ETHAN'S POV
Her lips found mine without warning.
One second I was pulling the blanket up around her shoulders, the next she was tugging at my sleeve and kissing me. It wasn’t practiced or precise, her movements were a little slow, her breath heavy with sweet alcohol, but the kiss itself was full of something that stopped me cold: yearning.
For a moment, I didn’t kiss her back.
Not because I didn’t want to—God, I wanted to—but because I wasn’t sure it was okay.
She was drunk. I knew that. I’d watched her stumble, watched her sink into sleep and babble about tennis and pancakes and stars. I’d carried her into my room because I didn’t know where else to take her. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
But then her fingers curled into the front of my shirt, small and certain, and she breathed out against my lips, “Don’t think too much, Ethan.”
I closed my eyes. Her voice was soft, slow, but not slurred. She looked at me, not glazed or vacant, but searching—serious in a way that made something tighten low in my chest. She wasn’t falling into me by accident anymore. She was choosing this.
Still, I hesitated.
“You’ve had a lot to drink,” I said, barely above a whisper, as if saying it aloud would break the moment open and send us tumbling out.
She blinked slowly, brows furrowing. “I know. But I’m not gone.” Her hand cupped the side of my face. “You feel safe.”
I swallowed hard. She was right there, her eyes locked on mine, a quiet kind of rawness in her expression. “Tori…”
“You can stop if it feels wrong,” she said. “But it doesn’t feel wrong to me.”
That was the moment I cracked.
Because it didn’t feel wrong. Not when her lips found mine again, slower now, with a tenderness that had nothing to do with urgency. Not when she shifted beneath me, her body warm and pliant, her hands moving to draw me closer like she needed to feel every inch of me just to believe I was real.
I moved carefully, deliberately, as if the silence between us might shatter. My hands found her waist, sliding beneath the hem of her shirt like a question, waiting for her to stop me. She didn’t. She arched into me, a breath catching in her throat that made my pulse stutter.
Everything about it felt new—soft and awkward and impossibly intimate. No firestorm of passion, no wild desperation. Just two people fumbling toward each other, drawn together by something quieter: want, yes, but also trust.
“Are you sure?” I asked one last time, my voice barely holding steady.
She nodded, drawing me down until our foreheads touched again. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in this moment.”
The rest unfolded like a slow unraveling.
We didn’t rush. We moved in fits and pauses, tangled together in the hush of my bedroom. There were stifled laughs, whispered apologies, clothing shed with quiet hands and tentative fingers. When I finally pressed into her, it wasn’t with a groan or a curse but with a held breath, like I couldn’t believe she was letting me in.
She wrapped her arms around me and whispered my name, not like a plea, but like a welcome.
And as our bodies moved together, tentative at first, then steady, I wasn’t thinking about right or wrong, about tomorrow or how this might change everything. I was only thinking about her. The way she kissed me like she meant it. The way she held on like she was afraid to let go. The way it wasn’t just sex, it was something else.
Something real.
Later, when we lay tangled in the blankets, her head on my chest and our legs a lazy knot beneath the covers, I realized I wasn’t afraid anymore.
Of her. Of this. Of what it might mean.