There's a loveliness to Derrica that Loxley has always admired from a distance, comfortable with long-range appreciation. He might have indulged in imagining it all up close, too, but would not have anticipated how it is, to be its focus. To be looked at like that and touched in this way. To be told she has you, and request to keep having so sweetly.

He can only nod. He thinks he does say 'yes', again, but that it gets a little lost somewhere between kisses and the soft sounds she's pulling out of him. He does as asked—and it feels indulgent to do so—by staying mostly still and steady beneath her, at least to begin with.

She has his focus, magnetic, more a thing of physics than enchantment. His eyes watch her eyes and he hardly shifts enough to make the opportunity to kiss more difficult.