“You’re right,” I say. “I should have.”
Her mouth trembles. “I struggled when you were away.”
The words destroy me. They reach into my chest and clench a fist around whatever is left in there.
“I could have survived you being gone,” she says, quieter now. “I hated every second of it, but I could have survived that.” Hereyes hold mine, and no armor in the world is built for this. “What I couldn’t survive was thinking you never loved me. Thinking I’d given myself to you and you only remembered the parts you could use against me.”
“Fuck.” My voice breaks clean in half. “Sky…I loved you then,” I say, making sure the past tense is clear, just in case she is happy and having me back in the equation will fuck that up. “I loved you in that visiting room. I loved you so much I convinced myself that hurting you was the only decent thing I had left to give.”
She shakes her head, tears slipping freely. “That wasn’t decent, Zane.”
“No,” I say. “It wasn’t.”
“I didn’t need you to save me by breaking me.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to decide someone is better off without you, then destroy them so they’ll agree.”
“I know,” I whisper.
The air between us is no longer just heavy. It is alive.
Her pain. My guilt. The years. The want.
The old heat we have never been able to kill, no matter how much damage we buried it under. I stay quiet and do what Rainer told me to do, which is to shut up, let her feel it, and leave whatever comes next entirely up to her.
Her gaze drops to my mouth. It’s barely a second. Less than that. But I see it, and my whole body goes still.
“I should go,” she says, turning to leave.
I walk with her toward the roller door because standing here watching her leave is not something I am willing to do if I can have ten more seconds of walking beside her instead.
The evening air hits me at the threshold, cooler than in the workshop, carrying the scent of the street and the city beyond.
She reaches for the car door at the same moment I do.
Our fingers land on the handle at the same time, and the contact is so slight it should not register the way it does. The barest brush of her fingers against the back of my hand, warm, accidental, and absolutely devastating.
She goes still and so do I.
Skylar starts to turn toward me, her mouth already opening on a word she has decided on, and I have no idea what it is and I am never going to find out, because the distance between her face and mine is less than nothing. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remember sitting in the back of that police car and realizing with a clarity that has never left me that I did not kiss her. That I have tried time and again to remember our last kiss.
That thought spurs me forward before the rest of me has consented to it.
I close the distance and kiss her.
I know I shouldn’t. Not after everything I have said to her tonight, and that is the honest truth of it. But the moment my mouth finds hers, every other consideration simply ceases to exist. If I never get the chance to do this again, I am going to remember this as our last kiss, and I am going to make sure it is worth remembering.
She makes a small sound against my lips, and then she kisses me back, and it is nothing like two people being careful with each other or testing the temperature of something. It is rough and desperate, her hand coming up to grip the front of my shirt as if she needs something solid to hold onto. My hand finds her jaw and I tilt her face up, taking more than I have any right to and completely unable to stop.
My whole body is on fire.
Every nerve I have is firing at once, my cock hard and aching, the want for her so immediate, physical, and consuming that it takes everything I have not to press her back against the car and take this somewhere neither of us can come back from.
Her whole body shifts into me, that small, involuntary lean of someone whose body has made a decision before their brain has caught up. The feeling of her against me is enough to pull a sound out of me that I would be embarrassed by if I were capable of embarrassment right now.
But I’m not.
