and I trembled beneath him as his weight pressed me into the mattress, as his hand cradled the back of my neck and tilted me up to his mouth, to where he feasted on my lips like a dying man's final meal.

It was exquisite torture, waiting for what I knew was to come next, but then one of his hands snaked between our bodies and found that cluster of nerves at the apex of my thighs and suddenly the colors behind my eyelids were too bright, exploding with neon and effervescent clarity.

My body arched toward that touch, and in turn pressed him inside even deeper than he was before, against an inner part of me that had me begging for him to touch it just one more time.

"Look at you, squirming on my cock already. I knew you would be so good for me."

He stared down at me, his dark hair hanging over his forehead into his eyes as he withdrew himself from me and then thrusted forward, a choked cry falling from my lips as he hit that spot right where I wanted him, and then he was doing it again, his fingers never leaving that spot in between my thighs that had me seeing stars.

It was all at once too much and not enough, a cool burn and a pleasure pain intermingling into one as my fingers clawed at his back, as his mouth nipped and kissed at my neck, as he took my bottom lip between his teeth and tugged.

His body on mine was a religion newly founded and I was desperate to fling myself at its altar.

"Are you gonna come for me, baby?"

I could only moan in response.

"That's a good girl, I knew you could take it like this."

He hiked my leg up over his shoulder and found a new, deeper angle inside of me that had me near screaming.

As I felt his pace stuttering, I recalled an earlier conversation between the two of us about this exact moment, about the experience I wanted when I finally lost my virginity to him.

I recalled his question about birth control, which I gratefully informed him that I had been on since high school as an act of overachieving preparedness.

No, I had told him, I hadn't wanted to use a condom for our first time.

I wanted nothing in the way of our bodies as we finally came together, and come together we did as a burst of light flashed behind my tightly closed eyelids, as my walls tightened up around him and I pulsed in a contracting moment of pure orgasmic bliss.

"Fuck, such a good girl for me, Gracie."

And then he exploded inside of me, his pace stuttered and coming to a halt while he remained buried in me, eyes focused so intently on my own that I couldn't tell where I started and he began.

His lips on mine in the next moment were pure poetry.

"I love you," he rasped out against me.

Oh.

Oh, fuck.

"I--I think I love you, too."

He stilled.

"You don't have to say it back just--"

"No, no really. I feel the same way Kalen."

His eyes lit up like the ocean on a sunny day and then he was tugging me against him as he rolled over and plastered me to his side, a goofy smile tugging the edges of my mouth up.

Love.

Oh yeah, I was deep fucking in it alright.

And for once, the thought wasn't absolutely terrifying.

***

Author's Note:

What did you think of this chapter?

What do you think will happen next?

What do you WANT to happen next?

Until next time my lovely readers,
Kristen :)