Get It 9

His mouth finds mine and I stop being a person with a plan. I become a body that wants, and the wanting is so total it rewrites me from the inside out.

Max pulls me off the floor and carries me onto the bed, hands spanning my waist. He lowers me onto the sheets with a care that cracks something open behind my sternum, and I arch into him before I can stop myself.

“Easy.” His palm finds my cheek, thumb tracing my cheekbone. “I’ve got you—we don’t have to rush.”

But rushing is all my body understands right now, and the heat has dissolved every line between want and need. His hand slides under my shirt and his fingers spread across my ribs and my back bows so hard the headboard protests.

He peels the shirt over my head, slow, watching my face at every inch. I should feel exposed—I am exposed, more than I’ve ever been with another person—but the way he looks at me isn’t hunger, it’s someone checking for damage before they go further.

His thumb traces the underside of my breast and my breath fractures. He circles, deliberate, and my hands fist in the sheets because I need to hold onto something or I will fly apart.

He takes his time—that’s what undoes me. Not urgency but patience, his mouth mapping my collarbone, the hollow of my ribs, while his hands learn my waist like he’s memorizing something he’s afraid of losing.

My legs wrap around him and he rocks forward and the pressure tears a sound from my throat. He pauses, reads my face, adjusts—he does everything like someone handling something that matters too much to break.

He pulls the last of the fabric down my legs, knuckles dragging along my thighs, and the cool air and his warm breath and the fact that nobody has ever seen me like this all crash together behind my ribs. My eyes sting in a way that has nothing to do with the heat.

I push his sweatpants down and he’s hard against my thigh and the size of him sends something electric and terrifying through my abdomen. His hand comes up to cup my jaw, thumb running along my lower lip.

“We can stop.” He says it like he means it, like he’d walk out of this room on fire if I asked. “Whenever you say, Kylie.”

“Don’t stop.” My voice comes out shredded, barely a breath, and my fingers curl into the sheets beside my hips. “Please don’t stop.”

He settles between my thighs and the first press of him is slow, careful, and the stretch is a bright sharp thing that steals my air. My nails dig into his shoulders and he freezes, forehead dropping to mine, breathing hard against my mouth.

“Breathe with me.” He doesn’t move a fraction until my grip loosens and my lungs remember their function, and the patience—the absolute stillness of him holding himself in check while the bond screams—splits me open wider than the physical ever could.

He moves again and the sharp edge softens into something deeper, a pressure that builds until my spine turns liquid. My wolf surges, pressing behind my ribs hard enough to blur my vision gold, and I shove her back so hard my gasp turns into a sob.

His thumb traces circles on my hip, soothing, grounding, while the rest of him drives me toward an edge I’ve never been near. Every stroke is a response to something my body told him without words, every adjustment precise and careful.

“I’ve got you.” His mouth presses against my temple, my cheekbone, the corner of my jaw. “Stay with me.”

The orgasm detonates—white and total—tearing through me with a force that obliterates suppression and thought and everything I’ve been pretending to be. My wolf slams forward and my eyes burn gold and the sound I make is something feral, something no version of me this pack was allowed to see.

He follows with his face buried in my neck, shuddering so deep I feel it in my own bones. Then his mouth against my throat, breathing my name like he’s confirming I’m real.

He rolls to his side and pulls me against him. In the silence something shifts—the heat receding like a tide, leaving me raw and new and shaking on the shore.

“I wanted—” He stops, jaw working against the top of my head. The unfinished sentence hangs between us and I feel him swallow it, hide it under something safer. “How do you feel?”

“Like I should add ‘sleeps with stepbrother during heat‘ to my résumé—right under ‘proficient in Excel.'” I stare at the ceiling because looking at him would burn what little composure I have left.

He doesn’t laugh. The quiet that follows isn’t peace—it’s two people arriving at the same wreckage from different directions.

“This wasn’t—” He exhales, arm tightening around me. “I came in here to help you through it. That’s what I told myself.”

“And then you didn’t leave.” I say it without accusation, because there’s no version of tonight where I wanted him to.

The word neither of us has said takes up the entire room. I can feel him circling it the same way I am—the name that turns what just happened from a mistake into a betrayal.

“Mina.” I give it to him because someone has to, and my voice barely survives that. “You’re choosing her in less than two weeks.”

He’s quiet for so long my ribs ache from not breathing, every second of silence another weight on the pile between us. “I know.”

“That’s it?” I turn my head to see his face, and the look on it isn’t guilt exactly—it’s something heavier, like he’s watching a bridge burn that he set fire to himself. “Just ‘I know’?”

“I’m not going to pretend this didn’t happen.” His eyes find the ceiling, jaw tight. “And I’m not going to tell you it’s fine, because none of this is fine.”

The honesty is worse than any excuse, because excuses I know how to dismantle. This is just the truth with its teeth out, and neither of us has a plan for it.

“Your scent.” He says it after a pause, shifting to something he can examine instead of feel. “During the heat I could smell you—a wolf scent, full and real.”

“I don’t know what that was.” My throat works around lies while the truth sits behind my teeth, too dangerous to release. “I don’t understand what my body is doing right now.”

“It’s already fading—an hour ago it was unmistakable and now it’s almost gone.” His nose grazes the back of my neck. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe the wolf is still surfacing and the scent isn’t stable.” The lie tastes like copper. “Late bloomer, remember?”

“Late bloomers don’t lose a scent they already had.” He’s quiet, then his mouth presses warm against my neck—not a kiss, a question he’s choosing not to ask. “Okay, not tonight.”

Not tonight means tomorrow, or the next time his questions outweigh his patience. I have borrowed time, and I know the interest rate.

I close my eyes and let myself have thirty seconds of his arm around me, the fiction that this room exists outside consequence. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.

Downstairs, the front door opens. Two sets of footsteps—one heavy, one precise—and my mother’s laugh carries through the floorboards, bright and practiced.

My body goes rigid against Max’s chest, every muscle turning to wire. The thirty seconds I thought I had just became zero.