Liam didn’t want to walk away from her. Everything in him screamed not to walk away from her. He paused outside the door to the second floor, out of view from Min’s landing, and leaned his forehead against the cold stone of the doorframe. What he wouldn’t give to go back upstairs, to hold her until whatever demons were haunting her disappeared, until she knew in her soul that she was worth so much more than that drunk boy. That she deserved everything.
But he couldn’t go back. Not when his pulse was still pounding with the memory of her lush curves pressed against him on that rooftop. Not when he had already gone too far by letting himself touch her tonight. What had he been thinking, kissing her neck, indulging in this fantasy that all the barriers between them had magically been removed by going to a different country?
He didn’t just want her – he needed her. And he was pretty sure she needed him, too.
Fuck it.
Liam turned to climb the stairs again. He was so lost in his own thoughts that he almost ran into Will as he rounded the bend. The near collision pulled him back to himself, calming the need roaring through his blood. She had roommates, castmates who would be returning, just as Will was. They weren’t alone. He couldn’t go storming up to her bedroom, no matter how much he wanted to.
“You okay, Dr. J?” Will asked.
Liam blinked, wondering how long he’d been standing there staring at the baritone. “Fine. Thanks, Will. Goodnight,” he muttered, turning back to the door.
Will only made it a few steps before Liam called after him. “Hey, Will?” The young man turned back to face the conductor. Liam pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut, before continuing with a sigh. “Check in on Bobby, will you? Make sure he’s okay sleeping it off.”
“You got it, maestro,” Will said, laughing as he continued his ascent with a shake of his head.
By the time he’d showered, rinsing the smell of alcohol and stale smoke from his skin, and dropped onto his bed beneath the mosquito netting, Liam’s frustration had calmed to a dull roar. He reached under his mattress and retrieved the paperback edition ofThe Sun Also Risesthat he had stowed there. It had taken him an embarrassing amount of time to track down an English language copy in the city, but he’d done it. He wasn’t about to miss one of the books in the little book club he and Min had going, even if she was unaware that the club existed. That he religiously read along to whatever novel she talked about on their morning walks so he could hold up his end of the conversation. Thankfully, she’d mostly stuck to classics.
He hadn’t been surprised when he’d discovered that Min spent her mornings reading in the piazza. Her love of literature was one of the first things that had drawn him to her. As the dawn broke, Liam finished the last page of the book, holding it closed against his naked torso. His chest ached and he resisted the urge to press his hand to it. It wouldn’t help anyway. The unsettled melancholy that filled him was about so much more than the book – it was about the woman who had gotten him to read it.
The student who had seeped into his thoughts and was turning him inside out.
He’d been doing so well. He’d gone months without touching her, without being alone with her. Not that the distance had stopped the thoughts. The dreams. But he’d managed to put space between them. And he knew she had been dating other people. That had been good – it had forced him to remember that she wasn’t for him.
And then he’d gone and done the most self-destructive thing possible – he’d asked her to join this summer program. To go with him to Italy for six weeks. If that hadn’t been bad enough, he’d found every opportunity he could since they’d gotten there to be near her, to talk to her, to be alone with her, to touch her.
It still wasn’t enough.
He wanted to sit with her and talk through every page of these books – not just the highlights on their too-brief morning walks. To know what parts made her cry, which characters stayed in her heart. To hold her against his chest while she told him every book she thought he should read, his own personal syllabus devised by the woman he couldn’t get out of his head. He wanted to watch that look of wonder bloom on her face every time she found a new work of art that spoke to her soul. To introduce her to all the great works that lived in his heart, to watch symphonies and operas crash over her. To make love to her to that music so that it became a part of their very bodies.
What the fuck is wrong with me?He had never in his life used the termmaking lovebefore. But somehow, as badly as he wanted to fuck Min, he wanted to make love to her even more. The realization was terrifying.
Despite the voice in the back of his head warning him to be careful, for the second time that night, he was painfully hard, thoughts of Min playing through his mind. With a resigned sigh, he freed his throbbing erection from his boxer briefs, stroking himself roughly, as if it were a punishment. As if he was determined to derive as little pleasure as possible from the motion even as it drove him closer and closer to orgasm. He leaned his head back and threw an arm over his face, like covering his eyes could somehow blot out how wrong it was to jack off while thinking of his student.
His strokes grew rougher, more urgent as he thought of the way her skin flushed when he touched her, the botanical scent of her hair as he kissed the nape of her neck, the delicious way her body yielded to his when they were pressed together. He imagined her pink lips wrapped around his cock, burying his face between her thighs, the taste of her on his tongue.
He thrust into his fist, pretending it was her, that every time she pressed her thighs together the next day, she would feel the lack of him within her and ache to be filled again. His movements grew frantic, erratic, as he imagined her crying his name when she came, the way her cunt would grasp around him, how she would writhe for him. He would conduct her body just like a symphony and know that she was his.
He came hard in hot streams, his climax so violent he couldn’t breathe, the electricity of it shooting down his spine as he coated his fingers and stomach with his release. Gasping out a curse, his body relaxed.
He knew he should be ashamed, that he should regret it. Or that, at the very least, an orgasm that hard should sate him. But even now, lying there coated with his own cum, his cock still half hard, his climax had done nothing to ease his desire for Min. And the worrisome thing of it was, he was beginning to question if it was really wrong to want her.
Chapter Ten
Min should have called out sick.
Never mind that it was their last rehearsal, she should have stayed in bed, safely under the covers behind two sets of locked doors. At the very least, she should have called her therapist first.
She definitely should not have gone to rehearsal as if everything was fine, as if she wasn’t held together by scotch tape and string. As if there wasn’t a weight on her chest so immense she could hardly breathe.
But she was a professional. And she would not let Aidan take that from her, too.
She sat in the back of the church, but she wasn’t there. Not really. She was still in Aidan’s bedroom last December, still suffocating on the whiskey stench and the weight, still swimming up from the depths of her own drunkenness only to find the surface of the water iced over.
It’s my fault. It didn’t matter what her therapist said. She knew it had been her fault. She shouldn’t have had so much to drink. She should have gone back to the apartment with Jeff instead of being so fucking stubborn and leaving with Aidan. She shouldn’t have let her guard down around a man who clearly didn’t care about her at all.
She drank her water and tried to focus on the scene rehearsing on the stage, but she couldn’t. Ever since Will had dropped that bottle of whiskey in the shared kitchen that morning, the smell mixing with the heat to sting her nostrils, she had felt like she was right back in the middle of the worst night of her life.
