“Wait,” I said quietly but loudly enough for him to hear me and make him stop and look up from his phone, “Please wait. Don’t…”

I wanted to say Don’t go. To ask him to come inside. But the blush rising in my cheeks made it so hard to get those words out and so rather than stammer and stutter the whole damn time I just turned and opened my door and walked inside.

But I made sure the door stayed open.

Waiting there in the darkness of my apartment and staring at the bright rectangle of my open front door was one of the most terrifying experiences in my life. I wanted him inside my place and I wanted him inside of me, I really did.

But god when he darkened my doorstep for a moment I thought I’d made a terrible mistake.

The few experiences I had with lovemaking were fumbling and inconsequential experiences in the darkness. Hands moving over bodies squirming. Feeling and exploring with an eager touch that turns insistent, but inexperience makes it all end too soon to be satisfying.

Chris was a few years older than me. Chris was a man who’d lived in the city his whole life. Chris was a powerful man, a real man, who surely knew what he wanted.

So Chris would surely be different for me.

But I had no idea how different he was. He was so big that he practically filled the door and when he closed it behind him, his presence loomed large.

With each step he took forward he seemed to grow in size until I was certain he was going to reach out and grasp me in a meaty hand before flinging me into his open maw and swallowing me whole.

In a way, maybe he did.

There was power in the way he grabbed me then, his touch on my slight body so rough that I worried it would leave bruises in the morning. He closed his arm around my waist and pulled me in close, gripping my hip around the back of me and lifting me until I was teetering on tiptoe before pressing his lips to mine.

For a man who could weave such poetry with his words, there was no gentle grace in his hands. It was more like his voice, a rugged and booming rumble.

But he said such sweet things.

His touch on my body wasn’t sweet. His touch on my body was rough and insistent. He held me to him and crushed his lips against mine, squeezing me so tight that by the time he broke away I was breathless.

This wasn’t an uncommon trope in the novels that I read. The brooding man who sees the world in coarse calculation and fucks with methodical force. The man who you fall for, knowing that he’s going to destroy everything.

But in all the stories I loved he’s also the man you wind up denying in favor of the sweet and sincere one you didn’t notice until the end.

Chris moved me, grabbing me up and lifting me like I was lighter than a feather. He set me on the edge of my kitchen counter and pressed forward while pulling me towards him, and my thighs spread to give him better access to my body.

Once more he kissed me, harsh and brutal and insistent and forceful. Now that his hands didn’t have to hold me up they were free to explore my body and they did, squeezing and running their calloused palms all over my soft skin.

I was wearing a sundress I knew was nearly insubstantial. One that I’d had for years and one that I probably should have gotten rid of a long time ago but it was sentimental for me. It was something that I’d held on to because it was comfortable rather than still in season or in fashion.

The fabric of it had gotten thin, not so thin that it was like tissue paper gossamer, but certainly thin enough that I could feel his harsh touch on me.

And the thing about that man from the stories. The bad man. The wrong man. The thing about him is that he takes what he wants. When he works on your body his deliberate force is exhilarating. He is capable of drawing great gulping waves of pleasure from you.

When he has you in his clutches you feel consumed by his strength, and though dangerous that sort of feeling is highly addictive.

I’d never been with a man like Chris. I’d never been with a man who knew what he wanted and worked towards it with this level of deliberate action.