She woke up two hours later, her sight a little hazy in the darkness of the room, but her other senses coming alive to make up for it, making her more aware of all that was around her. She could hear his soft breathing: it went in and came out steadily, like a reassurance, a promise of something she wasn’t sure she’d asked for, but it soothed her all the same. She could feel the warmth of his hand as it lay against her bare hip, could feel the hairs on his thighs as they grazed hers. His clean boy and dirty sex scent filled her nostrils and at first it made her smile lazily, made her remember his growls and her moans, but then she recalled the gentleness with which he’d caressed her back, the slight possessiveness that had edged into his voice when he’d muttered her name, his lips pressed up against her ear and his tongue ducking out to give her lobe a quick lick, and how genuinely she’d responded to that possessiveness, how she’d pulled him in closer and kissed him harder. 

That was when she started shaking. It wasn’t because she was cold, it wasn’t because they had somehow managed to pull the majority of the bedsheets off the bed in their eagerness to get each other’s clothes off, but because suddenly she knew that to him this had not just been a good fuck with someone that he liked talking to. 

She opened her eyes wide now and shifted away from him, staring at the dim outline of his body, wondering. What had she been thinking? She should have known from the very first time she’d lain her eyes on him, from the way she’d noticed him noticing her, with his barely there smile and questioning eyes, that this was not a man who just had sex for fun. She took a trembling finger and traced it along his lips, then pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen across his forehead, making him flinch in his sleep. She could imagine that he hadn’t kissed many women with those lips. She wondered what he would think if he knew how many men she had kissed, how many men she had slept with and had left casually, not even bothering to remember their names. She cocked her head to the side as she studied him and for the tiniest sliver of a moment she supposed that maybe she could stay there, next to him and let him hold her, just through that one night, that she could snuggle up closer to him and bury her face in the crook of his neck. But she only let it last for an instant. Within a blink of an eye she was carefully pulling herself away from him, lifting the sheets off her body, and easing herself out of his bed. She should not have done this, she knew. 

He wanted more from her than she was willing to offer. He was the kind of man who would eventually want to wake up to her in the morning and smile at her before he fell off to sleep, want to ask questions like, “How was your day,” and “What should we do this weekend?” She just wasn’t that kind of girl. She didn’t want to give up that much of herself to another person. She was too selfish, too concerned with her own safety, too aware of what it meant to take your own time, your own energy, your own self, and set them aside for someone else. You’d end up expecting them to appreciate those things as much as you had, and for as long as you would have. It was unreasonable to do something so ...open.  This was a lesson she had learnt very well. Now he would be the one to learn them. She knew that giving him even a little of what he would one day inevitably ask would leave her vulnerable: to want anything is to want just a little too much, and to want too much is to asking to be hurt. She knew this as she crouched on the floor, picked up her panties, and put them on, knew this as she searched for her bra and pulled on her jeans, knew it as she crept across the room trying to find her shirt. But even so her hands trembled and she could feel the heat and prickling building up behind her eyelids.

"Well I've been dragged all over the place 

I've taken hits time just don't erase..."