“Well,Idate.”
Leaning across the expanse of water, I cock my head. “Oh yeah? And what are the boys like that you date?”
Her chest flushes, and not from the temperature of the water, when she catalogues how much closer I am to her. She tries to give me a hard look, but the apples of her cheeks go pink. “They’re not boys.”
“Oh, I think they are.” I nod, pushing off the edge of the seat and dropping to my knees in the centre of the tub. I can think of a million and one things I could do to her from here. She blinks up at me. I grin down at her. “Are they what you think about?”
“Inappropriate,” she mutters, pursing her lips.
I shift forward, the outside of my thighs brushing her under the water.
Sloan squeezes her legs together, like she’s trying not to touch me, but the tiny breaths she’s taking tell me something different.
I’ve been reading her mind and her body since I was twenty—it’s my favourite book, I’ve read it cover to cover.
I shouldn’t do it. I shouldn’t say it. But I’ll live under her skin for the rest of my life because it’s better than nowhere.
“Because I know what I think about,” I start, voice low and rough, and I lean forward, mouth moving over her ear while I whisper the rest. “Only ever you.”
She pulls back, eyes wide, heat creeping across her cheeks, fingers tightening around the stem of her wineglass, and her teeth coming down on her bottom lip.
I let myself look at her mouth for longer than I should, how she sits, so straight and all tied up in knots I’d love to untangle. I know how.
She knows I know how.
But I stand, her eyes rove over my chest, tracking the droplets of water, and the way I can feel all my muscles contract when I hop out of the tub. My eyes never leave her, heart still with her where she sits, and I walk backward towards the door. “Night, Zlatícko.”
She’s what I think about when I get in the shower later.
I wasn’t lying.
Always her.
Only ever her.
It’s not even the way her lips part, the way her teeth come down on the centre of the full bottom one and I wish they were mine, how she blinks those blue eyes at me, the way her eyelashes flutter and her hair tumbles around her shoulders, showing me glimpses of me there, on her skin.
How when she breathes the curves of her chest expand and I know exactly what she feels like under my hands.
What her skin feels like when I scrape my teeth over her collarbone, that I know what it’s like to take her in my mouth, tongue swirling over beautiful, perfect peaked nipples.
The noises she makes, head tipped back with impossibly loud, breathy moans, fingers digging into my shoulders, my name on her lips asking for more when I’d move to bury my head between her thighs.
What it’s like to slide inside her afterwards, tongue tangling with hers so she can see how good she tastes.
How it feels when she comes, tightening around me.
It’s none of those things—even though they’re all enough to make me see fucking stars and forget my own name.
It’s her laugh that has me wrapping my hand around my cock, one palm gripping the tile wall of the shower, jaw clenched and all the muscles of my neck tense down to my shoulders until I come with her name on my lips.
I can’t open my fucking eyes.
I think there’s an ice pick digging into my temple.
Or maybe it’s the weight of loving her so much and breaking her heart that sits right on the crown of my head and crushes my brain.
It could be the fact that I have no right to think about her anymore at all, but especially not like I did last night.
